Repana, Vasiliki; (2008) Intercultural schooling in Greece :a study of schooling processes and teaching practices in four urban intercultural primary schools. Doctoral thesis , Institute of Education, University of London.

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Abstract

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.

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