Research and activism about girls’ education for global democracy: The case of the campaign ‘Etna,Volcano of Peace’,Catania,Italy

Abstract

According to a progressive interpretation of human development, girls’ education should form an integral part of a full democratic system. Nevertheless, girls’ education is threatened and attacked in many ways in current societies, be they authoritarian or democratic societies, developing or developed ones. In this article the two authors, both educators and researchers in education in Catania, Sicily, introduce their educational activities regarding the defence and promotion of girls’ education for development and social change. Three activities are at the core of their current, local and global commitment to the issue: continual seminars on Intercultural Geo-History (with a special focus on the ongoing wars), operating simultaneous Skype connections (the so-called ‘Orbital Classroom’); the Intercultural Prayer Against War; and the campaign ‘Etna, Volcano of Peace’. The article provides some details and describes partial successes of these educational activities led by a consistent group of girls, and explains how the activities relate to both interculturalism and global democracy theory.

Introduction

A century ago, John Dewey wrote that it was not enough to teach about war horrors or to avoid situations that could create conflict or international hostility, but instead to focus on all that unifies peoples and projects them towards common goals and results beyond geographic limitations. For Dewey, this was his conclusion drawn from the idea that education was the liberator of individual capacities in the progression towards the development of social goals. Otherwise, he insisted, the same democratic criteria for education would result in disconnected separatism (Dewey, 1996: 144). This American philosopher and educator aimed to emphasize the link between democracy and education; 100 years later we should re-emphasize this philosophy that has been lost in the ensuing deliberations by political scientists on democratic theory. We need to affirm that education should assist democracy to grow in order to become a global issue linked to development, gender respect and social change.

At Dewey’s epoch, the First World War was about to begin: the great European empires were planning to fight with the intention of obtaining total control of the planet. By using education about democracy, Dewey hoped to protect human progress and civilization. Nevertheless, decades later, once those empires had fallen and the Second World War was also over, the democratic USA, in its turn, threatened and blocked, too many times, the development of democracy in other countries, not only in Europe, but in all other continents. This contradiction highlights the need to present a new Dewey’s philosophy, by using education about democracy to question the key concepts of development and social change.

A history of the development of democracy education must include Gandhi’s name, since the Indian leader, in opposition to Dewey, was against his country’s entering the Second World War ‘to defend democracy’ (Borghi, 1951: 52). Gandhi was convinced that the US ‘democracy’ was particularly weak or thin: the founders of rich America had exterminated the natives and marginalized the Afro-descendants in their current society (a fact that Alexis de Tocqueville also noted); therefore, their ‘democracy’ was nothing else but a hypocritical mask to cover their colonial and imperialist goals, even setting aside their internal racism. Through war, argued Gandhi, the USA wanted to defend that ‘democracy’ (Gandhi, 1996: 140–141). Gandhi’s point was obvious: a democracy that is not founded on culture and spirituality, and on education based on the truth, is only an empty shell, a facade that covers invisible political and economic interests, an imbroglio of which the citizens are simply the uninformed supporters.

