The “Voice of Greece” in collaboration with the school of the Greek community of Melbourne broadcast the podcast series “Greek Sounds”.
These are six podcasts that were created with a lot of passion, during the school year 2021 by the students of the third grade of the Greek Community School of Melbourne (City campus). The aim of the series is to enrich the students’ language acquisition through the creative use of digital technologies. The aim is for students to connect with Greek language, culture and history in engaging ways through self-directed application of their reading, writing and speaking skills.
The project was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Clare Hall, Lecturer in Applied Arts in the Faculty of Education at Monash University and with the guidance of the class teacher, philologist Ms. Vassiliki Lampropoulou, under the guidance of the class teacher, Mrs. Vasiliki Lampropoulou. The ultimate goal was to create a series of podcasts that would provide a model teaching approach for other teachers, thus producing viable and realistic Greek-Australian, educational material.
Dr Hall and Monash University chose the Greek Community of Melbourne because of the school’s recognised strengths in language teaching and learning. Many teachers are skilled in producing quality digital materials and creative pedagogies that are guided by rich research on topics of their choice and concern. Among them, the philologist Vasiliki Lampropoulou, who undertook to carry out the project, guiding her students in exploring topics related to diversity, racism, bullying, food traditions, music, violence in sport, history, cultural heritage, adaptation difficulties, migration, etc. The six Greek children, Christina, Aphrodite, Artemis, Antonia, Vassilis, and Marina express their thoughts, desires, anxieties, aspirations and dreams for the future through the podcast series. And most importantly, the students learned to speak Greek outside of the school in a modern way that they already use in their daily lives.
The Hellenic Community School of Melbourne aspires for the project to be a starting point for collaboration with other schools and educational institutions in the diaspora to produce more collaborative media projects. The podcasts will be used in the Faculty of Education’s pre-service teacher education program at Monash University as an example of creative media arts for contemporary language and cultural education.
The Voice of Greece immediately embraced this effort and broadcast the six podcasts in the student-created “Echoes Hellenic” series on Wednesday, February 9, 2022, as Greeks everywhere celebrate World Greek Language Day: Christina Athanasopoulou, Artemis Galazoula, Aphrodite Ioannidou, Mar.