Identity and Diversity: The Educational Challenge in Urban Contexts

Abstract

One of the aspects of Urban Education is that of diversity as it displays in daily experiences, practices and interactions in multicultural contexts. Diversity between and within groups challenges reification and preassumptions on cultures, and it engages the discourse of the complexity of identity, thus avoiding to stereotype both the ‘cultural’ and the ‘multicultural’. The collective wom.an.ed – women’s studies in anthropology and education – thus addresses Urban Education not as an educational issue connected to minorities or immigrants, but rather as an educational approach which assumes the daily complexity, in particular that concerning the complexity of identity. Our research, conducted in several school and extra-school urban contexts in Italy, shows how diversity is, paradoxically, the common trait of the subjects involved in the educational relation.