This article describes the educational activities that the two current authors, both educators and researchers in education, being aware of the need to include Dewey’s approach, have developed in the last five years in Catania, Italy. Melita Cristaldi is a primary school teacher of Geo-History and Civic Education and holds a PhD in Education Sciences as well. Giovanni Pampanini is an educator specialized in Special Needs Education as well as a researcher in Comparative Education who founded an International Group on the Right to Education in 2010 (www.sissu.it). He has had a previous collaboration with intercultural educationalists like Peter Batelaan and Jagdish Gundara in the 1990s and, with the latter, during the organization of the 13th World Congress of Comparative Education held in Sarajevo in 2007 on the theme of Intercultural Dialogue (Batelaan and Gundara, 1992; Pampanini, 2010). Through this, he became aware of the complexity of Intercultural Democracy in general and Global Citizenship in particular (Pampanini, 2006; Palaialogou and Dietz, 2012; UNESCO, 2015). On her part, Melita has worked intensely on the hidden intercultural dimensions of teaching/learning, doing particular research in the mixed field of education and psychomotor therapy (Cristaldi, 2013, 2014). With the educational activities presented here the two authors are adding a particular international meaning to their understanding of the Deweyian nexus democracy/education. It is true, in fact, that the same Dewey stated that this nexus had ‘naturally’ developed from the US national boundaries to the international plan (Dewey, 1996: 144). Nevertheless, as Giovanni argued elsewhere, that ‘naturally’ needs to be encouraged through precisely aimed educational activities like those introduced in this article (Pampanini, 2013: 33). As will be described in detail in the following pages, these activities precisely tend to associate international education, global democracy and dialogue among civilizations. Of course, a need for a refreshment of the teachers’ profile in the intercultural direction is also evident, in particular regarding the management of the information and communications technologies (ICTs), as is also emerging from other contemporary attempts made in the United Kingdom and the USA (www.globalteacher.org.uk and www.globalteachereducation.org). For sure, international education should contribute to develop teachers’ and students’ intercultural intelligence, defining it as the psychological capability to overcome the obstacles to communication that cultural differences could eventually represent (Pampanini, 2011). Within a framework of development incorporating local and social communities and guided by an inspiration to global democracy, Melita and Giovanni have aimed to improve the awareness of the right to education on behalf of girls.

The Intercultural Geo-History Seminar

The event that took place in Chibok, Nigeria, in April 2014, when more than 270 girls were captured by the Boko Haram terrorist group, was the catalyst for developing a specific educational programme. That event generated a wave of discourses about girls’ right to education, while the Boko Haram’s aim was to prevent the accomplishment of such a right. In many schools around the world the Chibok situation created debate about different visions of education, between traditions and innovation, religion and democracy. In Catania, Sicily, the issue was central to Giovanni’s educational group discussions, raising disgust but also interest. This group, formed in 2012, initially had 10 members, mostly adolescent girls, coming from middle and secondary school, with some girl students coming from the University Faculty of Science of Education as trainees (Giovanni serves as their tutor).

As Giovanni is also the coordinator of the International Group on the Right to Education (Intl. Group) that connects approximately 80 university researchers from all over the world, the Chibok situation reverberated inside this Intl. Group. In fact, this Intl. Group was contemporarily holding its Global Meeting at Rabat University, Morocco, focusing on African development in particular (www.sissu.it). The Chibok incident prompted a specific mobilization within this group, and a member of it took the initiative to write a document called the Chibok Declaration on the Girls’ Right to Education and Democracy (www.ChibokDeclaration.org) and to create a website devoted to the Chibok girls. Thanks to other members of the Intl. Group the Chibok Declaration was translated into six different languages, then sent to Dr Kishore Singh, the current United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education in September 2014, asking him to submit it to the UN Secretary-General. Such activism reverberated also within Giovanni’s educational group in Catania. A member of the group, a Mauritius girl, helped by her mother, translated the Chibok Declaration into French Creole. During related discussions in Giovanni’s group, other girls inquired about the position of President Obama, apart from Michelle Obama’s support of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign launched by the Pakistani Malala Yousefzai. Other girls asked about the Italian premier, Matteo Renzi’s, possible response to the situation, because ‘it is not fair to wait to see what the Americans are doing to free people and resolve all the world’s problems’.

Moving on from these discussions, Giovanni’s Catanese group started to systematically collect articles from newspapers about the denial of rights, forming a collection of press archives. From this collection, the group accessed photos and news on war, ‘the mother of all denials’, to build information panels to be displayed in a public garden down-town. Falcone Park was selected because Giovanni Falcone was a courageous judge killed by the Mafia on 23 May 1992. With this new project, Giovanni’s educational group started to look like a Geo-History Seminar focused on war and on what a student or an educator can do regarding such a global issue. Since April 2014 this Geo-History Seminar meets weekly in a school in front of Falcone Park. In doing so, Giovanni was following the suggestions expressed by Veronica Boix-Mansilla and Anthony Jackson about how to build global competences in students and teachers/educators. As the two quoted authors say,

‘globally competent students are able to:

investigate the world beyond their immediate environment—framing significant problems and conducting well crafted and age appropriate research

recognize perspectives, others’ and their own—articulating and explaining such perspectives thoughtfully and respectfully

communicate ideas effectively with diverse audiences—bridging geographic, linguistic, ideological, and cultural barriers

take action to improve conditions—viewing themselves as players in the world and choosing to participate reflectively’ (Boix-Mansilla and Jackson, 2011: Conclusion).

