From its beginning, a quality feature of Italian intercultural education has been the attention paid to the contribution that folk and children tales as well as books on pupils’ and students’ countries of origin (both in translation or in original language) can give for discovering and appreciating the cultural situations (even the invented ones), ways and beliefs that differently enculturated people share, but also those that are instead distinctive of a cultural area and its population. As it is clear, the “multicultural shelves” address the changes that have characterized Italian society since the 1990s as consequence of the increasingly greater migratory flows and the policies of family reunion. Thus, for older pupils the shelves will host the so called “migration literature”, namely autobiographies of immigrants or collection of short stories whose authors are immigrants as is the case of Somali writer Igiaba Scego. Educational expert Vinicio Ongini (1991, 1999, 2006) initiated this trend and he has not only written a number of books on the topic of the “multicultural and intercultural library”, but has also been involved in disseminating his research and in teacher training courses. The educational investment into the multicultural library has been important for making “unfamiliar” versions of popular tales (such as Cindarella) known to pupils and teachers, and for introducing the latter into different worlds and to different story characters. Furthermore, underlining that an intercultural encounter could take place through reading, or re-reading (in the case of “unfamiliar” versions) stories, assigns a crucial role to the  imagination and narrative.

My presentation will start from there, and I will point out how  focusing on the imagined diversity narrated by stories that refer to areas and experiences of migration certainly answers teachers’ and pupils’ needs and wants in an relevant and involving way. However it fails (1) to consider the aspect of diversity “from within” and its connection with the European heritage, on the one hand, and on the other (2) to explore how such a diversity can be elaborated by writers by imagining a social and cultural landscape that is not their own, and by inventing characters around which the author constructs his/her story of cultural but also individual diversity. Besides coordinating ethnographic research on immigrant pupils’ schooling, in my work as an intercultural educationist, I have carried out fieldwork among the “occupational nomads” (ECOTEC 2008, Gobbo 2003a, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2009) that I presented at various ECERs. At ECER 2011 I intend to present my reflections on novels that are centred on occupational nomads such as circus and playground people, and discuss to what extent the art with which the authors develop the stories, and the stories themselves, can give relevant – or even controversial - insights on the theme of diversity and promote an approach to intercultural education that valorizes imagination as a way to learn about others and oneself. 

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