Sustainability and intercultural education. A change in perspective

Abstract

If an economic crisis is the best moment to remember the medium and long-term benefits ensured by the investment in education, then we should not forget the very reasons (the management of cultural diversity, transnationalism, etc.) which nowadays turn intercultural education into a suitable strategic resource for sustainability, equity, peace and social cohesion, at both national and international levels. The aim of this paper is to suggest a new field of study in pedagogy, trying to define epistemic connection bonds between sustainability as a holistic concept and intercultural education as a field whose scope can be extrapolated to the management of change affecting development, in both domestic and global terms. We believe that this connection will become clearer by making the best use of the present relevance of the complexity theory in social sciences, if we can manage to represent it as a path periscope of paths in which methods of investigation ways and patterns of intervention in the system are discerned. For the optimisation of the abovementioned system we need to apply the exponential magnitude orders (beyond those which are strictly linear) that an intercultural educational perspective is able to assume against any reductionist loss of direction regarding sustainability.