turkish-greek civic dialogue - AEGEE Europe

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in. As a last activity, the workshop leader directed the participants to work on
projects about subjects they prefer. Two groups were formed to this end to
work on the project’s aims, involvers, contents, partners and posters. At the
end, two festival projects were formed and were presented to the participants
of ‘Rebuilding Communication’ conference. During the workshop, participants
also made gestures and sounds by using their body to express themselves and
they had the chance to learn more about the other participants.
WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS OF
YOUTH’S ROLE IN TURKISH-GREEK DIALOGUE
PROUDLY PRESENT:
LET’S COOK FOR
THE GOOD
A Four-Day Festival which will involve all the NGO’s. There will be workshops
about the Greek and Turkish recipes and there will be discussions about the
history of these foods. As a result there will be a book with all the recipes of
the foods, the money that we will gain from the book will use for the help of
the poor regions of Greece and Turkey. In general we want to bring together
the two countries, to interact on an issue that is very common for them, to
learn about the evolution of the foods after many years and to use a common
issue for a good aim: to help the poor regions!
WAVES’ RELATIONSHIP
“Our team aimed to plan exchanges and a festival”. 1st Exchange: For 1 week
Greek participants would stay at a small town in Turkey, 2 nd Exchange: For 1
week Turkish participants would stay at a small town in Greece. 1 Festival,
10 week performances on a boat. The participants would start from their
countries on boats to meet in the middle of AEGEAN sea, navigate across the
AEGEAN, and then go back again to their countries. During the exchanges,
they would learn about the culture of the “other”. Lessons on Turkish or Greek
dances, music, food. On the boat, they would perform everything they learnt
and additionally professional artists would present some performances.
3. THE ROLE OF EDUCATION IN
TURKISH-GREEK RELATIONS
....................................................... Recep Boztemur, Panagiotis Kontolemos
Workshop Leaders
This workshop focused on the concept of education and the workshop
participants stimulated discussions on the role of education in Turkish-
Greek relations and dialogue, contribution of education in the formation of
stereotypes, the way history is taught in schools and the way it should be
taught, the content of history textbooks, how national policies use history as a
tool, and how to eliminate prejudices orienting from this issue. The workshop
was supported by the statistics presented by the academics. The workshop
participants decided to establish a mailing list to further discuss about their
proposals towards projects advocating objective history writing.
“This workshop on the role of education in Turkish- Greek Civic Dialogue mainly
concentrated on how education might be an ideological tool for national policies
and measures to be taken to diminish the stereotypes formed by national
education policies. On the first day of the workshop, we had a motivating
discussion moderated by AEGEE-Rodos member and archeology student
Panagiotis Kontolemos and Turkish- Greek Civic Dialogue project manager Burcu
Becermen from AEGEE-Ankara, on the role of education in the framework of
Turkish- Greek relations. There were AEGEE members from Athens, Rhodes,
Eskişehir, Izmir, Adana and Ankara branches, participants from Turkish History
Foundation, AFDAG (Anatolian Folk Dance Group), students from Bosphorus and
Istanbul Universities and history teaching staff from Sakarya University.”
MAIN POINTS OF DISCUSSION
- Why we need education and the ideological content of education
- How the content of textbooks effect the formation of stereotypes
through years in each country
- How history is taught and should be taught in Greece and Turkey
- How history is constructed and used as a tool by societies and
ideologies
Rebuilding Communication Association des Etats Généraux des Etudiants de L’Europe