Profiting from the contemporary concern of the Intl. Group about girls’ right to education, Giovanni, in tune with these suggestions, promoted the Orbital Classroom. An Orbital Classroom is a Skype connection with other educators, teachers and students in other parts of the globe. The idea at the basis of this pedagogical invention is ‘to put in movement’ different ideas on the same topic, in truth a global one. A global issue, by definition, is something that interests globally, so then an Orbital Classroom is just a pedagogical setting that allows people who live in different parts of the world to virtually meet and discuss global issues in educational settings (in school or outside-school settings). Information can vary, of course, according to different sources or different ideological points of view; focus and aims can modify according to the hopes of the people involved in the debate; fear, concern and visions can be expressed, manifested and discussed between groups who are educationally working in different latitudes of the world. During the second semester of 2014, Giovanni put his educational group of Catania in Skype contact with university lecturers in Morocco, Senegal, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Panama and Bulgaria. If his educational action is to become more and more international (more details follow in the next section of this paper), it is important now to focus on one idea that Giovanni developed in his theoretical speculation. In 2006 Giovanni published a book about a political theory of the educational institution in which he stated that the teacher has a political duty to involve his or her educational publics into the world debates on global issues (Pampanini, 2006). It is thanks to this, in fact, that the teacher could become an actor of first magnitude in what could be said a global democracy in a Deweyian perspective that is based on international democratic education. From this point of view, the approach to global democracy that Giovanni is forging is somehow distinctive in front of other concurrent global democracy theories listed as follows: liberal internationalism, radical pluralist democracy, cosmopolitan democracy and deliberative democracy (McGrew, 2002; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015). In fact, Giovanni believes that global democracy should basically be founded on education assumed as an international praxis of the Dialogue among Civilizations from the bottom (Pampanini, 2012, 2015a, 2015b).

In Melita’s classroom, too, the Chibok issue has been a topic for discussion and reflection. Her class, in Fontanarossa School in Catania, was composed of 20 eight-year-old children, half of them female and half male, at the time when the Chibok incident occurred, that is, in the 2013–2014 school year. Melita’s pupils watched videos via YouTube that showed the Nigerian students who had been captured and compelled to repeat Quran verses. Melita’s pupils wondered why all those girls were captured, and why girls only were submitted to such cruel treatment. Of course, this is not criticizing the Quran, but the seizure and treatment of the girls. Through the pupils’ questions, Melita realized how difficult it is to explain the lack of the right to education. In Italy the right to education is guaranteed for all boys and girls. Moreover, the pupils did not understand the link between the denial of rights and the capture – when a right is taken for granted, one risks missing even the meaning of this right. Melita’s pupils found Africa on the world map, then identified Nigeria’s location and the north-east part of it in particular. Inspired by the fact that famous women, like Malala, Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni, campaigned on behalf of the Chibok students, Melita’s pupils produced posters with Bring Back Our Girls written on them. Melita photographed her pupils while they were holding their posters before their faces in a way to hide their identity while manifesting their willingness at the same time. To externalize this educational action, those photos have been posted on Melita’s website, www.sissu.it, so her pupils understood that even by their small action they could contribute to the whole world community effort to liberate the Chibok girls and to affirm universally their right to education.

Melita’s educational action continued in the next school year, 2014–2015, taking inspiration from the fact that Malala, one of the main instigators of the Bring Back Our Girls campaign, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in October 2014. Beyond its particular meaning per se, this award gave Melita the chance to go back to the issue of girls’ right to education and compare it with the Italian situation. In Italy the issue of violence against women has become a focus in the last few years, and consequently the Italian government has emphatically targeted the ‘femminicidio’ crime. Melita’s educational activities allowed the pupils in her classroom to understand how the denial of women’s rights is not something that just occurs somewhere far away from us, but also – and in important proportions – in Italy too, and caused by Italians. All those educational activities became important stimuli to investigate how prejudices against the ‘other’ form in a child’s mind simply through the exposure to mass media and, sometimes, even through school experiences. During the conversations in the classroom, Melita heard from her pupils fresh stories of violent episodes witnessed at home, where Sicilian women had been the victims.

