Migration societies describe societies where migration is a pervasive and defining feature. Although migration and super-diversity (Vertovec, 2023) constitute the current norm in Europe and beyond, it still raises questions about the impact of migration and also its related diversity dimensions – for instance linguistic heterogeneity – on various areas of society and societal development. Education in the migration society is directly linked to inclusion, as the central task of the education system is to ensure equal participation in education and opportunities for the greatest possible educational success for all learners – regardless of their social and ethnic background, gender, disability, residence status and other social and personal circumstances. The importance of intercultural, migration, and diversity-sensitive pedagogy for educational equity, identity, belonging and global citizenship are undisputed (e.g, Fiorucci, 2020; Portera, 2020; Gross, 2022). However, who is defined as a learner with a “migration background”, who is an insider or an outsider, who is the so-called “other” (Said, 1978), and who is categorized as “we” and “others” (Mecheril, 2018) is strongly interwoven with other historically developed categories with roots in nationalism, eurocentrism, and colonialism; racism, discrimination and stereotypes are (re)produced also in educational institutions, which strive for inclusion and are guided by equity as leading principle (Ainscow, 2020). Research shows that groups of people are inter alia excluded because of their origin, even though the mechanisms of exclusion are highly complex and cannot be explained by the legal migration status only. It is assumed that also geopolitical and geographic factors determine which groups receive social support, access to educational opportunities, and solidarity, and which groups are subjected to the seemingly meritocratic neoliberal mechanisms – thus, an intersectional perspective on the phenomena is needed (Crenshaw, 1989; Winkler & Degele, 2011).

This paper presents key incidents that derive from research conducted in 2023 and 2024 in Saxony, Germany. Following an ethnographic methodology (e.g., Gobo & Molle, 2017), participatory observations in school classes and semi-structured interviews with different educational actors – children, teachers, school social workers, headmasters, and coordinators at the school authority – were conducted and complemented by an analysis of visual data: images, photos and video-/audio recordings.

Since the outbreak of the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022, Germany has faced the challenge of integrating more than 350,000 refugees into educational institutions. Even though this poses significant challenges to the education system in Germany, Ukrainian families and children are met with a high level of solidarity. This article discusses the high efforts of the education system towards Ukrainian refugees. These findings are contrasted with efforts regarding the inclusion of learners from other origins – especially from Arabic-speaking and African countries – to discuss racial and ethnic hierarchies and origin-based inclusion and exclusion that (re-)produce the so-called “others” and orders of belonging.

Over the past decade, Global Citizenship Education has gained a key role globally in the education policies of many national governments and in several international bodies, both intergovernmental and non-governmental. In parallel, a growing number of academic studies on GCED conceptualisations have recently become available (Bourn, 2020; Davies et al., 2018; Gaudelli, 2016; Oxley, Morris, 2013; Sant et al., 2018; Shultz, 2007; Tarozzi, Torres, 2016; Torres, 2017), also in Italy (Surian, 2020, Franch, 2020; Tarozzi, 2017).

A crucial role in this shift has been played by the inclusion of global citizenship as a complementary concept to education for sustainable development in the 2030 Agenda (UNESCO, 2017), where it is explicitly mentioned in Goal 4.7. Despite its growing political importance, it remains a vague and highly contested concept (Bourn, 2020; Hartung 2017; Jooste and Heleta 2017). This makes GCED a concept that is open to many conceptual, political and pedagogical interpretations (Gaudelli 2016; Shultz 2007; Torres 2017) and results in different educational approaches and goals due to conflicting political visions and assumptions (Oxley, Morris 2013; Veuglers 2011). Therefore, it is particularly important to compare the different policy discourses underlying the implementation of GCED policies at European and Italian levels, taking into account national academic traditions, cultural contexts and national rationales.

The proposed paper is part of a PRIN, "Global Civic Education" (GloCivEd), which aims to significantly advance knowledge in the field of GCED and to provide effective guidance to practitioners for the integration of GCED in secondary education through civic education. In particular, the study proposed here aims to investigate the ways in which issues and approaches of GCED are integrated into international policies, with particular reference to international policy documents published by intergovernmental (OECD, UNESCO, EU, UNICEF...) and non-governmental (GENE, CONCORD, SOLIDAR...) international bodies. Against this framework, the international political discourse, tends to refer to the GCED by maintaining a broad and all-encompassing definition, serving to bring together very different actors and to stay at the centre of the decision-making agenda (Schultz, Tarozzi, Kaarsgard, Inguaggiato, 2021, Tarozzi, Inguaggiato, 2017). But this ambiguity represents a serious obstacle for the actual inclusion of GCED in the curriculum at all levels of education and, more generally, to the translation of curricular indications into teaching practices. This paper aims at investigating these tensions by analysing policies to achieve a twofold result: on the one hand, to contribute to a conceptual clarification of the notion of Global Citizenship Education and the international polcy discourses urrounding it; on the other hand, to understand the extent to which international policy has infomed of the Italian law 92/19 which introduced civic education.

The issue of attitudes toward immigrants is a pivotal concern in contemporary society, where education is recognized to play a crucial role in shaping these perspectives (Bayram, 2022; Davidov & Semyonov, 2017; De Coninck, 2020). Recent years have witnessed significant global changes marked by mass migrations driven by factors like conflict, economic disparities, and climate change. Policymakers are increasingly scrutinizing the multifaceted implications of immigration across social, political, economic, and legal dimensions. There is a growing concern about the impact of immigrants on host societies, encompassing worries related to social dynamics, cultural shifts, and economic factors. The status of immigrants within European societies has become a central topic in widespread public discourse across the continent (Davidov & Semyonov, 2017).

