The Turkish Language Classes began in the third phase of the Project, in November 2006. They are intended for teachers who are native Greek speakers and provide them with the opportunity to learn Turkish. Parallel to these classes, the Project also organizes seminars to “acquaint” such teachers with the Turkish language. These seminars aim at helping them tackle the communication difficulties with those pupils who are native Turkish speakers and cannot (yet) understand Greek. In the seminars the instructors present the basic differences between the Greek language and the Turkish language. Once the teachers understand these differences, they can also understand the special difficulties that the aforementioned pupils experience while learning Greek, and can therefore adjust their teaching accordingly.
The classes have had an enormous appeal. In the school year 2011-12 they were attended by 537 teachers.
As the feedback from the teachers who attend the classes and the seminars has proven, these efforts to understand are not limited to just learning a language. The active contact with a language that expresses the cultural essence of a group that is different from “ours,” and the study of that language’s particular features result in coming closer to our next-door neighbor who happens to speak a different language. The difficulties in establishing contact that stem from speaking different languages can then be explained, demythologized, and become “comprehensible,” and are no longer a cause for distancing and marginalization.
The classes function like a multicultural interaction. Learning the language is accompanied by getting to know the “other” and his/her linguistic wealth. Furthermore, the desire of teachers to learn Turkish works positively for their Minority pupils too, because they see that their teachers, who struggle to teach them Greek, also want to learn their pupils’ language. Learning the language gains a more general dimension of communication and cross-cultural contact. It also functions, semantically, as a declaration of respect for, and acceptance of, the “other’s distinctness. This effort is seen by many minority members as a real desire for communication that is not limited to rhetorical statements.
In the school year 2012-2013, the classes take place in the KESPEMs of Xanthi, of Komotini, and of Alexandroupolis. They are attended by 684 teachers.