Melita’s educational activities consisted of classroom discussions, drawings and the administration of a test to evaluate the ability to appreciate equality between men and women. Melita thinks that educational research should be undertaken to investigate the cultural dimensions of learning that, if ignored, could negatively affect the educational results that an educator or a teacher actually wants to achieve (Cristaldi, 2013, 2014). Researching these topics Melita further highlighted how much culture matters in a democratic conception of schooling today: examining, in particular, the case of Italy, she showed the ambiguity of the Italian school system in so far as it, from one side, emphasizes the possible richness of cultural diversity but, from the other, considers the foreign students as students eventually with special needs in education (Cristaldi, 2015).

The Intercultural Prayer Against War

In August 2014, when the first pictures of the US prisoners killed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) appeared in newspapers, Giovanni decided to promote the Intercultural Prayer Against War (IPAW) initiative. The First World War occurred just one century before, when on 3 August 1914 Germany declared war on France, so Giovanni’s initiative could have been seen as a simple response to that anniversary. But, despite the coincidence, 1914–2014, Giovanni’s concern about war progressing in today’s world went back at least two decades (to before, that is, the 2001 Twin Towers attack and its impact).

This concern was strengthened when he learned that in 2007 the US Navy had presented a programme to install, in his region in Sicily, the Mobile User Objective System, (MUOS). MUOS is a super-radar system that serves military purposes. The US Navy intended to cover strategically the Mediterranean and North African areas (Mazzeo, 2011). In 2012, taking advantage of the fact that the Mediterranean Society of Comparative Education (MESCE) was about to hold its sixth international conference in Hammamet, Tunisia, Giovanni, who has been the main promoter of this academic society, presented to the MESCE general assembly an open letter to President Obama asking him to stop the MUOS project. The MESCE general assembly unanimously approved Giovanni’s letter on 3 October 2012, the letter was forwarded to the US Embassy in Rome, and finally published in the newspaper La Sicilia on 26 October 2012.

Subsequently, Giovanni organized an e-forum with six intellectuals who criticized the decision of further militarization of Sicily and the Mediterranean area (the e-forum, which was attended by Thomas Pogge, Nadia Urbinati, Buuba Diop, Aicha Maherzi, Pietro Grilli and Teruhisa Horio, is available on the website www.sissu.it homepage). Finally, Giovanni, along with other educators, involved the World Social Forum, held in Tunis, 29 March 2013, asking for public support for the Sicilian civil society movement against MUOS. For his commitment Giovanni was awarded the ASOLAPO/UNESCO Prize 2014–2015. However, the programme was accepted and in January 2014, MUOS was inaugurated, despite the many civil society protests and manifestations. Nevertheless, these protests obtained the result to block the US Navy project; in fact the Sicilian Administrative Court in February 2015 decided to stop the construction waiting for supplementary assessments.

As well as these general educational, political and cultural activities, Giovanni along with Melita raised the issue of war in their educational groups. This contributed to modifying Giovanni’s educational group into a permanent seminar on Intercultural Geo- History, as said above, to which Melita’s class added. Both groups cooperatively became mechanisms for preparing ‘happening-prayers’, the IPAW, and the collection of symbolic signatures against war. Following conversations inside their group and classroom, Giovanni and Melita involved representatives of the religions that are present in Catania (Catholic, Muslim and Buddhist). Along with their students, they organized events in Falcone Park, in Catania, that they called ‘prayers’, but which were actually an invitation to meditate on war rather than a prayer in a true, religious sense. From a theoretical point of view, this marked a very important point, since Melita and Giovanni wanted to add a Gandhian spiritual dimension to Dewey’s discourse on citizenship and cosmopolitan education. In particular, the IPAW initiative holds not so much a religious meaning in the strictest sense, rather it is a meditation on what makes a human commit violence upon another human. Thus their educational activities cover all the cognitive aspects – knowing where the wars actually are and why – along with the action of public meditation, in particular, on war.

