Abstract

One of the basic characteristics of modern societies is their multicultural character. As a result, this march of events innovated changes in the strength of pupilary population. Pupils with different national, lingual or cultural context go to schools, whereas tutorial systems are facing a new reality and are obliged to adapt to these circumstances. Intercultural education is introducing an effort to administer multiculturalism. Literature for children and young adults and its teaching is a very important ground for the accomplishment of the objectives of intercultural education, as it involves an ideological aspect. This aspect obtains a new dynamic in the case of positive or negative picture of the national or cultural Other and could play an important part in the development and in the advance of intercultural education. The program of an Intercultural Approach of Children’s Literature was designed and implemented in the context of the Laboratory of Art and Speech of the Section of Humanistic Studies of the Department of Education in the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. The program’s major aim was twofold. First of all we tried to make our students and future teachers think about multiculturalism. Thereafter, the university students informed their young students in elementary schools about multiculturalism, they sensitized them and helped them to develop positive attitudes over alterity. They implemented a tuition proposal of literature which relies on cultural studies and uses a critical and pedagogical setting. The tuition’s prime target is the redefinition of the concept of literature and its relation to the culture and the society. In the current essay the three phases of the program was mapped out as well as the theoretical framework of the literary analysis, which relies on the basic principles of Imagologie. Imagologie provides a specific methodological tool with an organized structure. In the end the program is evaluated in the context of the Greek educational system.