Cooking Workshops In The Intercultural Education: Active Learning For Raise Awareness of Complex Values

This abstract introduces the Cooking Workshop as educational setting, aimed to the development of knowledge and skills in intercultural education interventions for children. From a first qualitative study this setting can adequately support the process of raising awareness regarding the complex values of interculturality. The preparatory activities for this study required to base the educational project on some essential factors, similarly to the Philosophy for Children model: the participants’ characteristics; the object of awareness raising; the symbolic object that represents the object of awareness in the participants’ concrete experience. The participants of the workshop are children between the ages of five and seven, or rather children who do not have a solid skill in reading and writing yet. At these ages children normally cannot use the written text to process complex thoughts, despite they already have the cognitive resources that are useful for comprehend those thoughts. The object (the scope) of awareness, is the concept of plurality in the human identity dimension, that is one of the pillars of intercultural education. In Hannah Arendt’s philosophy, in which Humans are constantly engaged in a inner dialogue with the ‘other’ who inhabits it, suggests to distance ourselves from the narrative of accomplished, self-sufficient and singular Human. Nussbaum talks about Capabilities. Among these she collects together “senses, imagination and thought”, that is non-self-determined thought, but generated by the perception by and the sensitivity towards the of the alterity, and by the imagination, which is also identification with others and empathy. In accordance with the Philosophy of the Alterity (Buber, Ricoeur and Levinas), Rita Fadda, a pedagogist of the Cagliari school of critical pedagogy, suggests us to “recognize the stranger who inhabits us in other to welcome the foreigner we meet outside of us”, pointing out that the openness towards otherness is necessary to undertake subjective journey of self-discovery and development. Which symbol can summarize, at least at an introductory level, this emerging? It was decided to implement a cooking workshop, based on the creation of a product with a strong identity: tiramisu. This dessert, known by people of all ages and present in the tasting experience even outside of Italy, immediately evoke the identity dimension of Italianness. However, it has some features that make it suitable for representing the theme of the plurality of human identity: its ingredients. In fact, the coffee and cocoa, that are necessary for the dessert to be recognizable as tiramisu (its identity) are not Italian products nor could they ever be produced in Italy. Tiramisu, therefore, turns out to be the symbol useful to express that uniqueness and singularity are actually made up of different elements, as well as identity is the result of complex interactions between these elements. In the presentation, the theoretical foundations of the pedagogy of plurality will be explored in depth and the first results obtained from the implementation of the cooking workshop in a group of children will be discussed.