Published in M. Leicester, C. Modgil & S. Modgil,Education, Culture, and Values, Vol. III, London: Falmer Press,2000.

Piero Paolicchi

The use of stories in Intercultural Education

We see that understanding war does not stop war.Krishnamurti

Their stories, yours, mine - it is what we alltake with us on this trip we take, and we owe it

to each other to respect our stories and learnfrom them. R. Coles

Intercultural Education

Intercultural education is the object of ever growingattention in current educational debate, but the problem ofrelating to differences between cultures has as long ahistory as humanity itself. It depends on the universallyhuman dilemma between the acknowledgment of some featuresshared by all human beings as distinct from the world ofnon-human entities (animals, things), and each humangroup's cultural invention of boundaries which determineone's own identity with respect to some "human othernness"defined on the basis of the most varied features, such asthe colour of skin or language, religion or politicalideology. Nowadays, the contacts and reciprocal knowledgebetween different cultures have grown greatly, both throughliving together in the same territories and through thespread of communication systems. Awareness of theinterdependence between individuals, groups and societies

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for the solution of global problems, however, standstogether with hostility, exclusion, discrimination andviolence towards minority or weaker groups in real lifepractices and in cultural patterns. These range fromepisodes of "ordinary" sexism, racism, homophobia, topersistent or resurgent particularisms, separatisms andconflicts with outcomes of dramatic collective aggression.

The growth of rationality and of scientific thoughtdoes not seem to be able to reduce or eliminateindifference, hostility and violence towards individuals,groups and communities. These phenomena occur not only inthe so-called "underdeveloped" cultures, but also in thosewith a high level of "civilization". In the latter,attitudes of indifference and tacit tolerance towardsinjustice are common, if not a direct participation indiscriminating and aggressive actions, and when concreteinterests or viewpoints come into conflict, attitudes ofrefusal, hostility and discrimination are easily activatedand manifested. In western culture, however, the need forexplicitly and systematically directing education towardssuch goals as tolerance and respect for differences isconnected not only with the problems issuing from themulticultural character of our societies, but also with thedevelopments of philosophical thought in ethics, politics,law and education. In effect, one of the main issues ofmodern philosophical debate in these and other fields isthe dilemma between the value of equality among all humanbeings and the value of difference as an intrinsiccharacter of any single manifestation of life in itsindividuality (at the biological, psychological andcultural level), according to the idea that in nature andin society, "only diversity makes change and progress"(Dewey, 1966).

Intercultural education then is not a totally specialissue or problem in modern education, but a particularexpression of recurrent dilemmas between authority andautonomy, tradition and novelty, freedom and order,individual identity and belonging. Interculturalencounters, exchanges, conflicts, are much the same as

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those between individuals with different religious orpolitical beliefs, or sexual orientation, when in theirconfrontation something important with respect to theparticipants' identity, such as values, is at stake and maybe challenged or suppressed. So the aims and methods ofintercultural education, and of education for citizenship,tolerance, democracy, are the same as those of moraleducation in a context in which the function of cohesion,which education always carries out through the sharing andtrasmission of a common heritage of beliefs and values, hasto be combined with the idea of difference and pluralism asan unrenounceable conquest. Moreover, the dominance ofscientism, rational instrumentalism and bureaucracy in allmodern societies tends to keep apart individuals asseparate and "self-contained" entities (Sampson, 1977) andto osbcure their presence and value as persons by includingthem in categories and organizational systems, in order tosolve problems in strictly formal and functional ways.

In this context, the principle of respect fordifferences and for pluralism of values, though it iscertainly a step forward on the road to civilization anddemocracy, brings a further complexity into education,helping to create a general climate in which it has becomeincreasingly difficult to articulate, with a degree ofcertainty and hope for consensus, world visions thatexpress the ends and the values of human life (MacIntyre,1981). The voice of the fully developed rational-moralindividual, advocated as "prior to society" (Kohlberg,1976) and then to any other possible voice, seems to leadinevitably not to dialogue, but to a "monological"perspective which negates any possible "other" (Sampson,1993). The claim of constructing a "metavocabulary"(usually in the name of science or universal principlessuch as justice) able to exhaust all the claims expressedin the different vocabularies which confront one another inthe continuing exchanges between human individuals andgroups (Rorty, 1989) has been specifically criticized inthe moral and political arena. It is usually followed by aseries of consequences such as the devaluation of the voice

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of care (Gilligan, 1982), the imposition of a unique"grammar of justice" which obscurates the features of need,power, responsibility in human relationships (Wolgast,1987), the oblivion of the primary solidarity upon whichjustice itself is grounded and rights and duties areacknowledged and legitimated (Habermas, 1990), thesuppression of the very capacity of listening to the needsof others in their concrete and varying humanity(Ignatieff, 1984).

