1

NAME OF SPEAKER: Venetia Apostolidou, Maria Alexiou & Antonis

Stergiou

EMAIL: neta@eled.auth.gr,

TITLE OF THE PAPER:

Promoting Reading as an Inclusive Practice

for the Muslim Minority Children of Thrace in

Northern Greece

THEME:

Teaching Reading, Minority Education

In western Thrace, a northeastern province of Greece, at the border with Turkey, lives

a muslim minority who are Greek citizens of muslim religion. The muslim children,

according to the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), receive a bilingual education, which has

always been insufficient, due to various political, ideological and social reasons

(Dragonas and Frangoudaki 2006). When the Project for Reform in the Education of

Muslim Children (PEM) was launched in 1997, the overwhelming percentage of

students were underachievers 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

secondary school, exceeding 65%. This percentage was even higher (78%) for girls

particularly in the mountainous and remote areas (Askouni 2008). Almost the entire

minority population belongs to the two lower social strata: agricultural laborers and

manual workers far exceed those of the national mean (Androussou et al. 2011). As a

result, the muslim children have poor access to literacy and practically very few

opportunities to become equal members of a broader literate community and succeed

in education, work and social life. It doesn‟t come as a surprise that muslim children

are week readers and „reading for pleasure‟ is an unknown practice both for children

and adults.

PEM is a large-scale educational intervention which has been implemented for the

past 17 years (1997-2014). The target population of the intervention consists of

closely 11,000 students. The main idea on which the project was based is that

educational problems that linguistically and culturally diverse groups face are

complex in nature since the education and identity of these groups are determined by

power relations and social hierarchies (Cummins 1996, 2004). The intervention was

holistic as it included research, development of educational materials, transformative

actions within the school structure (curriculum changes, innovative approaches to

pedagogy and teacher in-service training), as well as educational activities within the

community. A complex project such as this presupposes a cross-disciplinary and

collective approach. It was carried out by an interdisciplinary team numbering almost

200 specialists in education, linguistics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, history,

conflict resolution, natural sciences and the arts (Androussou et al. 2011: 6).

Within this program, particular emphasis has been placed on literature teaching in

Junior High School. Literature is seen not as just one school subject but as the main

street that leads to literacy and promotes reading; even more, as the realm of

2

otherness. In reading we discover the cultural other, giving shape and meaning to our

own individual and historical experiences and constructing our personal and collective

identities (Apostolidou & Hodolidou 2008). It is for this reason that literature has a

leading role in minority education programs and in modern curricula based on the

principals of intercultural education (Rendon 1995).

However, reading literature by minority students cannot function as described above

automatically. Many obstacles get in the way. First, that they are struggling learners in

Greek, second that they don‟t feel respected at school, third that textbooks and

curricula are designed for native speakers i.e. majority students. As a result, literature

class, instead of promoting reading, could have contributed to their exclusion of

literacy. If literature class is to be an inclusive one, students must be actively engaged

in reading no matter what their culture and their language competence is. (Perez 2014)

When the program literature team started the intervention in Junior High Schools in

Thrace in 2002, the biggest problem we had to face was how to help the frustrated

literature teachers, who usually belong to the majority, to realize the real reasons of

the minority students‟ luck of interest for literature and their poor reading skills. They

used to blame bilingualism itself and their different cultural background which did

not, of course, promote reading, while a few had even come to the conclusion that

minority students, due to their language and culture, could not ever, under any

circumstances, be able to communicate with high greek and european literature. They

couldn‟t see that perhaps the teaching methods or the particular selection of texts

might have something to do, not to mention their own low expectations from their

students. (Apostolidou & Hodolidou 2008)

Teacher training was the most difficult part of the project for, as it is already apparent,

the problems in Thrace were not primarily pedagogic; they were first and foremost

ideological and political. Under such conditions teacher training was extremely hard.

Channels of communication with the teachers had to be established. Training was

carried out in small groups and teachers participated on a voluntary basis. Teachers

were actively involved in trying out and evaluating the new teaching materials and

then providing feedback. Hundreds of secondary teachers were trained over the years

but, eventually, approximately twenty teachers formed a group that, in close

collaboration with the training team, have been trying new methods and materials in

their literature classes persistently and continuously. Two of those are Maria Alexiou

and Antonis Stergiou, the co-authors of this paper.