During these brief but significant events, the members of Giovanni’s and Melita’s groups spoke about war in front of representatives of the different religions in Catania, and also learned from them; in particular, they learned from the Sinhalese Buddhist Monks that in Sri Lanka a civil war had lasted about three decades between the opposing Tamil and Sinhalese. In this way, knowledge and exchange became two living matters for Giovanni’s and Melita’s groups of girls and boys. In a sense, what happened during these IPAWs was a sort of Dialogue among Civilizations from the bottom, in a very democratic way.

While discussing in Falcone Park, Giovanni, Melita and their students shared the items from their press archives and collected symbolic signatures against war from the impromptu audience. In their turn, Giovanni’s students, although not requested to, continued to campaign against war while at their own schools in the following days, advising their companions and teachers, and collecting symbolic signatures as well. From this point of view, we can affirm that the very fact that girls were presenting their anti-war arguments in both formal classrooms and non-formal educational settings like that of Falcone Park should be considered as a cause for awareness about war, peace and international relations in general.

During the months of implementation of the IPAWs in Falcone Park, some other religious groups approached these spontaneous manifestations, asking to take part. Previous attempts to unify militants of different religious credos in Catania had failed because of mutual suspicions, but because these particular IPAWs were organized by two public educators and intellectuals, neutral territory seemed to be established and that enabled other groups to join in. Thus, we can say that, at least in this case, public education shows to be a more neutral territory for dialoguing than religion, in the Deweyian vein.

Melita reported about these IPAWs in her Fontanarossa School, sensitizing other colleagues (mostly female teachers), pupils and their parents to the extent that the female principal invited Giovanni to hold a seminar on Intercultural Pedagogy of Geo-History for the teachers. This seminar was realized on 8 and 9 September 2014 and it gave Giovanni and Melita the opportunity to enlarge their educational activities, sensitizing a larger audience of teachers and educators to build a deeper sense of spirituality and at the same time a cultural curiosity and respect in boys and girls. The basic conviction was that it is not possible to have citizens who are potentially cosmopolitan citizens, with authentic democratic skills, critical thinking and communication ability, neither nationally nor internationally, without a deep sense of concern and compassion towards all human beings. If the Intercultural Geo-History Seminars should serve to build the capacity to gather information from multiple sources, to compare them, to locate problems in the places where they occur on a world map, to understand the links that bind global international events, and, finally, to formulate a point of view in front of an audience, the IPAWs should serve to cement a mental overture in favour of international solidarity and deep spirituality for welcoming the ‘other’. There is no doubt that a Gandhian approach is what we need if we want education to help global democracy progress. Girls, in particular, can play a special role in such a philosophy of education, since they suffer the risk of being victims of violence more than boys. To empower them is crucial to a more general strategy of social change and democratic development.

The campaign ‘Etna, Volcano of Peace’