The subject who knows the truth and inevitably feelslegitimated to impose it on all others for their sake hasto be replaced by a subject who is aware of the finite andsituated nature of his or her truth, though that truth isstill central and decisive for his or her identity andunderstanding of the world. Any universalistic perspective,though deeply rooted in the human need for certainty, doesnot escape the risk of opening the way to fanaticism or atleast to the unconscious defence of the status quo. Thesituation seems to be without a way out between thedefensive returning to one's own certainties which so oftenproduce domination and aggression, and the willingness towork together through and about everyone's differences. "Weare condemned to either ignoring and annihilatingdifferences, or to working tenuously across them to formalways risky bonds of understanding" (Narayan, 1988, p.34).

To this end, the first step seems to realize a'respect' for diversity which in turn must be grounded inthe acknowledgment that

"we are in dire need of reformulating ourconceptions of both responsibility and moralobjectivity such that they enable and support ourseeing, acknowledging and struggling with how tochange our embeddedness in, and identificationwith the interests of, particular groups. Failingto do so will mean that, rather than counteringoppression, moral education will be continuing iton our behalf" (Boyd, 1996, p.29).

Only once we have abandoned the conviction that someone(usually we or our culture) has already reached the unique

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truth or that the confrontation's endpoint must be a uniqueand particular one, do we enter a perspective in which thedifferent points of view on human life and relationshipscan make themselves heard. Now education is no more aninstitution for the transmission of already-made andverified truths and codes but a forum in which humans "talkto each other over time about the differing interpretationsof what it means to be fully human, interpretations whichare always essentially contestable and never more thanperformative, prescriptive claims made to each other."(ibid., p.25).

The relationship with "otherness", in its form of"cultural otherness", may therefore offer a specialoccasion for rethinking the problem of moral education interms of a real development of self-awareness and opennessto confrontation, to dialogue and to all the possible butstill unknown truths it creates. Education thus has afurther and special chance to cope concretely with itshaving, like science and morality, an anti-authoritarianessence dialectically linked to the normative one (Peters,1959). The truth of the teacher, like that of anyparticipant in an open dialogical exchange, is set up assuch but is open to a common process of verification, inwhich consensus (from the latin cum-sentire = feeling with)is searched for instead of that passive assent whichsilences the other's voice and breaks up the relationshipno less than total dissent. In the field of knowledge as inthat of education, the problem of truth and authority cantherefore only be correctly approached from the point ofview of their relational, participatory, dialogicdimension, which paradoxically appears as both their limitand their strength.

The paradox of education lies in the necessity ofproposing a point of view in which we believe withoutaiming at imposing it, in expressing the deep meaning andvalue it has for us, its "truth for us", and at the sametime our respect for other points of view, for the pointsof view of others. This "accommodation of incompatible aimsthat arise from the competing pulls of different ways of

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interpreting relationships" requires a general framework(not only cognitive but also affective), an atmosphere ofcaring for ourselves and our values as much as for othersand their values, and of feeling motivated to live welland to live together, without negating one's own andothers' differences. It implies

"going beyond recognition of these differencesto facilitation of a deeper understanding of howthey are different, including clarification of boththe contexts within which the differentrelationships are psychologically andsociologically located and the boundaries of thosecontexts as they come into contact with eachother." (Boyd, 1996, p.25).

Therefore intercultural education, like moral education,cannot simply be another item of curricular content, but ashared process which leads all the participants to certainways of thinking and feeling about, and concretely actingin, relationships between people despite their differences.

The moral world is much more than mere reasoning onmoral questions: there are also things like feelings,empathic and identificatory processes, everyday analogicaland metaphorical arguments, attention to the commonfeatures of classes of actions and to the specificity ofeach case, to principles and to the affective relationshipsbetween people, to peoples' virtues and vices and to thecontexts in which decisions are enacted. Moral decisionsare always made in an involved and dilemmatic experience offinding out a solution to individually and collectivelyrelevant problems with cognitive, affective, social andcultural connotations.

