This paper discusses intercultural encounters in the Spanish Educational System. In this context, we are interested in looking at what happens to teacher's identity stabilization when students from an immigrant background are present in the classroom. In this article, we analyze several classroom interactions at a Madrilenian High School (13-14 year-old students), we are particularly looking at a lesson about the Muslim past of the Spanish territory. The findings indicate the emergence of conflictive situations where the teacher appeals to his authority through discursive (re) adjustments. Such adjustments occur when the teacher was involved in an alterity relation with what is foreign, mainly triggered by religious, ethnical and national issues. Teacher's identity (re)stabilizations were related, specifically, with ways of resolving those ruptures provoked by a scenario of multicultural alterity, taking into account his condition as social agent, necessarily compromised with the produced historical narration and a majority culture that supports it.
Multiculturalism; National identity; Teacher's identity; History teaching