Both the Intercultural Geo-History Seminar and the IPAWs were led by Melita and Giovanni to create an educational campaign against war. Taking advantage of the seminar on the Intercultural Pedagogy of Geo-History at the Fontanarossa School in Catania in early September 2014, Giovanni proposed the promotion of an educational campaign against war by a title that was evocative for the town. This proposal was the result of on-going discussions during the seminar. Importantly, the proposal was accepted by the principal, Concetta Tumminia, who was able to play a pivotal leadership role. The Etna volcano constitutes the typical skyline of Catania and is the highest active volcano in Europe; finally, in 2013 it was inserted into the humankind heritage list by UNESCO. Because of this, ‘Etna, Volcano of Peace’ was chosen as the slogan for this educational campaign against war. Thanks to the Fontanarossa School teachers and the principal’s support, this campaign started on an important, institutional track. Melita was appointed as the coordinator of the campaign in the name of the school, with the collaboration of Giovanni. From then onwards, Melita and Giovanni have communicated with both the Basso Foundation in Rome and the National Network of UNESCO Italian schools to gain their moral support. In this way, the educational campaign ‘Etna, Volcano of Peace’ was extended to other schools in Catania and reached national level. In addition, Giovanni and Melita launched the campaign at an international level through the Intl. Group on right to education. A number of universities reacted positively, so that the campaign received moral support from Prof. Kanishka Bedi, Kuala Lumpur University, President of the Indian Ocean Comparative Education Society, IOCES; Prof. Teshome Nekatibeb, University of Addis Ababa and President of Ethiopian chapter of the Africa For Research In Comparative Education society, AFRICE-ETH; Dr Daniel Komo Gakunga, University of Nairobi and, currently president of pan-African Africa for Research In Comparative Education, AFRICE; Prof. Rachida Kerkech, English department of the University Mohamed V of Rabat, Morocco; Prof. Babacar Buuba Diop, Dakar University and President of the Pan-African Association for Literacy and Adult Education; Dr Charles Owens Ndiaye of the African Social Forum in Senegal; and Prof. Teruhisa Horio, Emeritus of Tokyo University, Japan. In addition, a number of schools have been added to the list of supporters, including: the High School n. 5 in Montevideo, Uruguay; the Pan-African Institute of Psychomotricity and Relaxation, Douala, Cameroon; the students of the Pedagogical University of Mexico City; the municipal school Arthur Miranda de Carvalho in Mirangaba, Brazil; the Higher School of Education, Polytechnic Institute in Viana do Castelo, Portugal; and the International Cultural Association, Gabriella Bianco & Robert Steve Bingham (the lists of supporters are published in the Fontanarossa School website: www.icfontanarossa.it). Joining the campaign implies that during the academic year there will be held at least one seminar on Geo-History, focused on the current wars, plus the making of a two minute long video with the students contributing their thoughts about the topic.

To give a sense of timing to the campaign, Melita and Giovanni agreed to organize two Global Educational Manifestations (GEMs), the first one on 10 December 2014 and the second one on 3 June 2015, the campaign’s intended end (at least, for this academic year). The first GEM consisted of a Round Table on Intercultural Education for Peace, in which non-Italian educators who live in Catania participated, along with Zacharie Zachariev, former Director of UNESCO, and La Salete Coelho, coordinator of the project on Education for Development in the High School of Education in Viana do Castelo, Portugal and researcher in the centre of African Studies of the University of Porto (CEAUP), Portugal, in video-conference (Skype). The Round Table at the second GEM was attended not only by a large number of Fontanarossa School teachers but also by teachers and principals from other Catanese schools, plus the commissioner for educational policy of Catania municipality, representing the Mayor. Professor Zachariev was very encouraging and inspiring; he enthusiastically supported the campaign, while Dr Coelho showed a video created by a group of Portuguese girls who were students in her course, and based on the theme of Etna as a symbol of peace. The intercultural approach was a feature of this video. The girls integrated the Etna element with the history of Portugal, resulting in a mural with carnations overhanging Etna, the carnations symbolizing the Portuguese Revolution against a dictatorship in 1974. The Revolução dos Cravos was a peaceful revolution that ended the long authoritarian regime of Salazar and led to the restoration of democracy. Another video, which focused on the issue of child-soldiers, was made by pupils from the ‘Dante Alighieri’ school in Catania. There, too, the majority of pupils were female, as was the teacher, Professor Clotilde Russo, who organized the activity for that video. A group of school children in Mirangaba, Bahia, Brazil, participated as best they could: located in a very poor area, without any internet connection, the Brazilian colleague sent photos and recordings of her pupils to Melita using whatsapp, and vice versa.

