Venetia Apostolidou, Maria Alexiou &

Antonis Stergiou

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

In Thrace, a northeasternprovince of Greece, at theborder with Turkey, lives amuslim minority who areGreek citizens of muslimreligion. The muslimchildren, according to theTreaty of Lausanne (1923),receive a bilingual education,which has always beeninsufficient, due to variouspolitical, ideological andsocial reasons

In 1997, the overwhelming percentage of students wereunderachievers in both greek and turkish programs,their command of the greek language was very poor,and there was a very high drop out rate from secondaryschool, exceeding 65%. This percentage was even higher(78%) for girls particularly in the mountainous andremote areas . Almost the entire minority populationbelongs to the two lower social strata: agriculturallaborers and manual workers far exceed those of thenational mean As a result, the muslim children havepoor access to literacy and practically very fewopportunities to become equal members of a broaderliterate community and succeed in education, work andsocial life. It doesn’t come as a surprise that muslimchildren are week readers and ‘reading for pleasure’ isan unknown practice both for children and adults.

Project for Reform in the Education of Muslim Children

PEM is a large-scale educationalintervention which has beenimplemented for the past 17 years(1997-2014). The target populationof the intervention consists ofclosely 11,000 students. The mainidea on which the project wasbased is that educationalproblems that linguistically andculturally diverse groups face arecomplex in nature since theeducation and identity of thesegroups are determined by powerrelations and social hierarchies

www.museduc.grThe intervention was holistic as itincluded research, development ofeducational materials,transformative actions within theschool structure (curriculumchanges, innovative approaches topedagogy and teacher in-servicetraining), as well as educationalactivities within the community. Acomplex project such as thispresupposes a cross-disciplinaryand collective approach. It wascarried out by an interdisciplinaryteam numbering almost 200specialists in education,linguistics, sociology, psychology,anthropology, history, conflictresolution, natural sciences andthe arts

Literature in Junior High SchoolLiterature is seen not as just one school subjectbut as the main street that leads to literacy andpromotes reading; even more, as the realm ofotherness. In reading we discover the culturalother, giving shape and meaning to our ownindividual and historical experiences andconstructing our personal and collectiveidentities It is for this reason that literature has aleading role in minority education programs andin modern curricula based on the principals ofintercultural education.

Many obstacles get in the wayMuslim children are struggling learners in

Greek

they don’t feel respected at school

textbooks and curricula are designed for native speakers i.e. majority students

frustrated literature teachers

Teacher training

Teachers used to blamebilingualism itself and theirdifferent cultural backgroundwhich did not, of course, promotereading, while a few had even cometo the conclusion that minoritystudents, due to their language andculture, could not ever, under anycircumstances, be able tocommunicate with high greek andeuropean literature. They couldn’tsee that perhaps the teachingmethods or the particular selectionof texts might have something todo, not to mention their own lowexpectations from their students.

Teacher training

Channels of communication withthe teachers had to be established.Training was carried out in smallgroups and teachers participated ona voluntary basis. Teachers wereactively involved in trying out andevaluating the new teachingmaterials and then providingfeedback. Hundreds of secondaryteachers were trained over the yearsbut, eventually, approximatelytwenty teachers formed a groupthat, in close collaboration with thetraining team, have been trying newmethods and materials in theirliterature classes persistently andcontinuously. Two of those areMaria Alexiou and Antonis Stergiou,the co-authors of this paper.

Text selection criteria

development of a wide range of reading andcommunicative skills

reading for meaning is situated in a wider culturalcontext where all forms of oral and visualcommunication are interrelated

Neither acculturation nor stressing their muslimidentity

rich, meaningful texts which talk about children andadolescent experiences common in modern world

not only literary texts but also songs, comics, movies,videos

Teaching Methods‘unit approach’ or ‘narrow reading’

A unit is a sustained reading and learningsequence which integrates language arts activitieswith no verbal activities and leads to connectionsbetween literary works or between literary andnon fiction texts. The unit is built around a set oftexts, related by theme, genre, focus, style or anyother common element

Some examples Comics

Poems and songs

Toys, games and plays in literature

Journey as a life and reading experience

Teenage fiction

Movies based on novels

Two ground rules in teaching methodology• verbal expression is not the only way to

communicate response to reading especiallyamong minority children, so we encouragedactivities inspired by other arts such as drama,music, painting, photography and video making.

• reading is the centre of a project with studentsworking in groups on a well-balanced task

Hasan, 8th grade student Minority High School of the city of Komotini

It is a bilingual schoolwhere most of thesubjects are taught inturkish.

Hasan was a strugglinglearner in greek,repeating the same gradefor second time,indifferent and restlessin all classes. Obviouslyhe had very low selfesteem and had beencompletely unmotivated

Journey as a life and reading experience

At the beginning of the project, whenstudents worked on travel brochures,souvenirs and pictures from variousplaces in Greece and all over the world,Hasan, although he did not participatein the discussions, gradually started toshow some signs of interest.Surprisingly enough, he was, for the firsttime, quiet. The activity that attractedhim more and became the catalyst forhis full involvement was dramatizationof a literary text. Hasan gained theapplause of his peers and startedundertaking roles in oral and writingactivities.

Hasan not only finished the 8th gradesuccessfully but, in the following year,wrote a poem in turkish and translatedit into greek successfully.

Deniz, a 7th grade student of in the Junior High School of the minority village Sminthe in the Rhodope Mountains.

Deniz comes from a remotesmall village. She had alreadybeen rejected from anotherschool in the nearby townbecause of her low grades,when she was enrolled again inthe 7th grade in Antonis’ school.At the beginning of theteaching unit, she wasreluctant to express personalideas and views

Comics

Deniz didn’t know anythingabout the techniques of thecomic strips. Gradually, whileshe was comprehendingtechniques such as the panels,the speech and the thoughtbubbles, the pictorialrepresentation of sound effects,the difference between the fonts,the punctuation and the facialexpressions of the characters,she felt self confident. As a resultof this feeling, Deniz coped withthe stress of reading aloud withthe appropriate intonation.

She managed, step by step, to: • read aloud a story of a 4-panel comic strip and retell the story in her own words• change the text of the speech bubbles and make up a real new funny story • write a short humorous narrative text based on an 8-panel comic strip, whose

panels were tangled and wordless• participate in the dramatization of a 16-panel comic strip story about parent-

teen relationships, being actually the leading actress of the littleimprovisational play

• use (in teamwork) the software “Toondoo” and convert a scene of a narrativetext to a 2-panel comic strip

• translate a turkish poem by Nazim Hikmet for her group• read a long comic book, published by the European Commission in 1998

entitled The Raspberry Ice Cream War about a peaceful Europe withoutfrontiers

• write a short story, based on one she was told by her grandparents and read italoud in the classroom, receiving positive feedback

• undertake the responsibilities of a stage director, during a classroom projecton the comedy The birds, by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, in theform of a comic book. Deniz and her peers cut out and recomposed the mostmeaningful and distinctive panels that had been chosen in order to shortenthe prototype comic book. Due to this playful way, all students finally createdtheir own version of the comedy demonstrating the level of their readingcomprehension.

And what is happening now to those students?

Learning is not a matter of ‘development’ inwhich you leave your old selves behind, leavingbehind lifeworlds that would otherwise havebeen framed by education as more or lessinadequate to the task of modern life. Rather,learning is a matter of repertoire, startingwith recognition of lifeworld experience andusing that experience as a basis for extendingwhat one knows and what one can do(Kalanzis & Cope)