Abstract

This paper focuses on the sense of interculturality at public schools in Seville and El Ejido (Andalusia, Spain) which are located in multicultural urban environments and with students of immigrant families from various origins. Our study is based on intertextual discourse analysis of legal and political documents planning the Andalusian education system, on the discourse of the education agents, and on the observation of practices aimed towards intercultural education. We show how the intertextuality between the legal-political discourses, the discourse reproduced in the schools, and the practices of intervention on cultural diversity lead to an undervalued perception of minority cultures in the school and a notion of multiculturalism focused on assimilation. We criticize the conception of interculturality as exhibited in Andalusia’s education policies, since this perspective reveals the discursive intertextuality among policies, pedagogical communication and practices.