Teachers’ professional development for Intercultural Pedagogy: a case from Greece

Christos Govaris

Stavroula Kaldi (Eds.)

The educational challenge of cultural diversity

in the international context

Waxmann 2010

Munster / New York / Munchen / Berlin

6

Contents

Marita Paparoussi Exploring diversity in Greek language and literary textbooks .................... 153

Aspassia Chatzidaki and Eleni Katsarou Teachers' professional development for intercultural pedagogy:

A case from Greece ...................................................................................... 175

Christos Govaris, Stavroula Kaldi and Sotirios Lolakas Exploring the relationship between self esteem and

school achievement of students with immigrant background

and native students in the Greek primary school .. ..................................... .. 191

Authors ...................................... .......................... ................. ........................ 209

Aspassia Chatzidaki and Eleni Katsarou

Teachers' professional development for intercultural pedagogy: A case from Greece 1.

Introduction

In-service teachers' training in Greece is based on an approach that is used worldwide: curing existing deficiencies. It involves reinforcing teachers' theoretical knowledge and/or nurturing the skills they are perceived to lack (see Xochelis, 2002; Tsafos & Katsarou, 2000, pp. 67-69), with the aim of making teachers capable of effectively managing problems in their class­ rooms. It brings to mind a picture of rather passive teachers who have to adopt specific knowledge or skills and learn a range of techniques which they are then required to implement (Diamond, 1991, p. 10). In this ap­ proach, in-service teacher training attempts to meet the needs of current situ­ ations but fails to change teachers' preconceptions, their personal and often tacit theories. It thus offers teachers no opportunity to study the foundations, goals, and results of their teaching acts, or foster conscious teaching choic­ es (Mavrogiorgos, 1989, p. 22). Research findings and conference reports demonstrate that such training programmes are rather ineffective, induc­ ing changes neither at the school nor at the classroom level (Mavrogiorgos, 1996, p. 19). In the field of intercultural pedagogy, few training programmes have successfully implemented different approaches (see for instance, An­ droussou, 2005; Dragonas & Frangoudaki 2008). Furthermore, most teachers remain unsatisfied with such programmes (e.g. Palaiologou & Evangelou, 2007). In this article we will present a training seminar on intercultural peda­ gogy which, as we will show, was organised following the developmental approach, focusing on each teacher's potential for development and using communication-oriented learning (Katsarou & Dedouli, 2008). It requires educators to take responsibility for their own professional development, by acknowledging them as the most important factor of the educational act, not simple technical managers of knowledge (Wiggins, 1993, p. 53). This semi­ nar aims to guide educators towards a deeper and richer understanding of their work through comprehensive multi-faceted reflection (Jackson, 1992; O'Hanlon, 1993, p. 244), championing continuous life-long learning. It is a type of training that emphasises the development of personal meanings, rather than imitation of modeled behaviours; it focuses more on the educa­

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tors' subjective experiences and less on objectively collected or perceived information on teaching (Diamond 1991, p. 11). We develop this article in two stages: after presenting the seminar and linking it to the theoretical principles that initially shaped it, we will present and discuss the conclusions we reached after assessing it.

2. The training seminar: "Teaching and researching in a multicultural classroom" 2.1 Seminar design - choosing action research The training seminar dealt with intercultural pedagogy and was addressed to high school teachers. It was part of a much larger project that aimed at the school integration of children of immigrants and repatriated Greeks, which was subsidised by the European Union for the most part and by the Greek Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs. The seminar took place in three stages during school year 2007-08 in the county of Rethymnon on the island of Crete. The four-member team that designed and implemented the semi­ nar consisted of the two authors of this paper (members of the faculty of the Department of Primary Education and the Department of Philosophical and Social Sciences of the University of Crete), and two other colleagues of the same University, Yorgos Tsiolis and Manolis Dafermos, from the depart­ ments of Sociology and Psychology respectively. The idea was to create a multi-disciplinary group who could join forces and approach the subject not only from an educational but also from a sociolinguistic, psychological, and sociological perspective. Before the seminar started, an open invitation was sent to all junior high schools in the area. The initial tum-out was twenty-five educators who spe­ cialized in a variety of subjects. Most of them attended the seminar until it was completed (15 sessions), while those who dropped out, were replaced by other educators who attended only the seminar's second and third phases. The design of the seminar was based on the principles of action re­ search (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988; Elliott, 1991). We planned and implemented processes that demanded the combination of pedagogical theory and teaching practice, aiming to enrich both. For this reason theoretical lectures comprised a relatively small part of the seminar (3-4 hours of the 15 hours allotted to each stage), while we placed more emphasis on, and devoted more time to, training techniques that offer educa­ tors the opportunity to share and utilise their experiences from school prac­

