Intercultural Education to Encounter Migrant-Driven Diversity: Assessing the Tension between Policy and Bottom-up Implementation Practices

Over the years, cultural and linguistic diversity in European schools has increased significantly, largely due to the growing number of students with “migratory backgrounds”. In response, the Council of Europe (2008) and the European Commission in the Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion (2021-2027) have promoted intercultural education as the primary educational strategy to address this diversity. A recent systematic review of existing studies in the field of intercultural education research has highlighted a gap between the official discourse on intercultural education and its actual implementation in European classrooms (Rapanta & Trovao, 2021). These findings call for further research to better disentangle the extent, dimensions, and factors contributing to this policy-practice gap.

The present article addresses this research gap by providing an in-depth empirical investigation of the implementation of intercultural practices by teachers in primary and middle schools, in the city of Trento (Italy). Specifically, the research explores: 1. the presence of generalized discretionary practices, with regard to the formal intercultural paradigm (i.e., European guidelines and national/sub-national policy frameworks), that may indicate the existence of a policy-practice gap and 2. the potential factors behind teachers’ discretion, with a focus on the challenges they encounter when dealing with the empirical implementation of intercultural policies and/or teachers’ personal ideological values and preferences that are at odds with the intercultural ideology.

The research combines elements from the studies on intercultural education (Zilliacus 2014; Rapanta and Trovao 2021) with insights from the bottom-up studies on policy implementation (Lipsky, 1980). The article relies on a mix inductive-deductive logic and semi-structured interviews with school teachers. The main objective is to expand the current scholarly understanding of the policy-practice gap in the field of education policies. The article also aims at advancing a new argument about potential explanatory factors behind this gap