Israeli schools are meeting points for the different cultural groups of the Israeli society. There are Arabs and Jews, pious and non-pious Jews; Ashkenazi, Mizrachi and Ethiopia Jews; to name a few... The "melting pot" ideology, prevailing in the early days of the State, seems to have failed. We believe that an alternative discourse is urgently needed to enable the inclusion and participation of the different groups and individuals in the creation of a multicultural narrative of understanding and acceptance.
As teacher educators, we believe that it is our responsibility to develop discourse processes that encourage the kind of intercultural dialogue with our students that is based on the principle of openness. In our paper we present an experimental workshop that engages student teachers in an ethnographic research of their personal cultural community in order to widen their horizon of understanding beyond their own culture to that of their classmates. The research was done in a disciplined way borrowed from ethnographic research and adapted for educational purposes. The conceptual framework that served as basis for our work included: the 'principle of openness', 'multicultural attitude', 'spaces of shared cultural understanding. The paper clarifies these concepts and discusses our basic argument that an intercultural dialogue can be achieved through an attitude based on the 'principle of openness', an attitude that enables the creation of a shared space of cultural understanding.

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Keywords

• Teacher Education
• Intercultural Dialogue
• The Principle of Openness
• Multicultural Attitude
• Cultural Understanding
• Educational Ethnography

(30 min. Conference Paper, English)