Intercultural Education and Cooperative Learning:
An Interview with Francesca Gobbo

Professor Francesca Gobbo of the University of Turin is one of the key organizers of the 19-22 January 2008 conference that IASCE is jointly organizing with the International Association for Intercultural Education, University of Turin, School of Education,  and the Teaching Services Centre of the Education Department of the Province of Turin. To provide some background on herself and the concepts that are central to the conference, Professor Gobbo kindly agreed to be interviewed for the IASCE Newsletter.

1.    How did you originally become involved in intercultural education (IE)?

My involvement in intercultural education developed from my involvement with multiculturalism which began in 1969. After graduating in Education from the University of Padua at the end of 1968, I won a scholarship to attend the School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley, as a graduate student. Multiculturalism was making its first steps, and I decided to virtually transplant myself into the Anthropology Department where I had the opportunity to study under the Nigerian-born anthropologist John U. Ogbu. In those years (I left the States in Spring of 1975), the themes were multicultural education, ethnicity and ethnic identity.

I returned to an Italy that ten years later would start to change due to immigration that progressively grew to account now for almost 5% of the total Italian population. I started to read about intercultural education and then to teach it at the University of Padua. I continue to teach and do research on IE and multiculturalism by employing an ethnographic approach that allows myself (and the doctoral students I tutor) to test intercultural educational theories and theories on immigrant students’ schooling experience and eventually to formulate new ones on the basis of empirical evidence. My theoretical perspective on IE is characterized by the fact that I do not limit it to migration, but instead I widen its scope and concern by studying internal minorities including religious minorities (such as the Italian Waldensians), ethnic minorities (the Italian-Albanian minority resulting from the flight of Albanians before the Turks around 1476), and occupational minorities (such as the fairground and circus people). In my books, I also give space to Roma and Sinti groups’ schooling experiences.

2.  How did you become involved with Cooperative Learning (CL)?

As for CL, it all started in Sodertalje, where Pieter Batelaan organized a conference on CL in 1997. All the main representatives of this educational sector were there, but I was particularly interested in what Elizabeth Cohen had to say because it resonated with my social, educational and political concerns. Batelaan was responsible for an EU project that still had room for other participants, so I asked the Padua department if they wished to be involved in the project, and once I got the green light, I organized training seminars in CL led by Batelaan, and I trained teachers in two schools in Padua and cooperated in writing the text on the experimentation in CL in 9 different European countries. This project brought me in touch with the CL people in Gent, and, with them, I did another study on CL, using Cohen’s Complex Instruction strategy. In 1998 and in 1999, I attended seminars at Stanford University on Complex Instruction, and invited Elizabeth Cohen to Padua for a seminar.

3. What kind of work are you currently doing in IE and CL?

  Here is an example. I am involved in in-service teacher development on Complex Instruction. Because of migratory flows, Italian schools and teachers realize that they need to look for educational approaches capable of responding to increasingly heterogeneous classrooms through the recognition and valorisation of differences. Complex Instruction gives me the opportunity to aptly complement the celebration of diversity with the recognition that when the same is connected with low social status, it is too often negatively perceived, in turn producing low expectations towards the diverse children’s school achievement and significantly limiting peers’ interaction with the latter even in group work. I believe that, though Complex Instruction predates intercultural education, it has a powerful intercultural dimension, since it looks at and works with students’ different cultural, linguistic and cognitive abilities as resources for learning that is achieved when every student participates equally in group work and can contribute in his/her specific way to the understanding of difficult concepts and to the solution of open-ended problems. Also, Complex Instruction promotes social and educational justice by using CL to attain equitable classrooms.

4. Please say a bit more about how you work with teachers on IE and CL?

I remind teachers of Italy’s own traditions in group work, to problematise Cohen’s educational innovation in order to lessen the possibility that teachers will treat Complex Instruction as an instructional package or recipe, to be delivered “just in time.” Furthermore, I raise the question if, and to what extent, the migration of educational ideas and strategies from one social, cultural and political context to another one should not first of all take into serious consideration how such ideas and strategies are understood and creatively interpreted when they reach a new environment. My firm belief is that new ideas and programs should encounter and interact with the social, historical and intellectual fabrics that they are supposed to innovate. I like to think that this could also be a way to acknowledge and respect the diversity that intercultural education promotes and sustains, by paying attention to the fact that we who disseminate educational innovations are from the beginning in a relation not only with institutional contexts and teaching traditions but first of all with persons whose complex professional identity and personal history represent a challenging opportunity to have them as partners in an intercultural dialogue.

5.  What do you think is the connection between IE and CL?

I find Cohen’s approach particularly appropriate for intercultural education when it is seen in the light of social justice and equity, and not just a celebration of diversity. The latter should certainly be considered but also kept under close attention given the different backgrounds, different experiences of migration and different relation with the school culture, the peer culture and the cultures of the receiving society. Additionally, I could say that the effort to understand the others’ cultural orientations and perspectives on the future requires the latter’s cooperation. This is particularly true if one gains such understanding through ethnographic research, where the researchers’ aim to understand and interpret people’s lives can only be attained by considering them as partners.

6. What do you think can be gained by people in IE and CL meeting each other at this conference?

I do hope that the conference will provide all of us with the opportunity not only to present and exchange “good practices” but to reflect on them and on how, and to what extent, they can be borrowed and transplanted in a new social and educational context, and on how they can be connected to so-  called local educational traditions (speaking from Europe, can we forget Freinet’s seminal contribution in France, or, in Italy, the work done by the association of Movimento di Cooperazione Educativa, or by don Milani, or Mario Lodi?). This can be another way to promote encounters between different educational and cultural perspectives. We hope that people enacting different perspectives will learn from each other’s successes and disappointments, and learn how school cultures can also change. It is also a way to learn how historical changes can affect both to IE and CL.

7. What do you see as ways to continue the relationship between people in the two fields after the conference?

From my point of view, continuity in the relationship between the two fields will be promoted by problematising both fields as they already happen, and by introducing a comparative perspective. I am wary of educational innovations’ dissemination almost exclusively in terms of “good practices,” since the latter are important not only for the answers or solutions they provide teachers but also because they invite (and perhaps challenge) them to be critically reflective, to be creators of education. I would say that this is also (or especially true) for university educators and researchers. Attention should be paid to the complexity of the context where both intercultural education and cooperative learning activities are introduced.

Further reading:

1.  Batelaan, P. Ed. (1998), Towards an equitable classroom. Cooperative Learning in Intercultural Education in Europe, Hilversum: International Association for Intercultural Education (IAIE).

2.    Gobbo, F. (2007). Teaching teachers cooperative learning: An intercultural   challenge. In G. Bhatti, C. Gaine, F. Gobbo, & Y. Leeman (Eds.), Social justice and intercultural education: An open-ended dialogue (pp. 75-88). Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books.