Review of Gunther Dietz and Laura Mateos Cortés (2011), Interculturalidad y educación intercultural en México: un análisis de los discursos nacionales e internacionales en su impacto en los modelos educativos mexicanos, SEP/CGEIB, Mexico

¿EMPODERAR LA DIFERENCIA O GESTIONAR LA DIVERSIDAD?

Abstract

In a normative way and in order to promote its appropriation, education officials, academics, teachers and other actors incorporated the intercultural question into our discourses. However, for teachers “the intercultural” meant more than adopting the concept and inserting it into the educational lexicon: interculturality had to be made concrete, permeate the curriculum, appear “as a cross-cutting element” in lesson planning, and spread through civic and social programs and wall newspapers; that is, educational practice had to be interculturalized so that, gradually, relations of intercultural coexistence would be achieved in the classroom. In this sense, the book by Gunther Dietz and Laura Mateos is an opportunity to delve not only into the topics of interculturality but also into its implications. A first contribution of the book is that it reveals the nationalist structures underlying intercultural discourse, which determine the political and then pedagogical orientations of the approach and strategies guiding intercultural education.