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tice. Moreover, we attempted to develop partnerships among participating educators, particularly those who served at the same school, and encouraged their active participation in the seminar - in shaping the direction taken by the seminar in each of the three stages, in the training processes that were developed, and in the actions/interactions that were implemented in the schools. Lastly, this seminar placed special emphasis on feedback and reflec­ tion, mainly to help educators understand and realise (perhaps even chal­ lenge) their tacit theories (Carr & Kemmis, 1986, p. 189; Argyris & Schon, 198811989, p. 613). The adoption of action research principles was a conscious choice, based on the nature of the seminar's content. Since the seminar dealt with inter­ cultural pedagogy, it involved the development of attitudes and skills that would make educators ready to participate in intercultural dialogues (Gov­ aris 2001, pp. 174-193). These attitudes and skills comprised empathy, criti­ cal stance towards roles, tolerance of ambiguity, and communicative compe­ tence. Consequently the seminar's content justified (perhaps even demanded) the educators' reflection on their practices and the explicit and implicit be­ liefs that shaped those practices, and called for the educators' participation in collaborative work, followed by their involvement in researching the al­ ternative perspectives and solutions offered by such work. Action research provided the necessary framework, since it constitutes a type of self-reflec­ tive research that is collective and requires cooperation and good judgement, aiming at understanding and improving practice (McCutcheon & Jung, 1990, p. 148), as well as improving the situations in which this practice is imple­ mented (Carr & Kemmis, 1986, p. 162).

2.2 Seminar goals and structure The training seminar's goals, related to the framework discussed above,

were:

a) To promote a process of reflection: to urge educators to think about

what really happens in their school and classrooms. b) To help educators study their practices and speculate on the factors that shape these practices. c) To inform and sensitise educators to relevant theory and relevant discus­ sions in the social sciences field. d) To help educators plan and implement actions in their schools for en­ hancing the way in which the Cultural Other is managed in the school.

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In order to achieve these goals, the seminar was structured in three stages of 15 hours each (November 2007, February 2008, and June 2008). The first two stages were organised in the following way: The first day started with an experience-based workshop, a training tech­ nique that provides educators with the opportunity to express themselves and put across their associative representations regarding the issues under study. By encouraging participating educators to verbalise their experiences in the workshop (Noye & Piveteau, 1997, p. 98), the trainers learned how the trainees experienced reality in their schools. Moreover, the educators' ex­ periential knowledge provided us with the necessary basis for critique and reflective intervention. In the latter we brought out the invisible sides of the stories told in the workshops, highlighting implicit explanations and percep­ tions that were latent in these stories but that the practitioners could not eas­ ily identify when dealing with the pressure of daily action. Most importantly, listening to the educators' narrations helped us understand and reveal their professional values, knowledge, and practices (Day, 1999; Yinger, 1987; Clandinin & Connelly, 1995). Starting the seminar with such workshops proved particularly beneficial since it provided the opportunity for direct and genuine transfer of the trainees' knowledge, before they were influenced by the way we deal with relevant issues as trainers. During the workshops it became necessary to discuss concepts like civilisation, culture, cultural iden­ tity, immigrant identity, stereotypes, and prejudice. It also became neces­ sary to look into the different ways in which the concepts of integration, multiculturalism, and interculturalism deal with the Cultural Other and with peaceful co-existence. The second day was devoted to theoretical lectures, which were explic­ itly linked to the experience-based workshops, focusing on issues that had emerged from these workshops. The lectures embraced the trainees' lived experiences and the experiential knowledge they had already expressed, en­ riched with elements of theory. The aim was to start off from the narrations dealing with classroom reality, in order to reach a more theoretical discus­ sion, also drawing from contemporary scientific dialogue. The seminar's lec­ tures thus dealt with identity and otherness, stereotypes and prejudice, the concept of civilisation and culturalism, and issues regarding multicultural­ ism, multilingualism and bilingualism. The link with theory helped educa­ tors challenge a number of conceptions that were latent in the educators' discourse and well established in common thinking, often forming the basis for the creation of thoughtless generalisations and stereotypes. When designing the theoretical lectures, we sought to strike a balance between practice and theory. On the one hand, educators were to familiar­

