European Identity - Individual, Group and Society - HumanitarianNet

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURAL IDENTITY(IES) OF PORTUGUESE ... 219required them to reconsider their cultural identities. Three mainfeatures of the way they accounted for these new identities were:—Engagement with family practices that required bridging betweenthe Portuguese and the English cultural spaces.—Feeling empowered by the mastering of cultural tools (e.g. beingfluent in Portuguese language) associated with the Portugueseheritage.—Feeling dis-empowered when the differences linked to theirPortuguese identity were not accepted / recognized or treated aslack of competence.In addition, the interviews with their teachers revealed that there isvery little recognition of the process of cultural identity developmentthese children experience as a result of their movement betweendifferent European cultural spaces. It is unfortunate that the adaptationof these children to schools is mostly viewed in cognitive and linguisticterms, without a more informed debate of the role school play inshaping their cultural identities 7 . I seriously believe that this area needsto be addressed as a condition to support improvement in their currentschool achievements. It is not uncommon that in the first stages ofschooling these children experience a loss of competencies valued inother cultural spaces they belong (ed). Thus, at school they are not onlydeveloping new identities but also sometimes recovering a sense oftheir selves “lost” in the cultural transitions.If I look back at the conditions that enabled the three women (Lina,Maria and Madalena) to develop a European identity I can see that likethem the students went through life trajectories that challenged a monoculturalidentity. The students experienced this challenge on a bi-culturaldimension. Unlike the women, the students did not seem to have theresources that would enable them to transcend the dichotomous culturalidentities. They battled between keeping a bi-cultural identity, abandoningtheir Portuguese identity and, resisting the British identity.7This scenario is not unique to schools that receive Portuguese migrants. In a recentreport examining the experience of minority children in mainly white schools (Cline,Abreu, Fihosy, Gray, Lambert and Neale, 2002) our research team concluded that “Noschool in this sample had a fully developed strategy for preparing pupils through thecurriculum for life in a diverse society. Presented with alternative ideals of how diversitymight be treated, most informants saw their school or class as trying to treat all childrenequally and playing down ethnic and cultural differences.” We also concluded that“There was no evidence that either initial teacher training or in-service training hadprepared the staff of the schools for the challenges of diversity that they can expect tomeet with increasing frequency in the future”.