Hi Mike,
I'd love to know more about your programme especially being involved a bit in the French programme of Peace education in schools.
I'm a trained HR consultant and focus on cross-cultural conflicts.
As far as my experience goes understanding how the other 'functions' is important for acceptation of a different identity.Our 'western' identification of the factors of identity as uniquenes,coherence, continuity and self-image aimed at the psychological autonomy of the idividual might not apply in other cultures. There the concept of interdependance might lead to an 'outsourcing' ( or projection) of the above mentioned criteria on other people ( members of the family, priest or even ghosts etc.) and with that expectations and concepts very different from ours.
For multi-cultured kids there might even be different layers that are concerned- ie concepts and beliefs depending on situation and environment.
In my experience prejudice and lack of esteem can grow simply out of different beliefs being based on different cultures. For example I've seen two people accusing each other to be gay simply because they came from different cultural beliefs and as such had a behaviour that wouldn't fit in the other's concept.

Would love to exchange more on that
Daniele de Lutzel

Thanks Daniele,

Yes, there are lots of traps that we can fall into through judging other peoples behaviours through the lens of my own cultural assumptions. I like to tell the story (found in Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline) of the woman whose co-workers assumed was cold and unsociable because she didn't respond to greetings and turned down invitations to socialize after work. In fact the real reason was that the woman had a hearing disability.

This is why we focus a lot on developing listening skills in the workshop, and part of that is recognizing our own internal filters - both personal and cultural. I use the analogy of making the holes in the filters bigger = raising awareness/consciousness. And the best way to raise consciousness is to be in the habit of listening in silence.

But we also recognize that we can never become experts on other people and other cultures, and that in our ignorance we will make mistakes and possibly cause offense. So another thing we try to do in a multicultural world is to normalize those mistakes, to make it OK and a part of the learning process. When we step outside our comfort zones (whatever they may be) we become vulnerable and other people outside their comfort zones are vulnerable as well. So we need a lot of love, humility and big sense of humour to deal with the mistakes that we will make.