“Social Inclusion by Education in Europe’s Multicultural Society” University of Barcelona, Spain, 17 April 2010
On April 17, 2010, the European Commission organised a press briefing entitled: “Social Inclusion by Education in Europe’s Multicultural Society” at the University of Barcelona.
The EMILIE Project was one of four EU funded projects to be presented to a gathering of journalists from the written (16) and audiovisual (7) press, coming from all EU 27 countries.
A member of the French EMILIE team, Angéline Escafré-Dublet, presented the project findings with a focus on the educational challenges in the nine countries studied by the EMILIE team. Journalists asked numerous questions about the project, including: What is the difference between intercultural and multicultural education? What are the kind of inclusive approaches to education that could be identified? How was the fieldwork conducted?
During the discussion, it was noted that it is important to recognise the particularities of each national contexts that make each experience useful and pertinent, but not necessarily transferable to another national context. The aim of this project was to understand the logic, dynamics and influential factors that define the different approaches, rather than to give “bad points” or “good points” to certain countries based on their experiences and policies. However, some issues require to be approached a certain way, for instance the necessity to approach language learning by both promoting the language of the country of origin as much as the language of the host country and the necessity to have a holistic approach towards diversity (not only focused on or targeting one group) is relevant and necessary for all national.
The point about language learning raised interest and a journalist from TVÉ in Ireland asked further question during an interview, along with a journalist from Italy (RAI 1) and Austria (Der Standard).
After the presentation of the four EU funded projects (EMILIE, EDUMIGROM, INLUD-ED and YUPPIE), the group of journalists and researchers were invited to visit the Montserrat Madre Deu Primary School outside Barcelona in order to observe various particularly interesting activities organised for children of immigrants and their parents : Catalan classes for immigrant mothers, reading groups, etc.
For the presentation on the Emilie project findings click here
For the agenda click here
To find out more about this event, please click here
To read the EC Commission News Alert, please click here