The intertwining between cognition and motivation,cognition and action, which has already been singled out asthe core point of moral development, results central alsoto intercultural education. Both processes imply not onlycognitive decentralization or perspective change, butdecentralization with respect to one's own self-interest,and one's group-interest, in order to take the view theother as that of a fellow participant not only in some

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theoretical discussion, but in everyday life with its minorproblems and in occasions when important decisions are tobe made in individual and collective life. Focusingattention on justice as a formal, rational and universalprinciple has led, in both fields, to neglect themotivational constituents which structure the relationshipwith others and with social rules: the sense of belongingand responsibility and the whole world of Pascal's "reasonsof the heart" which are not only emotional responses butmeanings forged by the heat of living with others in ashared world. Thus, in order to educate children (andadults too), to live together respecting one another, to becommitted and responsible towards the common world, to besensible, pay attention and use tolerance towardsdifference, it is necessary to speak to their hearts, notonly to their minds.

Also in intercultural education pupils have not onlyto be taught about which beliefs and values to hold, butboth to acquire some rational justification for holdingthose beliefs and values, and to be motivated to act uponthem in appropriate circumstances. In order to give pupilsnot only "justifying" reasons for action but also reasonswhich "motivate" them to act, it is not enough to teachthem the form and the content of moral reasoning: it needsa talk about virtues together with discussion on principlesand rules, character education together with development ofmoral reasoning; critical thought and empathy must bedeveloped together and vitalized reciprocally, engagingpupils not only in dialogue and discussion but also in realco-operative and communal activities. Moreover, asintercultural education, like moral education, is aboutissues of living together, it cannot be delegated toexperts or relegated to particular spaces and times ofschool activity, but must be undertaken responsibly by allmembers of the community and by any institution whichrepresents it. Schools must become places where pupils andteachers, as members of a whole community, experience ashared social climate of acceptance, respect, open-mindedness, and put into effect "an 'ethics of everyday', a

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morality of minor affairs, that translates respect forpersons into small deeds of kindness, honesty and decency"(Lickona 1980, p.131) as occasions for all to takeresponsibility in a concrete and real way.

Basic patterns of relating with others must beacquired, much as mother language is acquired, throughdirectly experiencing and enacting them, through the forceof daily life and shared world visions. This means a deepchange in the very communicative activity of schools; theconstruction of a shared universe of meanings implies theabandonment of "institutional" communication according tothe pattern: the teacher asks a question, the pupilanswers, and the teacher evaluates. This must be replacedby a real exchange, beginning from a common experience thatdoes not involve a single interpretation or solution, adiscourse that re-elaborates that experience throughconfrontation and negotiation between different meanings,and a turn- and and role-taking are not rigidly andformally fixed. Dialogue about values and difference has tobecome part of shared relationship patterns, of the verysocial climate in which all members live. It needs a sortof "knowing from within" (Shotter, 1993) which presupposesthat at least some shared cores of beliefs and values bedeeply felt and acted out in concrete situations beforebeing reflectively and abstractly articulated.Communicating itself implies having already something incommon as a basis for reaching the goal of understanding,some overlap between different life horizons is as much aprerequisite and an instrument as the product ofcommunication. Moreover, in order to cope with valueconflict, a minimal consensus has to be brought about atfirst, going down to the level of what we already have incommon, or otherwise reciprocal understanding will not bereached, nor dialogue even start: paradoxically, a"community" is required for communication and negotiationabout conflicting values to be possible.

Why stories?

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On these premises, the educator's main, if not unique,starting point and instrument seems to be «to takeseriously both the quest for life's meaning and the call tocare for persons» (Witherell and Noddings, 1991, p.3), andto invite other people to do likewise. This can be done byproposing not only abstract principles of justice or dutyto discuss, but also a common life adventure, throughwhich all participants can reach the goal of becoming"friends of one another's minds" (Greene, 1991), even, andperhaps especially, when the other is "stranger". Such away of going ahead with one another and with everyone's owndifferences must pass across the territories of emotion andimagination no less than those of reflection andjudgement, and "requires bringing together the skills ofrational moral deliberation and of opportunities forconcrete cognitive, affective, and aesthetic responses tohuman suffering, injustice, caring and joy" (Witherell,1991, p.238). As a consequence, as Boyd brilliantly states,"sorely needed in moral education discourse at present ismore openness to paradox, to irony, to tragedy, an opennessthat will require more effective countering of prevailingpsychological orientations that thrive on easy closure,certainty, close-minded commitment and exclusion" (1996,p.25).