On January 2015, because of the educational campaign, the principal of the Fontanarossa School, Concetta Tumminia, received the ‘Rosario Livatino’ prize, an international prize for education to uphold the values of legality and justice. The second GEM, on 3 June 2015, put together all the educational material against war produced by student groups in both Italy and abroad, and presented them in a video-conference from Fontanarossa School using Skype, culminating in the symbolic gesture of surrounding Etna with all the collected symbolic signatures against war. The starting stage of this event was followed via Skype from Indian teachers and pupils of a public elementary school of Bangalore, India, organized by Prof. Niranjan Aradhiya from the School of Law in India University in the same town. The following Round Table about the figure and role of the envisaged Global Teacher was discussed with a number of Catanese attending stakeholders in education and, via Skype videoconference, with international guests, including the former UNESCO Director Prof. Zacharie Zachariev, Prof. Diane Napier, University of Georgia-USA and World Council of Comparative Education Societies, WCCES, past Secretary General, Prof. Rachida Kerkech, University of Rabat, Morocco, and Charles O Ndiaye of the Pan-African Association for Literacy and Adult Education from Dakar, Senegal.

Given that the GEM’s objective is to encourage students to stand against war all over the world, the Orbital Classrooms joined with the other pedagogical activities described above could be predicated as good examples of how to implement global democracy through a Dialogue among Civilizations practised through education. From this point of view, in fact, this kind of international education represents a way to revitalize the Deweyian nexus between democracy and education, developing it at an international level, therefore paving the way to think of global democracy from an international education point of view, if global democracy should be posed on dialogue above all.

Conclusion

The educational activities undertaken since the beginning of the current decade by the authors in Catania, Sicily, reflect their theoretical approach to international education and peace, and hold a specific meaning for both research in education and activism. They are convinced that their educational activities accommodate well in the Dewey educational tradition in the sense that their activities reinvigorate the nexus between education and democracy while making sense of interculturalism (Pampanini, 2010). Giovanni’s previous collaboration with intercultural educationalists like Peter Batelaan and Jagdish Gundara in the 1990s and during the organization of the 13th World Congress of Comparative Education held in Sarajevo in 2007 on the theme of Intercultural Dialogue allows the authors to be aware of the current commitment of educators/educationalists with Intercultural Democracy generally and with Global Citizenship in particular (Palaialogou and Dietz, 2012; UNESCO, 2015). Thus, Giovanni has already tried to theorize the specific intercultural challenges to democracy theories in a book published in 2006 (Pampanini, 2006), while Melita has intensely worked on the hidden intercultural dimensions of teaching/learning (Cristaldi, 2013, 2014, 2015). By the educational activities presented here the two authors are adding a particular international meaning to their understanding of the Deweyian nexus democracy/education; in fact, it is clear, a century after Dewey’s days, that there is no ‘natural’ development of the democratic discourse from the US national boundaries to the international plan. The educational activities presented in this article are precise in their intelligence in so far as they tend to represent an in vitro model of how international education could represent a form of Dialogue among Civilizations nowadays tending to global democracy. The Orbital Classrooms, led by teachers who are able to collect information systematically about global issues, are not but a practice from the bottom of such a dialogue in which only teachers’ and student’s intercultural intelligence can develop (Pampanini, 2011).

The very idea that the teacher has a political duty to involve his or her educational publics into world debates on global issues makes of him or her an actor of the first magnitude in what could be said to be a global democracy in a Deweyian perspective that is based on international democratic education. In particular, it should be noted that Giovanni’s approach to global democracy is somehow distinctive before other concurrent global democracy theories because it is basically founded on education assumed as an international praxis of the Dialogue among Civilizations from the bottom (Pampanini, 2012).

According to these assumptions Melita and Giovanni describe in their present article how they have moved from the individual classroom or educational group level, extending their educational conversations via Skype on the international arena. In addition, they have insufflated a Gandhian inspiration into their educational activities, trying to complete their theoretical, Deweyian approach to education and global democracy with a profound spirituality and sense of respect for the truth.

In the educational activities described in this article, the authors focus on the aspect that is related to girls’ right to education as a crucial dimension for both social change and democratic development. The very recent events in Chibok, Nigeria (April 2014), Malala Yousefzai’s Nobel Prize for Peace (October 2014) and the escalation of the many wars all around the world have been among the catalysts in advancing the authors’ educational activities instigated in Catania, Sicily, to build global competences about global issues like war and peace, and development and democracy, in their students. The major awards that these educational activities are receiving give hope for a continuation and deepening of the same activities.