ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the construction of difference in the context of intercultural education by drawing attention to how students educated on interculturality describe and interpret the various approaches and relationships to otherness evoked by the notion. The postcolonial approach deployed in the chapter is an important instrument for capturing how Eurocentrism continues to inform ways of knowing and thinking. Nevertheless, the chapter focuses on one, albeit important, aspect of a complex problem involving interculturality. The construction of difference in colonial discourse enabled Europe to legitimise colonialism on a rhetorical level, insofar as it consciously set out to modernise, develop, instruct, and civilise. The legacies of educational institutions, hospitals and missions around the globe all testify to this history, which over time established a rhetoric of modernisation and development that concomitantly silenced the harsher logics of coloniality in the process of 'civilising' the 'native' populations.
