Pedagogical Considerations
Language Survival Guide - My First Greek: Educational Material Designed by Teachers and Students to Assist Smooth Adaptation and Integration
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dora Tsiagani
Can mother tongues of students attending a multicultural primary school express their own “voice”? Can they also support the teaching of Greek language? Commencing from the above, teachers and students of the fifth and sixth grade of primary school and the Hellenic Theatre/Drama Educational Network worked together to create the “Language Survival Guide. My First Greek”. This guide is comprised of five thematic videos (classroom objects, classroom activities, colours, body, face) where mother tongues (Albanian, Bengali, Chinese, Farsi, Arabic), together with Greek and English, compose a multilingual guide in order to deal with the needs of the specific school as most students (refugees and immigrants) who attend the school speaking different foreign languages. The use of the “Language Survival Guide” and the opportunity to have free access to the school webpage will contribute to enhance the new students language skills and lead to their emancipation and autonomy. At the same time listening to ‘other’ languages builds up a multilingual culture within a conducive learning environment for effective integration.
Supporting Refugees’ Life Narratives via a Multiliteracy Education Competences Framework
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Niki Lambropoulos
Refugees come from a variety of warring countries and most of them have experienced very hard circumstances. They exchange their life narratives around campfires struggling to make sense and meaning of the sudden change in their lives. Refugees are individuals of various nationalities with different social and cultural characteristics as well as diverse economic and cultural capital. The internet and social media diminished obstacles such as the physical and time obstacles but additional competences are required. For example, empathy in such online shared meaning creation is still an issue due to the psychological distance, the communicating and discourse differences, the diverse background and social languages. Hence, this paper proposes a multiliteracy competences framework to activate and support refugees’ life narratives for transformative self-expression via shared multimodal communication. The latter is built upon online communities and the sense of belonging. It includes the linguistic, visual, audio, corporal, musical, and alphabetical as well as gestural and spatial modes of meaning making and sharing, already integrated into the everyday media and cultural practices. Such transformed practice is viewed as embedded in authentic learning and active participation in online communities requiring specific multiliteracy education competences according to the participants’ lifeworlds, also shaped by participants’ multidimensional personalities.
Early Childhood Education on Greek Islands: Supporting Refugee and Asylum Seeking Children in Refugee Centres
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nektarios Stellakis, Christina Polyzou, Dora Kalantzi
Early Childhood Education on Greek Islands was a program that took place on four Aegean islands (Leros, Samos, Chios, Lesvos ) during summer 2018. Students from the Department of Educational Sciences and Early Childhood Education (University of Patras, Greece) were employed and worked during summer holidays in the kindergartens inside hotspots. The Program was funded by the Open Society Foundation, through ELKE of the University of Patras (FK 80550). Its main purpose was to offer to refugee children, who reside in the Reception and Identification Centres, various creative activities in order to enhance socialisation, creativity, and learning through play and expression. Moreover, the program aimed to help children get familiar with the Greek language and be ready for primary school. In this study, we focus on this experience and the kindergarten, which is in the school area in Chios RIC.
Pre-service Teachers’ Intercultural Learning Through Pedagogical Encounters with Diverse Others in the Community
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eva Polymenakou
Student teachers need to learn how to act appropriately as intercultural educators in a multicultural world. Experiential intercultural learning has been consistently found to be critical toward this end. Nevertheless, the learning opportunities that pedagogical intercultural encounters in the local community may involve for pre-service teachers have barely been investigated in Greece. This paper reports on the results of my thesis that addressed this gap. The study qualitatively explored pre-service teachers’ experiences of Pedagogical Intercultural Community Encounters (PICEs). It took place in two departments of pre-school education in Greece, where participants worked on projects that included off-campus encounters with perceived culturally diverse individuals. The latter were mainly of refugee, immigrant, and Roma backgrounds. The data were collected through individual interviews with student teachers and through their reflective written texts. They were analysed thematically, and Dewey’s experiential learning theory was applied. PICEs were found to foster pre-service teachers’ IL. Specifically, they can enable pre-service teachers to change their own attitudes and to envision changing those of their learners. Secondly, PICEs can help pre-service teachers appreciate the complexity of diversity by pondering over the boundaries of equality, similarity and difference. Thirdly, PICEs constitute a form of praxis, as pre-service teachers are actively involved in their own learning in a way that will also be valuable in their professional educational roles.The study’s main contribution consists in conceptualising PICEs as a community-based educational resource that needs its own space in the literature of Intercultural Learning and of Teacher Education.
