Interculturality in Italian Teaching: A report on Teacher Education in the City of São Paulo

Abstract

Culture has played a prominent role in the scope of L2 teaching and learning only since the 1990s, despite its clear relationship with language. Even
so, nowadays the inclusion of the cultural component in the classroom is still a great challenge for L2 teachers (KUMARAVADIVELU, 2008). Based on the importance of such challenge, the treatment of culture in L2 classes was one of the topics covered during the Didactic Support for Italian Teaching, included in the Multicultural Training Program in Italian Language for Teachers of the Municipal Education System of the City of São Paulo, promoted by the Instituto Cultural Ítalo-Brasileiro in partnership with the city of São Paulo and with the Graduate Program in Italian Language, Literature and Culture of the Universidade de São Paulo, in the second half of 2020. We propose an experience report in order to show how teachers of the municipal schools of São Paulo have chosen to take an intercultural approach in the development of projects for teaching Italian in the schools where they work. At first, we will show how the intercultural approach was treated by the teacher educators in the meetings of the  aforementioned support. Then, we will describe the project proposals that incorporated the intercultural
component among their goals and will reflect on the paths found by these teachers for the insertion of cultural aspects in their practices, based on the concepts of emics and ethics, as proposed by Goodenough (1970) and Agar (2007). Finally, we will elucidate how the proposals seek to stimulate the development of intercultural competence (BYRAM, 1987; CORBETT, 2003).