Constructing social skills to ‘Learn together’ in the intercultural classroom

One of the most urgent problems of our complex society is learning to live together and to see difference as a growth opportunity for everyone. Recently, the European Education Ministers in the European Union again emphasized the role of education in creating harmonious coexistence in Europe and in preventing further violence and intolerance. Most OECD countries acknowledge the need to develop students’ social and emotional skills, which play a key role in promoting active citizenship and social progress. Italian law clearly encourages the use of collaborative learning to transform the classroom into a place for communication and cooperation. Extensive research also testifies to the contribution of Cooperative Learning to building social skills and a sense of community. This is the background of the present paper, which focus on the effectiveness of the ‘Learning Together’ model to build social skills in multicultural contexts; these skills are directly related to academic success for all pupils. A multicultural and conflicted classroom in Northern Italy was observed for six years, from the first primary school year to the first middle school year. These 19 students and their 36 parents participated in a wide range of interdisciplinary projects on intercultural education, shared by the teachers on the team. The Grounded Theory Method of analysis of all the gradually collected data - 62 focused interviews with key informants, participant observation, pupil questionnaires and documentary research - led to the emergence of a pedagogical model of social skills building. The presentation will highlight, among the many benefits of the Learning Together model, the real social skills directly perceived and experienced by pupils, parents and teachers on this path and some possible differences between native participants and those with an immigrant background. It will not be a taxonomy of social skills designed ‘a priori’, but the result of an experiential and situated learning process, which understands social competences - the core category of this process - as the product of interactions between teachers’ ethical choices, effective teaching strategies and constructively lived multicultural experiences. The project helped to foster relational skills related to self and group management, conflict mediation, decision making, communication and socio-affective growth, all of which permit the transformation of ‘problems’ or ‘risks’ into ‘resources’, for building an inclusive and intercultural learning community.