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ise themselves with elements of academic knowledge, not through "expert" monologues, but through lectures that were linked to their school lives and offered information they could utilise to obtain more knowledge and become better able to explain the realities they experienced. On the other hand, the link to their daily routines was not to limit the lectures to barren empiricism, which would have occurred should the lectures have provided educators with ready-to-implement solutions or practical guidelines. Current approaches to cultural and linguistic diversity in education in Greece have been criticized (cf. Damanakis 1997) for being focused on the treatment of students with "a specific educational, social or cultural iden­ tity" (Law 2413/1996), something which obviously deviates from the aims of Intercultural Pedagogy. Thus one of our basic goals was to clarify the differences between multiculturalism and interculturalism, and to explain what a true intercultural pedagogy would aim for. We particularly wanted to draw the trainees' attention to the essentialist notion of culture inherent in the multiculturalist approach (Vermeulen & Slijper, 2000, Dafermakis, 2007). Educators, along with the general public, seem to consider immigrant students simply as others, as carriers of their parents' cultures, and fail (or refuse) to see that these young people usually form a complex identity as a result of socialization in their ethnic communities and the host country. An­ other issue we raised was the preoccupation with the "exotic" folk aspect of the other's culture as a token of respect for his/her culture (Hollins, 1996), since this is another common mistake in teachers' handling of diversity in their classes. On the third day, these theoretical contemplations were transformed into school projects/interventions (products of combining theory and prac­ tice), with various groups of educators attempting to implement them in their schools with their students. The design and implementation of school projects was included as a training process because it offers participant edu­ cators the opportunity to utilise their experiences and associate learning with their interests and professional lives, by actively participating in research­ based learning (Dedouli, 2005, pp. 417-424).

2.3 Projects implemented in schools At the school level, actions were based for the most part on the hard work, imagination, and inspiration of the educators and their students. Having in­ tegrated into their own educational frameworks the ideas and good practices with which they had become familiar during the seminar meetings, educa­

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tors were a source of inspiration to students, who joined them in the call­ ing to become "translators of civilisations". The participating educators and students were called to make "foreign" culture both visible and familiar by developing and implementing specific actions (mostly large-scale projects, like Folk Theatre in Countries of the World, a leaflet with texts and pictures of folk theatre from the homelands of a high school's students; the intercul­ tural festival Love is our Homeland, which featured displays devoted to the civilisations of various countries and songs acted out by the students; and the theatre play Brecht and Hitler). While implementing projects, educators also engaged in documenting their actions by keeping a research journal, ad­ ministering questionnaires to their students, and interviewing them. In the third stage of the seminar, participating educators and their stu­ dents presented descriptions of the projects they had implemented at their schools. In this stage participating educators had the opportunity to assess their actions and present them to the educational community and the general public - thus transforming themselves from trainees to trainers. The semi­ nar's third stage was completed with discussion between participating educa­ tors and the training group. This discussion aimed at assessing the seminar and was deeply reflective. The educators spoke of the changes they observed in their discourse and behaviour towards foreign and Greek students, as well as changes in the discourse and behaviour of the students who participated in the projects. These changes will be commented upon in the following sec­ tion of our paper, as part of the overall evaluation of the seminar.