This sort of plea for imagination or for "paradox,irony, and tragedy" echoes a lot of other proposals bymoral and educational philosophers or psychologists(Paolicchi, 1994) to introduce (or better systematicallyto make more explicit) a "narrative perspective" for aneducation that uses the potentialities of affectivity andimagination together with those of critical thought sostrongly privileged in recent times, but showing theirshortcomings precisely in the field of moral andintercultural education. Advocating a narrative perspectiveon education means: a) thinking and speaking about problemsof persons and their relationships by applying the"narratory principle" according to which human conductcannot be considered apart from "the phenomenon of

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emplotment" (Sarbin, 1990), that is sense-making throughassigning observations to a narrative structure, in orderto grasp the meaningful richness of individually andsocially variable life textures and contexts; and b) usingthe patrimony of wisdom and knowledge regarding humanproblems, cumulated across space and time in narrative andfiction of any kind, as a basic educational tool to promoteself-awareness and a better capacity of living togetherwith and through everyone's differences: "The story fabricoffers us images, myths, and metaphors that are morallyresonant and contribute both to our knowing and our beingknown" (Witherell, 1991, p.239).

As world visions and values are all "storied", that isdescribed, explained and legitimated in myths, legends,traditions, religious and political philosophies, tounderstand and respect others and their differences withoutannihilating them (through attacking, segregating,assimilating, removing them by any sort of theory or schemaor pre-judged knowledge), implies getting closer to oneanother through a sort of corollary of the narratoryprinciple: the understanding of people and their problems,especially problems of difference and relationship, ofvalues and beliefs, can be better reached by narratingone's own stories to one another.

Logical-mathematical thought is by definition empty ofthe experiential and cultural contents that structure humanaction and constitute its "reasons". It tends towards theideal of totally formalized description and explanationthrough abstract conceptualization and the construction ofperfectly defined categories linked together in a fullycoherent system; its use produces "good theories, tightanalysis, logical proof, sound arguments and empiricaldiscovery guided by reasoned hypothesis" (Bruner, 1986,p.13). Narrative thought refers instead to a human realitythat may be true or imagined but that is always endowedwith meaning; it is linked to the emotional life and tofeelings; it introduces an evaluative dimension into thevision of the world, a dimension in which events are alsoarranged and made meaningful from a moral point of view;

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its use produces "good stories, gripping drama, andbelievable, though not necessarily 'true' historicalaccounts" (ibid.). It therefore seems to be the naturaland, so to speak, consubstantial instrument for an adequatedescription and explanation of some of the essentialaspects of human life.

Stories can accordingly be seen as the best way tobecoming dialectically, dialogically and contextually awareof others's and one's own particularity and diversity , andto find in diversity a resource instead of a threat. Inthe field of education, stories

"provide us with a picture of real people in realsituations, struggling with real problems. Theybanish the indifference often generated bysamples, treatments, and faceless subjects. Theyinvite us to specutale on what might be changedand with what effect. And, of course, they remindus of our persistent fallibility" (Witherell andNoddings, 1991, p.280).

So a "narrative perspective" appears particularly usefulfor rethinking educational practice and implementing a newone coherent with the current theoretical and practicalscenario of education, in which problems of democracy,citizenship, difference, interculture has become central.To this end, we shall bear in mind that story-telling isnot only a way of exchanging cognitive contents in astoried form, but of setting up and developing a storyconcretely experienced between narrators and listeners: anarrative perspective on education is concerned not onlywith what is taught or told in schools, but with whathappens in schools as places in which people exchangenarrated stories and interweave "lived" stories which mouldthe meanings and goals of their life.

Telling stories to one another has always been the mainway through which every society carries out its fundamentaltask of transmitting across generations the meanings thatdefine actions. Narratives explain how and why somethinghappens to or is done by someone, or could happen or bedone, and why the explanation they give can be suited to

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that particular case or person: they serve, in short, togive a lot of information on human facts that any formalmodel would not give. They therefore have an essential rolein the transmission of those cultural patterns that cannotbe proposed in structural form through lines, graphs,numbers, letters, or abstract terms, and therefore seemrather to require "presentation" (Hymes, 1980).That is whystories, (parables, myths, legends, tales, novels, dramas)have always been a special tool for transmitting values.Stories offer "journeys into practical ethics" (Coles,1989) because they do not simply describe, but legitimizesome features of the world, which they put forward not onlyas it is but also as it could be, or should be, or as wewould like it to be. They endow the world with an orderwhich is not only of a causal and spatial-temporal type,but also depends on the intentions, desires, feelings, aimsand decisions of human beings. Furthermore, they are alwaysauthored, they express their author's choice of a "point ofview" on the world. For all these reasons stories seemspecifically apt to treat

"matters of value - and especially valuedifference - [which] must always be performativelyinterpreted because they refer not to unchangingempirical facts about the world, but to particularforms of human intentionality and meaning-makingwhen individuals and groups seek to situatethemselves in the world and in relation to eachother" (Boyd, 1992, p.19).

