Education Dialogue Project
This project has promoted the use of dialogue in order to heighten intercultural awareness within the secondary school setting in Victoria. The project has helped build an educational programme that mitigates community conflict and tension and promotes multicultural dialogue and co-operation. The project is led by Professor Joseph Camilleri, Director of the Centre for Dialogue, and is coordinated by Dr George Myconos.
Commencing in November 2004 the Project has entailed extensive consultations with academics in other universities, a range of community, ethnic, and religious organisations concerned with education in Victoria. The Project has benefited from the guidance of an advisory committee comprising experts in education from across Victoria.
The Education Dialogue Project has stressed the importance of the following:
- the need to hold up to scrutiny traditions and worldviews in order to discover their basic ethical impulses, and their potential for adaptation;
- placing emphasis on engagement with, and not merely recognition of, the ‘other’;
- encouraging processes that invite open inquiry, taking risks when doing so, while maintaining equality/fairness;
- stressing both humility and mutual respect as essential aspects of one’s disposition;
- discovering one’s self through discovering the other;
- nurturing empathy and compassion though telling and listening to stories.
The Education Dialogue Project has relied on two separate but related means of promoting intercultural awareness:
- hosting training workshops that promote ideas integral to intercultural dialogue to secondary school teachers and other education professionals;
- collaboration with a select group of schools with a view to devising initiatives informed by the idea of intercultural dialogue. These initiatives have been incorporated into the relevant schools’ programmes. The Project has developed initiatives relating to one or more of the following components:
- School Ethos
- School Curriculum
- Professional Development
- Extra-Curricular Activity
- Parental Involvement
The precise mix of these components has beenshaped by the context, needs, and resource capacity of each participating school, and in close consultation with the Centre for Dialogue.
In essence, the Education Dialogue Project has promoted teaching and communication regimes that confront ignorance and certitude – as these pertain to intercultural relations – and that give voice to those who might otherwise be marginalized.
For more information on this project please contact: Dr George Myconos
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