3.

Evaluation of the seminar

3.1 Aims of the evaluation The evaluation of the seminar aimed not only at discovering whether the goals set initially had been met but also at exploring how participants had felt about the whole experience. As a result, we conducted a multi-layered evaluation that used a variety of data and approaches. More specifically, we were interested in investigating the following issues: (1) How did participants feel about the seminar's duration and content, the fact that experience-based workshops were combined with lectures deliv­ ered by specialists, and that they were asked to design and carry out smaller­ or wider-scale projects in their schools.

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(2) Did participants think they had benefited from the seminar at a theo­ retical level, at the level of teaching practices, or on a more general (cogni­ tive / affective) level. (3) In what ways had the projects carried out in the participants' schools affected the students (Greeks and foreigners), the teachers, and the school as a whole.

3.2 Data and methods Data on these issues were collected from the participating teachers' discours­ es not only regarding the organisation of the seminar but other relevant is­ sues. As the seminar was part of a larger intercultural education project that was being implemented in different parts of Greece at the same time, the central management unit required that all participants complete an evaluation sheet at the end of each of the first two seminar rounds. The first task on the sheets invited participants to evaluate the seminar on a five-point scale. Next, participants were presented with a six-point Likert scale for rating six seminar components. The next part of the evaluation sheet comprised open­ ended questions that asked participants what they thought they had gained with regard to theoretical knowledge, teaching practices, and gains on a more personal level. Finally, participants were invited to offer comments and to make suggestions for improvement. Although the data from the evaluation form would have provided us with sufficient information on the participants' degree of satisfaction with various aspects of the seminar, we opted for a more diversified and thorough ap­ proach. Accordingly we gathered additional data as follows: • Five interviews conducted in December 2007 by Eleni Katsarou and par­ ticipants of the first round of the seminar (the aim was to explore how individual teachers had experienced their participation so far) • Tape recording of the final discussion which took place in June 2008, where both trainers and trainees reported on their seminar experiences. • Notes taken of discussions which took place during the first two rounds of the seminar, in which participants exchange personal experiences and views, plan and discuss their projects, question and argue about issues which lie at the heart of the seminar's topic.

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To extract meaning from the raw data we opted for qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2000; Miles & Huberman, 1994) in the form of Thematic Analysis (Ayres, 2008, p. 867).

3.3 The trainees' perceptions of the seminar Based on quantitative data alone, our subjects' degree of satisfaction ap­ peared to be quite high. After the first seminar round, twelve out of the twenty-six participants (46%) mentioned in the evaluation sheets that they were satisfied "very much" with the seminar, whereas 50% said they were "quite" satisfied with it. After the second seminar round, 12 of 18 partici­ pants opted for the first answer (66.6%), whereas one third said they were "quite" satisfied. The evaluations based on the six-point Likert scale yielded equally posi­ tive results. The mean ratings by the 26 participants of the first round were as follows: 5.44 for the composition of the trainers' team, 5.63 for the com­ position of the trainees' team, 5.77 for the coordination, 5.80 for the organi­ sation, 5.30 for the comprehensiveness of the content, 5.50 for the useful­ ness of the content, 5.69 for the cohesion between the units, and 5.57 for the implementation of the seminar. After the second round, participants were even more enthusiastic; 10 of the 18 trainees rated all components with 6, which undoubtedly gives a rather satisfactory picture. However, we believe that the qualitative evaluation we attempted is of far more interest. The data pertained to the trainees' answers to the open­ ended questions, the five interviews, and the individual accounts offered by the participants during the final group discussion. Here we present a selec­ tive summary of their views on the issues mentioned in the beginning of this paper. With regard to the structure of the seminar, we notice that the trainees often mention the workshops as something they enjoyed very much, mainly because they then had opportunities to exchange ideas and experiences with fellow practitioners but also because what took place in the workshops al­ lowed them to better understand the theory presented afterwards by the in­ structors/trainers. When answering the question "what have you gained in terms of theoretical knowledge from this seminar? ", the large majority of the participants replied that they gained a lot through the lectures delivered by the four instructors. Some of them said that they heard things completely new to them, others were thankful for the clarification of terms and notions which had been relatively vague until then. However, although it was impor­