Knowing and relating to one another through stories

As Coles (1989) reminds us, there are manyinterpretations to a good story, and it is not a questionof which one is right or wrong but of what you do with whatyou have read. (p.47). Stories, like symbols of any kind,always tell more than their content, not only for thehearer, but for the teller, who can discover some of their

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meanings in the very act of retelling them. Theirinterpretability makes stories, in Bakhtin's (1981) terms,not an "authoritative" but an "internally persuasive" kindof discourse. The former "demands that we acknowledge it,that we make it our own; it binds us" Its authority isfused to it and depends only on the speaker; so it is not a"generator of meaning or a thinking device" on the part ofthe hearer, and in fact it is never presented in narrativeforms, but only transmitted in formal ones. The latter, onthe contrary, is not finite but open, creative, for it"awakens new and independent words" from within the hearer.Therefore, the usefulness of stories in interculturaleducation depends also on the fact that, unlike arguing bythe rules of principled moral reasoning, in telling andconfronting stories some really "new" truth (concealed inone of them or in both, or born in their very encounter)can emerge from the exchange and from the participants'confrontation between truths that are concrete, situated,partial and open to discussion, though deeply believed.

A story, however, is never registered "objectively" bythe listener. Listening too is constructive and selective,because the listener enters the narrative context and hearsthe story with the background of his or her personalexperience which contains the roots not only of oppressionand standardization but also of difference and thepossibility of fighting external pressures in the present.Like the heroes of fables, who can only fight theiropponent by winning possession of the magical instrumentwith which they are oppressed, children (and all others whobear some difference with respect to dominant models) faceup to the power which stories have over them by their ownpower to recreate the stories they hear or to invent newones. Even in the face of general agreement, theindividual, as the child in the well-known fable, can shoutthat the king has no clothes. On the other hand, to tellone's own story presupposes not only having something tosay, but facing the risk of entering the border-landbetween acceptation and rejection in which communicationalways takes place, and then feeling and being qualified to

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speak. So, the power dimension of the social world in whichdialogue has to be brought about must not be overlooked. Itis not enough to apply to the abstract rule of equal rightto make one's voice heard in an "ideal discourse"(Habermas, 1983); the inequalities issuing from havinglived in a world of actually unequal social power,including the power of making one's voice heard, requiresthat those in power accept to listen more, especially inthe first moments of the exchange: they, in fact, have moreto learn both about the others' world, almost unknown tothem, and about theirs, which others know as much as it isnecessary for them to live or at least survive in it.(Boyd, 1992; Sampson, 1993)

As human exchanges are almost never balanced, andeducational exchanges are unbalanced by definition, asecond fundamental rule can be derived from the fact thatnarrating, like every educational intervention andencounter between human beings, develops on the two levelsof exchange of information (the story narrated) and ofparticipation in a common experience (the story lived),that are not the same but are never independent of eachother. So a further rule in story-telling could be one ofsincerity, which demands for the listener to movesystematically from the question "What are you saying tome?" to the question "What are you doing to me, and why?".To tell a story, in fact, can mean to try to impose,suggest, counsel, deceive, ask, answer, sell, give, andanything else: this ultimately decides the "truth" of thestory, which is not exhausted in the narrative content andin the relationship between narrative content and the realworld, but regards the meaning and the purpose of thenarrative act as a relationship between human beings.

The very act of "knowing", as Langer (1957) stated, isnot a sort of accurately registering what the world is initself, but the result of a human mind's throwing its lighton the world and giving it some new feature and meaning.Some shared basic experiences (such as joy, pain, hope,fear, anxiety) in a common world in which, as Vico(1730/1952) reminded us, trees and thunders came long

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earlier than philosophers, make those acts potentiallyshareable, understandable, to a large extent. However,knowledge, as intersubjectively shared as it might be, isnot the product of seeing but of looking at the world andthe others. Seeing "the" other is a mechanical response toan external reality which in a sense moulds the seers' eyesand excludes responsibility on their part; looking at, likenarrating, "an" other is an intentional act characterizedby will, choice and awareness, and then is endowed by anessentially moral character.

