TY  - UNPB
N2  - This is a school based ethnographic style inquiry that took place in four intercultural
primary schools in a major metropolitan area of Greece and extended over a period of
a school year. Intercultural schools were introduced in Greece by Law in 1996 and
that was the first official recognition of the educational needs of children coming from
different cultural backgrounds. The overall aim of this thesis is to uncover teachers'
beliefs and practices and explore by an in depth analysis, the everyday operation of
intercultural schools in Greece by identifying both their explicit aims and hidden
agendas in relation to the education of 'foreign' children. It aimed to unravel their
everyday schooling processes and examine intercultural ideology in practice. The
study used a mixture of qualitative methods that included observations, interviews
with the head teachers, classroom and bilingual teachers and analysis of school based
and educational policy documents.
The findings suggest that the educational practices identified, treated the diversity of
`foreign' children as an educational problem that hindered their progress and had to
be altered in order to fit the school's culture and norms. As a result, 'foreign' children
attended bilingual classes that focused mainly on the teaching of the Greek language
and aimed to integrate them quickly into the mainstream classroom, in order to match
the school's criteria of 'normality'. Children's previous educational experiences and
cultural capital were neglected, as was their first language which was seen as a
constraint to their integration in the mainstream classroom and, in effect, to Greek
society more broadly. Overall the study suggests that intercultural schools, despite
their rhetoric, still work within a monocultural and monolinguistic framework and act
as sites for the reproduction of State ideology and culture. The study concludes by
proposing a different model of education for all children, based on democratic values
and citizenship education, aiming to prepare competent and active citizens with
multiple identities to meet the challenges of the national, European and global
context.
M1  - Doctoral
A1  - Repana, Vasiliki
PB  - Institute of Education, University of London
Y1  - 2008///
N1  - Thesis: (PhD) University of London Institute of Education, 2008.
ID  - discovery10020561
AV  - public
EP  - 411
UR  - http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.525500
TI  - Intercultural schooling in Greece :a study of schooling processes and teaching practices in four urban intercultural primary schools
ER  -