No abstract

Education is a basic tool for the empowerment of national identity and for the promotion of certain ideological choices. School provides new generations with the "official knowledge," which arises after a series of social and political controversies that in many cases lead to a new kind of cultural wars. School history is a major influence on the development of students' views with respect to convictions about democracy and the way and manner they confront "others," concerning nationality, sex, sexual orientation and special needs. The aim of this paper is to investigate the new sixth grade's (pupils, 11years-old) history "package" (textbook, workbook and teacher's book) which was introduced during the 2012-2013 school year and was used for teaching in the Greek nation's territory. The researchers, under the lens of critical pedagogy, using content analysis as a basic tool, investigated the way the "others," the "different" ones were presented in this didactic package.

Politicians and academics from various European countries dealing with the issues of the Roma strongly believe that education can help Roma individuals and groups social integration and improve their living conditions. Therefore, a series of policies measures and programs have been set up to target the educational integration of pupils of Roma origins. What is missing from these actions are the views of Roma themselves. This exactly is the aim of our paper: to give a voice to those parents of Roma origins, whose children go to school or ought to go to school. Our study is based on a qualitative research where participants are individuals of Roma origins living in the suburbs of Thessaloniki (Greece). According to our finding, it seems that Roma parents' that contributed to our research approaches and attitudes broke down some basic and well-established myths about education.

The aim of this paper is to search out the educational problems that students of Roma origin confront, especially those coming from institutional arrangements and laws. Toward this end, we undertook a content analysis of all of the textbooks currently used in Greek primary education. Our research showed that, despite their improvement, the "new" textbooks continue to treat Greeks as the center of interest in education. The weak presence of Roma in textbooks renders the imperative need for a curriculum which explores issues of social inequality and injustice; a curriculum which will set forth the problems, activities, and accomplishments of all portions of the population, independent of class, ethnic or national origin, sex, sexual orientation or special needs.

Abstract"Discipline" is a notion which is related to military and police organization and structures and thus it is possible to cause negative predisposition to a number of people. We use the term discipline in quotes, because we could not find a more suitable, in order to describe the body of measures, acts and incidents we deal in the research we present here. "Discipline" in classroom and in school is an issue which concerns educators, parents and guardians, as well as politicians in many countries. Policies and practices of "discipline" in schools are associated with social and political factors and events. Massive, formal, education as it is structured since it has been established, premises a specific framework in order to be operative. A number of rules and routines are necessary to apply if a school and a classroom want to achieve their cognitive, emotional, and social goals. In this paper, we present data of a research relating to the exploration of teachers' attitudes, beliefs and practices concerning issues of school "discipline" in Greek schools. Our research strategy is Case Study and its main technique is in-depth semi-structured interview. Our main findings display what teachers who participate in our research consider as causes of school discipline problems; how they relate these problems with wider social reality pupils face; how their positive and negative behaviors contribute to pupils behaviors; techniques they use to prevent and resolve "discipline" problems and how they evaluate their basic studies and retraining in order to manage their classrooms.