A narrative stance with respect to others, values andrelationships seems therefore the best way to become awareat once of one's looking and of the other, and so to see atonce the others and ourselves in their faces. When theother is some fixed "in itself" which does not offer us anychoice, knowledge is distant, cold, final; when the otheris looked at as a lot of still unexplored possibilities,knowledge is close, passionate, open, and the relationshiptends to attune correspondently. Psychological andhistorical research (Staub, 1989) is full of examples thatdemonstrate how the major episodes of destructiveaggressiveness or passive tolerance towards them imply aprocess of transforming the concrete single other into adistant, stereotyped and objectified "otherness" forindividuals and groups being able to destroy "it".Collective violence is always legitimated by reasons rootedin some totalizing logic in which persons are substitutedby social, political, economic, religious categories, anddecisions are made in the name of universal abstractprinciples and rules. Maybe this is what an Africanimmigrant boy in an Italian school sensed in the seeminglykind attention payd to his culture, when he reacted bycrying "I'm not a culture, I'm a boy".

This takes us into a further special feature ofstories, their concreteness, which is strictly related totheir educational power. It is primarily by means of theirconcreteness that stories exert their capacity to speak tothe minds and the hearts of pupils, to stimulate at onceimagination, intellect and emotions. They act upon

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consciousness and behaviour, critical discrimination andjudgment, especially with children and adolescents, byshowing them familiar and concrete moral issues in whichcharacters not unlike themselves act and decide, ratherthan abstract moral dilemmas. The task of understanding theconcepts of justice, equality, peace, dignity, rights anddemocracy, can be achieved with more deepness andliveliness through stories, narrated and lived, which givepupils opportunities to experience affective involvementin those values and to express them through art, drama, orcreative writing, as the Council of Europe's Committee ofMinisters itself recommended (1985). Using Hoffman's (1984)terms, we can say that stories mediate between the level ofprimary or global empathy and that of reflectivelymotivated action, through the "sympathy" they can activatetowards a person or a group or category.

Together with the ability to take others' point ofview, stories stimulate the capacity to recognize anddifferentiate individuals and their feelings, and toaccordingly experience and be aware of one's own differentfeelings and emotions towards them. Moreover, charactersare likely to be perceived by the reader as new andexciting possibilities and not as ultimate exemplars. Thepower of a story can lead us to be completely involvedwith the fortunes of its characters and influence also ourattitudes towards similar real people and situations. Butour involvement will be with a single specific characterand situation rather than with a culture or a set ofvalues, so that the other as a concrete individual in aconcrete context will be more probably "an alternative forus, not to us" (Williams, 1985). This is also in accordancewith some recent results in educational research andpractice, such as the fact that accepting others does notmean to totally accept or exalt their values, nor tooverlook differences among members of a culture byidentifying them all with a cultural identity with whichthey themselves do not identify totally, nor finally torefuse to stress the possibility that others can bemistaken.

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The educational function of stories dependsparticularly on the fact that the various cognitive,aesthetic, affective and moral dimensions are connected andreinforce each other within them. Stories stand centrallybetween thought and emotion, as well as between everydaylife and exceptionality, conversation and rite. They drawtheir "socializing" force from the "choreography oflanguage" (Ochs, 1991) and from the narrative context noless than from their content. Stories and story-telling,through the double identifying relationship they establishbetween the narrator and the listener (to the story and toeach other) are a special tool for imagination as "the siteof identification and the place where identity isconstructed", and for moral imagination as "the place thatallows us to relate to each other". (Pagano, 1991, p.264).Poets have already stated that a human being, in order tobe "greatly good", has to "imagine intensively andcomprehensively" (Shelley, 1961, p.495), that "imaginationhas a way of lighting on truth that the reason has not"(Yeats, 1961, p.65). But also Dewey wrote long ago that"imagination is the great instrument of moral good"(1934/1980, p.344), and more recently Kekes (1993)advocated systematically the use of materials drawn fromnovels, biographies, history, ethnography, as the best wayto enlarge pupils' knowledge of what life may be, toconfront with possibilities other than those of ourtradition, and to reflect on conventions and values of ourculture, on their shortcomings, biases and mistakes.Stories succeed because "they work their way well intoone's thinking life, yes, but also one's reveries or idlethoughts, even one's moods and dreams" (Coles, 1989,p.204): stories, in sum, educate because they can teachand touch.

