Uniformity …           or diversity?
A melting pot …
… or a salad bowl?
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In other words, should different people from different cultures fuse together, so to say, into one big, global melting pot? Should we, as teachers, try to wipe out, or at least reduce, cultural differences so that we can promote uniform ways of working in the classroom? Or should people from different cultures retain their group identities and learn to live together in a sort of big salad bowl?
Of course the idea of the melting pot is no longer very fashionable today, and we tend, at least in theory, to go for the salad bowl. However, we are well aware that the question is not simple to deal with in practical terms. So I would like to move towards the end of this paper by mentioning some basic pedagogical implications of what we’ve said so far.