In a previous study, we investigated changes in attitudes toward immigrants among 14-year-old students in Slovenia, comparing data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) cycles of 2009 and 2016. The initial result from ICCS 2022 data indicates that Slovenia falls below the international average on the scale of positive attitudes toward immigrants, prompting a closer examination of these attitudes. Given that civic education plays a fundamental role in preparing individuals to be active and responsible citizens, exerting a positive influence on attitudes toward immigrants (Diazgranados & Sandoval-Hernandez, 2015), this study aims to explore the association between civic knowledge and students' attitudes toward immigrants. Utilizing both descriptive statistics and additional linear regression analysis, the study aims to enhance our understanding of the dynamics between civic education and attitudes toward immigrants in Slovenia. This exploration may serve as a valuable foundation for future, in-depth research in this field.

According to the latest report from Ministero dell’Istruzione e del Merito on students with non-Italian citizenship in Italian schools (MIM, 2023), their number amounts to 872,360 and constitutes 10.6% of the total student population. Their distribution is not homogeneous, and about a quarter of the schools find themselves with a student population in which more than 15% of the students have a non-Italian background. Furthermore, there is a proliferation of various educational agencies (family, school, religious communities, groups of non-formal education) that contribute to enriching the cognitive baggage of each person.

Within the contemporary educational scenario, therefore, each person comes into contact with potentially conflicting information, beliefs, values, models, and norms, and seeks to cognitively and emotionally manage this pluralism. In this process, the school must fulfill a fundamental task, that of "promoting students' ability to make sense of the variety of their experiences, in order to reduce the fragmentation and episodic nature that may characterize the lives of children and adolescents" (MIUR, 2012). However, there are different strategies and models for managing intercultural and interreligious coexistence that the school can adopt, either towards enhancing personally, culturally, and religiously determined affiliations or towards their limitation.

Specifically, we believe that different models and visions of pluralism can be analyzed based on their placement along two axes of variation: the first relating to the didactic-organizational conception of pluralism and the other concerning its philosophical conception. The two opposing ideal types related to the didactic-organizational conception of pluralism refer to the two main models of political management of pluralism: French-style assimilationism and Anglo-Saxon-style multiculturalism. The two opposing ideal types related to the philosophical conception of pluralism are universalism and relativism (Berger, 2014). We believe that a teacher's orientation regarding these two axes significantly contributes to determining the actions and practices implemented in an intercultural educational context.

In light of this framework, the proposed report aims to present an ongoing research project that seeks to investigate the perceptions and orientations of primary school teachers regarding pluralism and intercultural and interreligious coexistence in schools, as well as the models of action currently being implemented to manage these phenomena. Specifically, this qualitative research utilizes focus groups as a tool to explore teachers' opinions and orientations, thereby elucidating a range of perspectives and experiences.

Nowadays in the contemporary globalised, multicultural and postcolonial society, pedagogy has to face many challenges to ensure that in school students will be educated in democracy and global citizenship.

For that to happen, it is urgent to introduce in schools the idea that intercultural pedagogy – an educational intentional project which cuts across all the disciplines taught in school for the purpose of changing the perceptions and cognitive habits with which people generally represent the relationship between foreigners and human natives and non-natives (Fiorucci, 2020) – should focus more on the aspect of power in human relationships, a cogent theme for the postcolonial pedagogy (Burgio, 2022)

As a matter of facts, even if historically speaking, political colonisation ended thanks to the process of decolonisation aimed at breaking the political and economic relationships of one country over another, decolonialisation (Borghi, 2020) – namely a process of people minds decolonisation from colonial power mechanisms – is still necessary, both for teachers and students’ minds.

Discrimination, inequality, eeurocentrism, modern racism, violence, prejudices as reflections of the colonial logics and devices in the intercultural coexistence, and undermining it, are all challenges for an education aimed at reaching democracy and global citizenship. In fact, in this context it is urgent to consider how teachers should play an important role to, more or less consciously, implement or subvert these dynamics.

To overcome all these pedagogical challenges, it will be necessary to promote a post-colonial, anti-racist, critic and transformative (Merizow, 2003) pedagogy, fostering an education understood as awareness of the reference models in people minds, transforming them from culturally and unknowingly assimilated perspectives to perspectives assumed by a process of reflection.

For the reasons stated below, the aim of the work is to understand the role teachers have in promoting coexistence and global citizenship through a focus group based on a discussion about the themes of power, racism and prejudices in schools, seen under the lens of intersectionality.

The focus group will be preceded by the administration of an anonymous questionnaire about subtle and blatant prejudices to all the participants (Pettigrew and Meertens, 1995) and results will be discussed during the same.

It will be analised if teachers are aware about the importance of their role in promoting democracy, if are able to transgress the canonical school roles (hooks, 2020), to subvert power relationship from the privileged situation in which they are (Borghi, 2020), to create community based on the recognition of the subjectivity of the other, to create a place of freedom and to promote critical thinking (hooks, 2003).

More importantly will be a discussion seeking to eventually deconstruct wrong conceptualised ideas in teachers minds in order to transform them as a result of a critical analysis of the reality.

I hope this contribute will make teachers aware about how power could mine their role in increasing coexistence and global citizenship in school and could suggest new decolonial and critical practices to be implemented, indiscriminately, in the Italian school.