Crossing Cultures through the Intangible Heritage: an Educational Programme about Migration in Greece

Abstract

This paper presents the preliminary results of a research programme on the social and cultural impact of migration into Greece conducted on the Greek island of Skiathos. The programme involved educational activities which were based on the collection and analysis of oral material. A school class of eleven years old students, both native and immigrants, was asked to search into their family history and bring to light heirlooms and related narrations which represented oral traditions in their countries. In a first phase of the project the artifacts and the accompanying oral material were used as stimuli for discussion between native and immigrant children in the class. Subsequently, the collected tangible and intangible material was displayed in a temporary museum exhibition entitled ‘With a suitcase full of dreams’. The perceptions which all the groups of children, participants and visitors, native and immigrants had about migration before and after the educational program were recorded and analyzed in relation to the impact of the oral traditions on them. The results of the study are discussed with respect to the new communicative role which institutions of formal and informal learning could undertake due to the multiple use of intangible heritage in the approach of subtle social subjects such as migration. Among the most important findings was the fact that children who took part in the project and visited the exhibition realized that through discovering other people’s culture they could develop their knowledge of unknown aspects of their own culture and history. Maria Vlachaki Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Preschool Education, University of Thessaly, Greece 94 Educational programme about migration in Greece