Emotion, in this context, plays the basic role of a"skill at imaginative identification" (Rorty, 1989, p.93)that penetrates deeper into daily moral life than acritical abstract approach to moral dilemmas can do.Emotions are not mere subjective natural reactions, butconstitute "a kind of appraisal" (Peters, 1970, p.188) of

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reality: as such, they are an important part of ourpractical reason, they are internal to a cultural way oflooking at the world, to a shared set of thoughts andbeliefs, and then they can be educated. And stories areimportant just because they do not only stimulate emotions,but also show them in ways that activate both involvementand reflection, and so can lead the listener to anunderstanding of the emotional world in other people and inoneself.

Concluding remarks

Intercultural education is a complex, theorical-practical set of concepts and strategies which aims atcreating in schools an accepting climate open to diversityin any form, both in the presence and in the absence of'strangers'. The choice of occasionally privileging one oranother among those strategies and the concrete ways ofimplementing it depends on the concrete features ofeducational situations, such as the age of pupils and theirfamily environment, the larger social context in which theschool operates, the necessity of coping with specialcurrent problems and conflicts, and so on. The generalbackground which is now shared by most of those whopractice intercultural education can be summarized asfollows.

Pupils have to be thought of and treated as persons,that is as bodily, mental, affective, social and culturalwholes, and as members of a plurality of social groups (thefamily, the peer group, the class, the school, the society,the human community) with which they identify and in whichthey have to be aided to develop individual and originalstories in relation with others. Openness to others can beactually favoured by stimulating both reflection anddiscussion on universal principles and rights, andknowledge of different cultures and even of the particularstory which is the only thing that can make a mere person afriend. The actual presence of a "stranger" is a concrete

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problem to solve but also the most powerful resource toactivate respect for justice and rights and at the sametime reciprocal curiosity and the discovery of differencesand similarities between people. In the absence of"strangers", the best way to educate to interculture isthrough the forms of "otherness" brought about bydifferences between sexes, age groups, social roles, familycontexts, past experiences of people of the same culture.

The best substitute of a real encounter with a presentother is its "presentation" through narratives with theirmultifarious set, both of dramatic and emblematic lifefeatures and dilemmas, and of the everyday features whichmake differences interesting and exciting rather thanproblematic and threatening. Narratives allow powerfuleducating trips across individual, historical and culturaldifferences, so that they are the best tool to prepare thecontact with the other and to impede or reduce his or herpre-emptive and prejudiced rejection, abstraction(stereopyping), fragmentation (nick-naming), exploitation(scapegoating), so frequent in school and often not reducedeven by "contact projects" (Miller and Brewer, 1984). Inconcrete relationships and in narratives, difference,however, must not be stressed as an absolute alternative toassimilation, but together with the similarities whichenhance the possibility of intercultural understanding andfellowship. Furthermore, it has to be based on thereciprocal looking at between equals who disclose oneselfto each other: difference is not only in the other.

Which kind of stories to narrate will depend on manyfactors: the age of pupils, the atmosphere of the schooland local community or of the whole society in a certainmoment, the salience of specific problems between differentcultural groups within it, and so on. Space will be leftfor stories about pupils themselves in their everydayschool or family life, about characters like them in theclassics or current narrative, about pupils' parents or theelderly, specially when they faced different or unusuallife conditions. Suitable stories can be found both in ourtradition and in others': difference and its unjust

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treatment are well represented in our history. Othernessitself is not necessarily outside us, it is in the multiplevoices that speak in our culture and in our very mind,which is born and nurtured by the dialogical exchange withconcrete others (Wertsch, 1991). So intercultural educationcan be carried on not only through confrontation betweenopposite cultural visions of the world, but within and bymeans of every culture's "multivoicedness", though wewesterners have to strongly oppose the idea that the bestway to understand and represent others' problems andsufferences is that of our culture. In education, as inanthropology and in social sciences, a recent coreattainment is the awareness that people who suffer and faceproblems daily are the most competent to speak about them.

Narrating and interpreting stories plays a central rolein intercultural education, first of all because storiesembody in particularly incisive ways issues of values andvalue conflicts that are the core of interculturalencounters. Secondly, because to build and interpretstories is the best way to become aware of other people asindividuals and of one's own identity, which in turn givesa ground for the possibility of a mature morality. Thirdly,because stories, in their concreteness and finiteness,present the world without the rigidity of formalized andabsolute truths, as they are interpretable, open to furtherenrichment from the listener. Finally, because to exchangestories requires and in turn enlarges the shared patrimonynecessary for their comprehension and the very communityboth presupposed and consolidated by every story narrated.As narrating, correctly understood in an educationalperspective, is always a "talking with others, not only toor about others" (Boyd, 1992), to understand a story, infact, always implies and stimulates a dual competence: thatrelated to the world narrated and that related to the worldin which the act of narrating is performed as part of areal story enacted by the narrator and the listener.

