This document summarizes a project called PEM that aimed to improve education for Muslim children in Thrace, Greece. It found that in 1997, Muslim children had very poor Greek language skills, high dropout rates, and limited social mobility. PEM was a 17-year holistic intervention with an interdisciplinary team that developed new educational materials, teaching approaches, and teacher training. It emphasized using literature and creative works to promote literacy and reading engagement. The document describes how two students, Hasan and Deniz, became more motivated learners through participating in creative projects focused on comics, poems, and plays. It concludes that learning builds on students' life experiences rather than replacing them.

1. Venetia Apostolidou, Maria Alexiou &
Antonis Stergiou
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece

2. In 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

3. 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 . Almost the entire minority population
belongs to the two lower social strata: agricultural
laborers and manual workers far exceed those of the
national mean 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.

4. Project for Reform
in the Education of
Muslim Children
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

5. www.museduc.gr
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

7. Literature 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
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 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.

8. Many obstacles get in the way
 Muslim children are struggling learners in
Greek
 they don’t feel respected at school
 textbooks and curricula are designed for native
speakers i.e. majority students
 frustrated literature teachers

9. Teacher training
Teachers 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.

10. Teacher training
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.

11. Text selection criteria
 development of a wide range of reading and
communicative skills
 reading for meaning is situated in a wider cultural
context where all forms of oral and visual
communication are interrelated
 Neither acculturation nor stressing their muslim
identity
 rich, meaningful texts which talk about children and
adolescent experiences common in modern world
 not only literary texts but also songs, comics, movies,
videos

12. Teaching Methods
‘unit approach’ or ‘narrow reading’
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

13. Some examples
 Comics
Poems and songs
Toys, games and plays in literature
 Journey as a life and reading
experience
Teenage fiction
Movies based on novels

14. Two ground rules in teaching methodology
• verbal expression is not the only way to
communicate response to reading especially
among minority children, so we encouraged
activities inspired by other arts such as drama,
music, painting, photography and video making.
• reading is the centre of a project with students
working in groups on a well-balanced task

15. Hasan, 8th grade student
Minority High School of
the city of Komotini
It is a bilingual school
where most of the
subjects are taught in
turkish.
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

16. Journey as a life and
reading experience
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. 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 in oral and writing
activities.
Hasan not only finished the 8th grade
successfully but, in the following year,
wrote a poem in turkish and translated
it into greek successfully.

17. Deniz, a 7th grade student of in
the Junior High School of the
minority village Sminthe in the
Rhodope Mountains.
Deniz comes 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

18. Comics
Deniz 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.

19. 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.

20. 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 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)