Intercultural Education in Morocco: Theorization and Practice through Teachers’ Perspectives

Abstract

Intercultural education is a critical educational approach that centers relations within and across cultures. It seeks to account for cultural diversities within schools/classrooms and develop students' cultural sensitivity and understanding of other cultures. Intercultural education has been increasingly important in post-modern Morocco considering, among other factors, the rising number of Sub-Saharan immigrants for instance. The kingdom's efforts to distance/challenge the lingering colonial legacies and broaden its global horizon have underscored the necessity of adopting intercultural education as a strategic approach to achieve this goal. To operationalize this visualization, teachers are often tasked with integrating the norms and principles of intercultural education into their teaching practices, fostering a more inclusive and globally aware student body. However, it is not clear the extent to which they are supported through pre-service education to fulfill such tasks. To achieve this integration, there is a pressing need to complexify/problematize teachers' perspectives to uncover the theoretical and practical frameworks that inform their practices. This paper seeks to examine the range of factors, elements, and conditions that shape Moroccan high school teachers' beliefs and how they ultimately mold their pedagogical practices in the classroom. This research adopts a qualitative approach through the use of in-depth interviews with 25 Public EFL high school teachers based in various schools across Morocco. Thematic analysis is employed to navigate teachers’ views with the aim of coding, developing, and charting the most important and recurrent themes. Findings revealed that (a) Moroccan high school teachers perceive both language and culture as mutually reinforcing elements in the classroom, (b) they hold distinct conceptualizations regarding the implementation of intercultural education and (c) intercultural education is a highly context-sensitive pedagogy that accounts for the social, linguistic and cultural particularities of teachers’ contexts.