Intercultural Considerations in the Curriculum for Improving Quality in Education

Abstract

The everyday sense of quality refers to "what makes a person or a good thing better." The OECD has defined quality in education in 1995 as one education that achieves that all young people acquire knowledge, capabilities, skills and attitudes needed to function adequately in his adult life, in a life characterized by globalization and migration; a life in which, living together people with different ethnic and cultural referents. In this multicultural society, the education of quality is synonymous of intercultural education. The intercultural education has to assume two major challenges: first, to promote the advance in the stages of cultural crossroads between different ethnic and cultural groups enabling young people to develop healthy cultural identities and, second, to promote skills to be active, critical and responsible citizens in order to achieve a truly democratic society. We reflect on the need that teachers are knowledgeable of the stages of cultural crossroads in order to be able to plan activities that allow advance towards the interculturality and also promote skills in order to both the teacher himself and his students act as good citizens in the multicultural society they live.