Constadina Charalambous

This study presents a professional development (PD) program designed within the “SciArt—Promoting 21st-century skills through an inclusive STEAM approach to Cultural Heritage” project, which aims to prepare teachers to implement an inclusive, inquiry-based STEAM approach in their classrooms. The approach, developed collaboratively by academics from the arts, sciences, and cultural sectors across Cyprus, Greece, and Portugal, integrates archaeometric methods with cultural heritage to support identity exploration and inclusive pedagogy. The study explores how participating teachers evaluated the PD program, how it influenced their self-efficacy in applying inclusive, inquiry-based STEAM approaches, and how teacher trainers experienced its implementation across different national contexts. The study utilizes both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection, comprising questionnaires and a focus group. Results show high teacher satisfaction and increased self-efficacy across four thematic areas: inquiry-based learning, science-heritage integration, cultural identity exploration, and use of multimodality for inclusion. Teacher trainers described the process as demanding but professionally enriching, emphasizing the role of interdisciplinary collaboration. These findings highlight the potential of well-supported, theoretically grounded PD programs to build capacity for inclusive STEAM education, while also revealing structural barriers that must be addressed for wider implementation.

This article discusses the role of affect in diasporic belonging, especially when a community is affected by conflict, tracing the ways it circulates in and through discourses and interactions across different generations. Drawing on a linguistic ethnographic project on Greek-Cypriot diaspora, and following recent calls for paying more attention to affect in sociolinguistic analyses, it analyses the communicative dynamics of diasporic affect . Understanding diasporic affect as the circulation and communication of affects/emotions between individuals within a diasporic space, which is—to an extent—regulated by community norms, we analyze the discursive and communicative mechanisms participants used to navigate emotional norms about collective memory, conflict, and diasporic identifications. At the same time, we show how these mechanisms are productive of subjectivities that could either reinforce, disrupt, or redefine these norms. In doing so, we discuss the political implications of diasporic affect and the rules governing its expression and enactment in discourses and communicative practices. (Affect, conflict, diaspora, emotions, interaction, belonging)*

Situated in the conflict-affected Cypriot context, this paper aims to explore the affective dimension of nationalism as manifested in the representations of national ‘others’ in a Greek-Cypriot secondary school. Drawing on data from a linguistic ethnographic study looking at the negotiations of ethnic and intercultural education discourses, we focus on a series of classroom interactions discussing a poem written by a Turkish-Cypriot poet and how this text was interpreted by Greek-Cypriot students in focus group discussions. Our analysis shows how Turks and Turkish-Cypriots are affectively construed as national ‘others’, perpetuating dichotomies of ‘we’ and ‘they’. We also discuss the ambivalent feelings the particular poem brought, challenging hegemonic representations and feelings attached to those. The paper concludes with implications for education policies and practices.

Set in the peak of the so-called “European Migrant Crisis” and situated in the conflict-affected Cypriot context, this article examines Greek-Cypriot High School students’ representations of Syrian refugees as they were debated in classroom discussion. Drawing on ethnographic research that took place in 2016 in a Lower Secondary School in Cyprus, we analyse the interactional dynamics through which ‘bordering’ processes took place, showing how different types of borders were (re)-negotiated and re-instated in the classroom. Considering the sociohistorical context of Cyprus, we also investigate how teachers’ and students’ understandings of borders and ethnic identity-making were reshaped by local discourses. Our analysis shows that teachers, despite prompting students to take an active stance towards Syrian refugees as part of a peacebuilding stance, mobilised ethnocentric discourses that victimised refugees, portraying them as someone whose agency is taken away from, and for whom we can speak and act. Approaching borders as social constructs, we show how the national border separating “us” and “them” was construed and reaffirmed in such discussions, and how the representation of refugees as ‘the victim’ functioned as a way of narrating the ‘cultural fantasies’ of the national self.

This paper focuses on political socialization in a conflict-affected context and looks at how young Greek-Cypriot learners of Turkish debated political positionings and engaged with political and conflict ideologies usually seen as part of the adult world. It draws on data from two linguistic ethnographic projects (2006–2009; 2012–2015) that analysed classroom observations and recordings of controversial Turkish-as-Foreign-Language (MFL) lessons in a Greek-Cypriot Secondary School. The paper employs the concept of liminality, which has been traditionally linked with transition, describing an in-between space, where normal rules, conventions and relations are suspended or transgressed, carrying the potential for the creation of new structures and creative performance. Moving away from romantised approaches to liminality as liberating from structures, the analysis looks “inside liminality” for alternative or enduring patterns and conventions and reveals the affordances and limitations of liminal-like experiences in education settings, and their potential role in young people’s political socialization. Approaching children/teenagers as youthful political agents, the paper analyses first the multiple liminal social and political spaces that young learners of Turkish occupied; then, it focuses particularly on an interactional event, when the usual lesson structures and procedures of the language lesson were suspended, looking at how students, in this liminal-like moment, mobilized knowledge and recourses to form and debate political subjectivities and dominant political ideologies. The analysis points to the resilience of conflict discourses and discourses of othering but it also reveals youngsters’ attempts to articulate a political discourse that introduces new discursive frames for the discussion of social and political relations in a post-conflict manner. This has important implications for young people’s political socialization in conflict-affected contexts, revealing the role that language plays in this process.

Focusing on the role that language and language education can play in peace-building, this paper examines everyday practice through the lens of linguistic ethnography. It investigates Greek Cypriot teenagers learning Turkish, the language of the (former) enemy, and it asks: how were the Turkish language’s associations with violent conflict handled in the practices and institutional organisation of schooling, and how far and in what ways can we say that the Turkish lessons contributed to peace-building? Our findings address the institutional structures and routines of secondary schooling, pedagogic and interactional practices in class, and the links between school and home. The paper concludes with a discussion of what this study might contribute to the notion of ‘de-securitisation’ and to research on ‘hybrid’ and ‘everyday peace’.

This chapter draws on two ethnographic studies in Greek-Cypriot schools, focusing on immigrant children with Turkish as L1, a language that has been stigmatized by a history of conflict both in the Greek-Cypriot context and in many of the children’s own communities and historical trajectories. Analysing children’s silences and self-censoring of their Turkish-speakerness, it examines how language ideologies and discourses of (in)security and conflict may pose serious obstacles for enacting translanguaging as a socially just pedagogy.

Living Book—Augmenting Reading for Life, a three-year EU-funded Erasmus + project (September 2016–August 2019), exploited the affordances of augmented reality (AR) and other emerging technologies in order to address the underachievement of European youth in reading skills. The program developed an innovative approach that empowers teachers from upper primary and lower secondary schools (ages 9–15) to ‘augment’ students’ reading experiences through combining offline activities promoting reading literacy with online experiences of books’ ‘virtual augmentation’ and with social dynamics. Various professional learning activities were designed within the project, aimed at strengthening European teachers’ profile and competences in effectively integrating the Living Book approach into their classroom activities, and in dealing with diversified groups of learners, particularly pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds. Teachers also received training in how to involve parents, and particularly those from disadvantaged and/or migrant backgrounds, in proreading activities to back the overall Living Book strategy at home. The current article provides an overview of the main phases of the Living Book project implementation, and of the program’s key activities and outputs. It also outlines the content and structure of the ‘Augmented Teacher’ and ‘Augmented Parent-Trainer’ training courses developed within the project. Finally, it reports on the main insights gained from the pilot testing of the courses and the follow-up classroom experimentation that took place in the project partner countries.