Promoting preservice teachers’ intercultural sensibility: empathy, prejudice reduction and inclusion

Abstract

This paper considers the framework of social and intercultural pedagogy and focuses the important role of training for preservice teachers, in order to develop an intercultural perspective to promote and to respect diversity in didactic and educative practices. The paper presents an explorative research which involved students attending the III and the IV years at Sapienza University, in Education Science. The research involves students in a training focused on strategies to prejudice reduction to be applied in ordinary curricula in school contexts (intergroup contact, empathy). Before and after the training, students are asked to answer to questionnaire to measure implicit and explicit prejudice.