Social Pedagogy under Very Difficult Conditions: The Case of the Multicultural School of Athens

Abstract

This paper presents social pedagogy under very difficult conditions in the Multicultural School of Athens. More specifically, the paper introduces the Participatory Transformative Pedagogy model developed to train our students to overcome conflicts and to learn to coexist, communicate and gradually to participate to common actions and finally to collaborate effectively. Our efforts aim to introduce cooperation among students that have come from war-torn countries, have suffered a lot and finally meet, in the same school, students ‘responsible for their suffering’; this is the environment of the first multicultural School of Athens.

Participatory Transformative Pedagogy (PaTraPe), is a promising approach for making students develop relationships as the only way to deal with the demanding requirements of their classes that value cooperation. When sustainable relationships have been established, social pedagogy methods emerge. The aim of our model is to let a ‘social pedagogical wind’ blow in the Multicultural School of Athens, so that effective communication, community collaboration and social cohesion could be established.