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tant to us that the trainees develop a thorough understanding of basic terms and notions in the areas of intercultural education and bilingualism, this was but one of our goals. Equally, if not more important, was the goal of encour­ aging the trainees to become involved in project work in their own schools. We were happy to see that quite a few teachers mentioned this as a very positive feature of the seminar. Nonetheless, answers on the evaluation sheets also indicated that many teachers joined the seminar hoping to hear concrete advice and specific solutions for the problems they faced in their classes. Some of them even mentioned the lack of such practical solutions as the reason for their be­ ing "quite" rather than "completely" satisfied with the seminar at the end of the first round. However, when answering the question "what have you gained in terms of teaching practices? ", the large majority of trainees men­ tioned that they obtained many ideas they could use in their teaching and class management. To a certain extent their answers reflected the theoretical issues that were discussed and elaborated upon, especially after the second round. For instance, some trainees referred to ways of managing diversity in the classroom which focus on treating apparent learning difficulties and encouraging students' inclusion by making foreign students' cultures, talents, and personalities more prominent. Some teachers made explicit reference to having learned how to deal with diversity by respecting the individual iden­ tities of everyone in a class, not just children born to foreign parents or chil­ dren from cultural minorities These teachers seem to have understood how unfortunate it is to ascribe distinct and inalienable cultural characteristics to students on the basis of their ethnic origin alone, and hopefully they will avoid practices which propagate such views. When the trainees answered the question "what have you gained on a personal level? ", almost half of the answers referenced immigrant students ­ which demonstrated a distinct rise in awareness among this group of teach­ ers: • My viewpoint regarding foreign students changed. I was never a racist but now I have had the chance to think about many things as well. CBS)l • I've had the opportunity to reflect on whether I had been trying hard enough to make myself understood by these kids. CAlS) • It really set me thinking about my own behaviour with regard to foreign students. CB16). The letters refer to whether the questionnaire was collected after the first (A) or the sec­ ond (B) stage of the seminar and the numbers to the random numbering of the evaluation sheets. The answers/comments refer to various parts of the evaluation sheets and have been in fact codified in more elaborate ways, but for presentation purposes we have opted for a less complicated schema.

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There were, however, almost as many answers in which the participants did not make specific reference to diversity in the school but referred mainly to their professional development or to their own intellectual enrichment: • 1 enriched my knowledge, combined my practices, and broadened my thinking. (B2) • 1 gained a lot of things which will help me enrich my role as a teacher. (A13) • [1 gained} a feeling of usefulness and the satisfaction that we can actu­ ally get things done. (A18).

3.4 The impact of the seminar on the participating schools, their teachers, and their students As far as the school projects are concerned, we were interested in the train­ ees' accounts of the impacts they had on their schools, students, colleagues, and themselves personally. The main findings concerning foreign students were that in most cases these students embraced the opportunities they were given to display elements of their own culture and participated far more ac­ tively in the usual school activities. Their involvement not only led to higher self-esteem but apparently had a corollary effect: some of their teachers ­ even though they did not take part in the seminar - were impressed by the quality of their work and their commitment to the task, and changed their views of these students. The following extract from the final discussion is quite telling: I saw that they feel this immense need that we reach out for them [euh] and I believe that the end product was completely theirs. I mean, after a certain point it was their enthusiasm that kept us going . . .. And I think that some colleagues treat these kids differently now [euh ] because when they saw the little book they couldn't believe that some students could have such results. [Nonnally] these students are present but absent in the classroom. (Teacher L, School B). In other words, the projects seem to have contributed considerably to the im­ migrant students' empowerment (Cummins, 2003) by giving them a chance to prove what they can actually accomplish when a school activity has real meaning for them. In the same vein, some of the trainees seem to have experienced a change of attitudes towards immigrant students. During the first two stages, the dis­ cussions revealed that the predominant discourse surrounding these students