The second problem we had to face in designing the new educational materials was

the text selection criteria. As long as our main goal had been the development of a

wide range of reading and communicative skills and our belief that reading for

meaning is situated in a wider cultural context where all forms of oral and visual

communication are interrelated, we chose not only literary texts but also songs,

comics, movies, videos e.t.c. We were not interested in familiarizing them with the

greek national literature so to assimilate them in the majority culture (acculturation)

nor in stressing their muslim identity by choosing texts with muslim heroes or from

turkish literature (although we had a few of those) (Kalanzis and Cope 2009). Our

main concern was to propose to them rich, meaningful texts which talk about children

and adolescent experiences common in modern world. The cultural diversity would

naturally emerge through open reading practices and different approaches. The next

3

dilemma was whether we should look for “easy” texts as far as the language is

concerned since the children were not fluent speakers. The dispute among the

designing team and the teachers over the text language was endless: a text that was

considered easy for one class was found difficult for another. This is because

language in literary texts never functions autonomously. We strongly believed that the

teaching method, that is the preparation of the students before reading and the

motivation are the most important factors for making sense out of a text. (Perez 2014:

31) Therefore, although we paid attention to the language of the text, it was not our

first priority.

Our priority was surely the teaching methods. We chose the „unit approach‟ (Sloan

Davis 1991: 154) or, as it is called by others, the „narrow reading‟. (Hadaway &

Young 2010: 74- 78) A unit is a sustained reading and learning sequence which

integrates language arts activities with no verbal activities and leads to connections

between literary works or between literary and non fiction texts. The unit is built

around a set of texts, related by theme, genre, focus, style or any other common

element. The unit approach is based on the conviction that the desire to read as well as

making meaning is a matter of expanding students‟ cultural background. It might be

fruitful only when students get really interested and involved in the unit topic, making

the reading and writing incidental. (Smith 1988: 125) The ways of organizing units

are unlimited. Nevertheless, we had to choose a few, in order to elaborate them and

present them as examples: “Comics”, “Poems and songs”, “Toys, games and plays in

literature”, “Journey as a life and reading experience”, “Teenage fiction”, “Movies

based on novels”.

There are two ground rules in our teaching methodology: First that verbal expression

is not the only way to communicate response to reading, (Rosenblatt 1982: 275,

Hepler and Hickman 1982: 281) especially among minority children, so we

encouraged activities inspired by other arts such as drama, music, painting,

photography and video making. Second, reading is the centre of a project with

students working in groups on a well-balanced task. Above all, we tried to ensure that

communicative relations in class promote openness, empower the students‟ self

esteem and establish respect to different opinions, that is respect to cultural diversity.

In the rest of the paper we will take a closer look at two muslim students and their

progress during one school year. The first is Hasan, an 8th

grade student of Maria

Alexiou in the Minority High School of the city of Komotini. It is a bilingual school

where most of the subjects are taught in turkish. In greek literature class (2011-2012)

Maria chose the teaching unit “Journey as a life and reading experience” hoping that

the particular topic could be attractive for students who had no travelling experience

apart from their imaginative journeys. Hasan was a struggling learner in greek,

repeating the same grade for second time, indifferent and restless in all classes.

Obviously he had very low self esteem and had been completely unmotivated. At the

beginning of the project, when students worked on travel brochures, souvenirs and

pictures from various places in Greece and all over the world, Hasan, although he did

not participate in the discussions, gradually started to show some signs of interest.

Surprisingly enough, he was, for the first time, quiet. In the next phase, students were

working in groups and Hasan started participating in his own. The activity that

attracted him more and became the catalyst for his full involvement was dramatization

of a literary text. Hasan gained the applause of his peers and started undertaking roles

4

in oral and writing activities. The change in his attitude and his experience of the

literature class had consequences in other classes as well. Hasan not only finished the

8th

grade successfully but, in the following year, in Maria‟s literature class again,

wrote a poem in turkish and translated it into greek successfully, demonstrating that

among bilingual students, literacy in one language promotes literacy in the other as

well.