Compared to the truths that science has continually andtenaciously presented as objective and final, in storiesand in education something different takes a central role:

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the meaning and the value not only of what is transmittedbut also of the kind of world that the very act oftransmitting produces and proposes to those who areinvolved in the relationship. This does not conflict at allwith the central role of critical thought and discussion inmodern pedagogy, linked to the existence of moderninstitutions such as science or political democracy.Democracy, justice, tolerance, like all values, areabstract ideals to be translated into particular forms andpractices that are subject also to other requirementsaccording to the variety of historical and socialconditions. Nowadays, the objectives, methods and contentsof education must be examined in a context in whichpassions and violent actions, instead of being controlledby reason, seem to be proliferating in conjunction withsuch degenerations of reason as pure calculation ofinterest or the mere reckoning of preferences. The impactof a new story depends strongly on the possibility to tellit in "real time" to all the inhabitants of the "globalvillage", who are increasingly deluded into believing thatthey are playing an active role in it through opinion pollsand remote controls. Communication is no longer a discourseconstructed and developed in time step by step, but amatter of who is able to shout loudest and make his or hervoice heard in the fleeting moment in which it can bedistinguished, so that the quality of the single voices andstories is inevitably clouded and confused.

On this background, school education plays a strategicrole, for it can constitute a specific and privilegednarrative-relational context: meaningful, ruled, open,shared, of long duration, and so potentially incisive inthe immediate present and, in many cases, equally incisivein the long term. What is most important is that storiesnarrated and concretely enacted in everyday school life goahead accordingly in a shared, meaningful and positive wayof living together, because it is only

"in the context of an ongoing dialogue between ateacher and her students (or between students andother students) that words, language, and forms of

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discourse - including stories lived and storiestold - can have their most powerful,transformative, and long-lasting effect on younglives" (Tappan, 1991, p.253).

Especially in a multicultural context, "to start with astory" (Sylvester, 1991), could be the best way to makeeducation an open-ended dialogue, a process of countinuallycoping with differences between people, their values andvisions of the world, with the twofold goal of striving toreflectively and committedly understand both one's own andothers' stories, and to construct the best possible commonstory for us and for all others involved in it.

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Greene, M. (1991) Foreword to Witherell C. and Noddings, C.(Eds.) Stories Lives    Tell. New York: Teachers College Press.Habermas, F. (1990) Justice and solidarity; in T. Wren(Ed.) The Moral Domain.    Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Habermas, J. (1983) Moralbewusstsein und kommunikatives Handeln.Frankfurt:    Suhrkamp. Hoffman, M.L. (1984) Empathy, its limitations, and its rolein a comprehensive moral    theory; in Gewirtz J. andKurtines W. (Eds.) Morality, Moral Development, and    Moral Behavior,pp. 283-302. New York: Wiley.Hymes, D. (1980) Language in Education: Ethnolinguistic Essays.Washington, D.C.:    Center for Applied LinguisticsIgnatieff, M. (1984) The Needs of Strangers. London: Chatto andWindusKekes J. (1993) The Morality of Pluralism. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press.Kohlberg, L. (1976) Moral development and moralization; inLickona T. (Ed.) Moral    Development and Behavior: Theory, Research,and Social Issues. Nex York: Holt &    Rinehart.Langer, S.K. (1957) Philosophy in a New Key. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University    Press.Lickona, T. (1980) What does moral psychology has to say tothe teacher of ethics?; in    Callahan, D. and Bok S.(Eds.) Ethics teaching in Higher Education, pp. 103-132.    NewYork: Plenum Press.MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue. Notre Dame, IN: Notre DameUniversity Press.Miller, N. and Brewer, M.B. (Eds.) (1984) Goups in Contact. ThePsychology of    Desegregation. New York: Academic Press. Narayan, U. (1988) Working together across difference: someconsideratons on emotions    and political practice.Hypatia, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 31-47.Ochs, E. (1991) Linguistic resources for socializinghumanity. Proceedings of the    International Symposium on "RethinkingLinguistic Relativity". Ocho Rios: Wenner-   Green Foundation.Paolicchi, P. (1994) La morale della favola (The moral of the Story).Pisa: ETS.Peters, R. S. (1959) Authority, Responsibility, and Education.London: Allen & Unvin.

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