Teaching in intercultural classrooms. An Italian perspective

The world has dramatically changed. Today, the whole of humanity is facing multiple, complex, and interdependent transformations on local, regional, national, and global levels. We live in an era of ‘nowist culture’ and ‘hurried culture’ (Bertman, 1998), of the obsessive search for something new, of the renegotiation of meaning and fundamental references. The current liquid modern ‘consumer society’ evidences the transition from “linear time to pointillist time” (Bauman, 2016: 21). Increasingly, we are witnessing the advent of ‘new myths’ that generate simple ideas “that are comfortable, do not create problems, facilitate judgment, in a word, reassure us” (my translation) (Galimberti, 2009: 11). Globalisation and planetary interdependence seem to generate a growing attention to economic, political, and technological aspects, to the detriment of sociocultural or environmental implications. We are witnessing the emergence of a single market on a world scale, the concentration of capital and persistent ‘economic wars’ between nation states, which have generated an imbalance of wealth at the international level, with consequences both of a political and social nature (Bauman & Portera, 2021).