Our second case study is Deniz, a 7th

grade student of Antonis Stergiou, in the Junior

High School of the minority village Sminthe in the Rhodope Mountains. Antonis

chose the teaching unit “Comics” as he believed that the humorous tone and the

drawings of the comic characters could draw his students‟ interest and give them the

opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings. Among his students, there was

Deniz, a girl from a remote small village. She had already been rejected from another

school in the nearby town because of her low grades, when she was enrolled again in

the 7th

grade in Antonis‟ school. At the beginning of the teaching unit, she was

reluctant to express personal ideas and views and she didn‟t know anything about the

techniques of the comic strips. Gradually, while she was comprehending techniques

such as the panels, the speech and the thought bubbles, the pictorial representation of

sound effects, the difference between the fonts, the punctuation and the facial

expressions of the characters, she felt self confident. As a result of this feeling, Deniz

coped with the stress of reading aloud with the 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 little

improvisational play

use (in teamwork) the software “Toondoo” and convert a scene of a narrative text 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 without

frontiers

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

undertake the responsibilities of a stage director, during a classroom project on

the comedy The birds, by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, in the

form of a comic book. Deniz and her peers cut out and recomposed the most

meaningful and distinctive panels that had been chosen in order to shorten the

prototype comic book. Due to this playful way, all students finally created

their own version of the comedy demonstrating the level of their reading

comprehension.

And what is happening now to those students?

“Learning is not a matter of „development‟ in which you leave your old selves

behind, leaving behind lifeworlds that would otherwise have been framed by

5

education as more or less inadequate to the task of modern life. Rather,

learning is a matter of repertoire, starting with recognition of lifeworld

experience and using that experience as a basis for extending what one knows

and what one can do”. (Kalanzis & Cope 2009: 28-29)

Hasan and Deniz surely had a chance to hear the sound of the river below the bridge,

a pleasant sound that they had never heard of before, the sound of literacy.

References

Androussou, Alexandra, Nelly Askouni, Thalia Dragonas, Anna Frangoudaki, Effie

Plexousaki (2011), “Educational and Political Challenges in Reforming the

Education of the Muslim Minority in Thrace, Greece”, The International

Journal of Learning, 17 (11), 227-239.

Apostolidou, Venetia and Eleni Hodolidou (2008), “Teaching Literature in an

Intercultural Context: The Case of the Schools in Thrace”. In Dragonas, Thalia

and Anna Frangoudaki (eds), Addition not Subtraction, Multiplication not

Division: Reforming the Education of the Minority in Thrace. Athens:

Metaihmio (in Greek).

Askouni, Nelly (2008), “Minority Students‟ Drop-out Rates from Compulsory

Education in Thrace. In Dragonas, Thalia and Anna Frangoudaki (eds), Addition

not Subtraction, Multiplication not Division: Reforming the Education of the

Minority in Thrace. Athens: Metaihmio (in Greek).

Cummins, Jim (1996), Negotiating Identities: Education for Empowerment in a

Diverse Society. LosAngeles: California Association for Bilingual Children.

Cummins, Jim (2004), Language, Power and Pedagogy: Bilingual Children in the

Crossfire. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

Dragonas, Thalia and Anna Frangoudaki (2006), “Educating the Muslim Minority in

Western Thrace”, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 17(1), 21-41.

Hadaway, Nancy L. and Terell A. Young (2010), Matching Books and Readers.

Helping English learners in Grades K-6, NY: The Guilford Press.

Hepler, Susan and Janet Hickman (1982), “The Book Was Okay. I Love You-Social

Aspects of Response to Literature”, Theory into Practice, XXI, 4, 278-283.

Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope (2009), “Learner Differences: Determining the Terms

of Pedagogical Engagement”. In Soula Mitakidou, Evangelia Tressou, Beth

Blue Swadener and Carl. A. Grant (eds), Beyond Pedagogies of Exclusion in

Diverse Childhood Contexts. Transnational Challenges, NY: Palgrave

Macmillan, 13-29.

Perez, Kathy (2014), The New Inclusion. Differentiated Strategies to Engage All

Students, NY: Teachers College Press.

Rendon, L. (1995), Educating a New Majority: Transforming America’s Educational

System for Diversity. New Jersey: Jossey Bass Wiley.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. (1982), “The Literary Transaction: Evocation and Response”,

Theory into Practice, XXI, 4, 268-277.

Sloan Davis, Glenna (1991), The Child as Critic. Teaching Literature in Elementary

and Middle Schools, NY: Teachers College Press.

Smith, Frank (1988), Joining the Literacy Club. Further Essays Into Education,

London: Heinemann Educational Books.

6