Conference Program

In recent years, the need to respond to the growing cultural complexity of schools has led to the explicit formulation of the concept of intercultural competence, replacing a more generic reflection on interculturality and its related practices. Intercultural competence is conceived both as an educational objective addressed to students, as future citizens, and—prior to that—as a set of professional skills required of teachers, who are called upon to operate in contexts characterized by a plurality of forms of belonging that go far beyond geographical origin or migratory experience (Contini, 2023).

Over time, this need has led to the development of various training tools within the social sciences. The contribution presented here is situated within this perspective and introduces the cultural shock method developed by social psychologist Margalit Cohen‑Emerique in the field of social work, drawing on the critical incident technique (Flanagan, 1954). Observing the difficulties faced by practitioners in integrating anthropological knowledge transmitted by experts into their everyday professional practice, the scholar emphasized the need to conceive alternative training approaches based on non‑hierarchical learning processes and rooted in participants’ lived experiences, enabling them to develop greater sensitivity in perceiving and recognizing differences.

The method invites practitioners to conceptualize the analysis of experiences of emotional and/or cognitive disorientation occurring in helping relationships as an opportunity for decentering with respect to their implicit representations. Only after this initial stage of awareness of the relativity of one’s own point of view is it possible to move on to questioning the interlocutor’s frame of reference, understood as that of a concrete individual rather than the expression of an ethnic or national culture, and finally to negotiation. This phase focuses on the search for concrete solutions aimed at addressing specific problems, rather than remaining at a value‑based or ideological level.

Although the Italian translation of Cohen‑Emerique’s works (2016, 2017) has contributed to the dissemination of the cultural shock method within social work, its application remains limited, and its potential does not appear to have been fully explored in related fields such as education, where a lack of systematicity in intercultural approaches persists despite the proliferation of institutional documents at multiple levels (Tarozzi, 2015; Stillo, 2020; Contini, 2023).

Drawing on research–training pathways (Asquini, 2018) carried out over the past two years with social workers, healthcare professionals, and university students at the University of Genoa, this contribution presents some results from the application of the cultural shock method and discusses its transferability to teacher training. The proposed approach aligns with empirical literature highlighting the strong demand among teachers for support in the development of reflexivity, enabling them to find—individually and together with others—their own pathways within relational contexts that are unique and situated.