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was based on the "students at risk" notion. Teachers talked about how they "needed help" in order to adjust, to integrate, to learn Greek, and so on ­ but seldom mentioned any of the students' accomplishments or potential strengths (and if so, it was to point to an exception that proved the rule). This image of the "weak" student was successfully challenged throughout the seminar in many ways, something which apparently resulted in a change of attitudes among at least some of the participants. The following extract from the final discussion shows this quite vividly: Now, I don't think I remember much of the theory but, as far as prac­ tice goes, yeah, I've changed. I used to think ... Well, I wasn't a rac­ ist in the "ugly" sense of the word, but I would call myself a racist in the "nice" sense of the word. That is, my idea of these kids was like "Oh, the poor kid!" - looking down on them, you know, viewing them with pity, and not the way I should view them - which is go­ ing to be different from now on. . .. I mean, I don't think I treat these kids in a racist way, and I make sure their classmates don't treat them like that anymore, but I used to do it in a different way, and I do it differently now. I have a different approach to them now. Not like "Oh, the poor soul, who's been through so many hardships, who's been persecuted, etcetera." He's here now, that's it. Yeah, I care about the hardships he's been through but now that he's here he is a hu­ man being equal to me. He may not speak Greek, but hey, do I speak Albanian? I don't know if you understand the difference in my ap­ proach. (Teacher P, School A, final discussion). With regard to the foreign students' involvement in the projects it was also evident in the teachers' accounts that a few students refused to take part be­ cause, apparently, they did not like the idea of standing out as carriers of a different culture or simply because they felt they did not have something different to contribute. In this study almost all such cases involved students of Albanian origin. I tried to do something small with one class during one period. There were two Albanian students and one student from the Netherlands in this class. The idea was to gather in the school library and search for Christmas customs, songs, or recipes from other countries. Everyone was interested except the Albanians. They told me that they've got nothing special in their country. Their reaction was huge. Finally, the girl brought me a piece of paper with some Christmas customs writ­ ten on it, which were exactly the same as ours. (Teacher S, School A, February discussion).

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This kind of behaviour is indicative of the complex nature of identity con­ struction and identity negotiation in the school context, issues which the seminar obviously sought to address. The fact that Greek students (but also immigrant students of various backgrounds) hold negative views and stereo­ types of their foreign classmates certainly does not help their integration and free expression of their identity. Some of the teachers' accounts were quite vivid. In the following excerpt, the teacher reports what happened when she came up with the idea of celebrating the beginning of the Christmas holi­ days with an Albanian cake instead of a Greek one (in the school where she worked immigrant students amounted to 23% and most of them were Albanians). So, an Albanian student brought us a recipe and when a colleague told some students "You know, at Christmas we'll have an Albanian cake", a Greek student, whose father employs Albanians and whose business depends on immigrant labour, tUD1ed to her and said "We won't eat any filthy Albanian cakes!" (Teacher L, School B, Inter­ view). In the next quotation another teacher remembers what happened when he and his colleagues let their students know that the school was going to hold a multicultural festival, where "portraits" of various countries would be pre­ sented. We only had trouble with regard to the Albanians. When we told [the class] about the project, some kids started calling names their Albanian classmates, while until then they seemed to get along fine! They had a terrible row in one class! Some kids even started crying! (Teacher N, School C, February discussion). On the whole, the Greek students' involvement in the projects was minimal when it took place on a voluntary basis (School B), and did not seem to have had a large impact on their attitudes towards their foreign classmates when there was no question of choice (School C). At School B, however, relations seem to have changed to a certain extent. According to the teacher who was running the project: We discovered that our relationships with the children had improved but also the relationships between the children. (Teacher L, School B, February discussion).

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With regard to the impact the projects had on the whole school, we can safe­ ly say that they helped bring to the surface problems of racism and preju­ dice, which the teachers thought did not exist in their schools. As a result, the seminar was an important step towards awareness-raising among partici­ pants and non-participants alike as the following quotations show: Hmm, yeah, I was taken by surprise when I realised that in our school things were a little bit worse than I thought concerning "our" students' attitudes towards foreigners. I believed that, as our school is a small provincial school, there wouldn't be any racism .... But there it was. It was just under the carpet, and it became obvious, as my colleague mentioned, when we started talking in the classrooms about taking up countries and doing research about them. (Teacher B, School C, final discussion). All in all, one of the purposes of this seminar depended on individual teach­ ers, as we aimed at setting the ground for the creation of a critical mass of sensitive and informed practitioners who could eventually make the dif­ ference in their respective schools. However, this focus led us to underes­ timate - and to ultimately neglect - the importance of the context. To be more specific, at the launch of the project we did not pursue a policy of cultivating good relationships with the school headteachers, an omission that had important repercussions for the outcome of the seminar. In one case the headteacher withheld the information concerning the upcoming seminar and never informed the rest of the teachers. In another, we failed to dissuade some trainees from dropping out after the first stage of the seminar because of a misunderstanding concerning our goals, simply because we did not have direct access to their headteacher and could not explain ourselves via her, the person in authority. At any rate, during the evaluation process it became quite obvious that teachers take into serious consideration the limitations posed by the educational context. It looms large in their minds even when they try to embark on innovations - or perhaps especially when they do so ­ and seems to have a direct bearing on their efforts.

4.

Conclusions

Reflecting on the role of the participating teachers in the framework of this particular seminar, we can say that the implementation of the principles of action research led us to:

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• Treat trainees as lifelong learners who never cease to develop profession­ ally and who learn through researching their practices, their educational values, and the alternative solutions which may come out of those. • Ensure that trainees are actively engaged and involved in the training process by giving them "voice", by designing and implementing projects, by reflecting on their practices, and by researching their own actions. • Promote collaborative action and partnerships between trainers and train­ ees on the one hand, and among trainees on the other. The teachers who participated in the seminar appear to have accepted these roles quite satisfactorily. However, their ability to engage in critical reflec­ tion seemed to be lacking, they did not manage to analyse critically how political and social agents determine their educational practices. They did not turn into "transformative intellectuals" (Giroux, 1988) who could accept responsibility for transforming the goals and conditions of school life and society in general. However, it should be noted that the design of the semi­ nar did not create the necessary conditions for the educators to think criti­ cally about the restrictions imposed by society on pedagogical practice. This was basically the result of our underestimating the educational context that characterised the seminar. Nonetheless, the teachers who participated in the seminar did achieve personal change to a certain degree. This may not have led to direct transfor­ mations in schools but it created cells of (smaller) changes within a frame­ work of consciousness of the educator's social responsibility. In our view, teachers who find ways of collaborating and reflect on the social conse­ quences of their actions, denaturalising as much as possible everything they have learned to consider natural and therefore unchangeable, are moving to­ wards becoming agents of a more progressive and democratic education and society.

References Androussou, A. (2005). (in Greek) Pos se lene? Diergasies mias epimorfotikis paremvasis sti meionotiki ekpaidefsi. [What is your name? Processes of a teacher-training intervention concerning the education of the Muslim minor­ ity]. Athens, Greece: Gutenberg. Argyris, C. & Schon, D. (1988/89). Participatory action research and action sci­ ence compared. American Behavioral Scientist, 32(5), 612-623. Ayres, L. (2008). Thematic coding and analysis. In L.M. Given (Ed.), The Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods (pp. 867-868). Los Angeles, CA: Sage.

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