On the other hand, there is limited discussion in the United State about a pedagogy centered on diasporic material. To the best of knowledge, and I hope I am mistaken, we have not been particularly keen in systematically thinking about this prospect.
I do not believe we have a good sense of the scale of interest among educators on the topic.
An interest is emerging, though, and this talk aims to contribute to the nascent conversation.
Our relative inattention contrasts with the cultural realties of our classrooms where the immigrant past and the ethnic present are ubiquitous. Think of the multiple linguistic registers at work. One is Grenglish, the result of the exposure of the students to two languages; in circulation are vocabularies and grammars of regional dialects connected with family histories; the linguistic repertoire of students includes passages of koine due to exposure to the Greek Orthodoxy liturgy and Sunday school; probably one could detect in their speaking traces of Greek as it was spoken in the 1950s and 1960s. If we were to include Cypriot students, they would have contributed additional layers of linguistic diversity.
Our classroom are exciting spaces of heteroglossias.
The immigrant past and the ethnic present are also present in the memories, experiences, and social imagination of our students. There are family stories and histories, there are feelings and perceptions about growing up and living as a bicultural person.
If this is the case, if indeed immigration and ethnicity is everywhere in the classroom why we do not then inquire about their place in our curricula. As educators we now recognize that the identities and interests which the students bring with them in the classroom matter in connection to the content of our courses and the pedagogies we practice. If we agree, this question confronts us: What is the place of their subjectivities in the modern Greek language classroom? In turn, how do engage with these identities?
The prevailing practices in our classrooms connect students with Greece. Their interest in folk and popular culture, their ancestral roots, history, classical heritage, customs and traditions, places them in relation to Greek regions and national culture. The fact that the textual content of our classroom is Greece-centered accommodates this interest. In this respect, the language classroom empowers these identifications.
But we do not know enough on how our heritage students negotiate their biculturalism, how they understand their identities. College students tend to resist narratives that impose an identity on them. Instead, they view themselves as agents in shaping their own identities.
How do we engage these perspectives in the classroom? What material do we assign to enter into conversation with this point of view? Diasporic studies have theorized these issues.
There is an added dimension I must introduce in the discussion. It is an institutional mission by the Panhellenic Scholarship Foundation, an organization for which many of us have served as academic advisors; an organization also that has granted scholarship to many of our students. I quote their mission statement.
“Building a better America through Education and Hellenism is at the core of the Foundation’s mission. In that spirit, we aim to strengthen our civic fabric by supporting Greek American undergraduates as they develop their paideia and become enlightened and engaged citizen.”
The question here is how Greek and Greek American history and culture mediate the making of Greek diasporic citizenship. We notice, obviously, the emphasis is on the future, Greek American becoming in relation to the United States. Is this call relevant to us? If so, how we contribute to it?
Based on all the above, the question I am asking is this one: Are we interested in building on this conversation? Do you find value in expanding the curriculum to diasporic material?
Educators may have their own reasons to object or hesitate to incorporate diasporic topics in the classroom. Such a position merits discussion, which I hope we will be taking up in the Q&A. A major challenge, I believe is the artificial boundary between modern Greek and Greek American studies. Most language educators have been trained in the former and it is this focus that shapes their approach to teaching language and culture. Venturing in Greek American/diasporic history and culture presents significant challenges.
For those of us who are interested in the topic but are not familiar with conversations about the politics and poetics of Greek America and diaspora in general, there are still several routes for the gradual incorporation of diasporic material.
One is to introduce material that have been analyzed by modern Greek studies scholars.
I have in mind Mimika Kranaki’s Philellines, Thanasis Valtinos’ To Synaxari tou Andrea Kordopatis, and certainly the corpus of Vassilis Alexakis. There are the songs of Xenitia, documentaries on George Pelecanos, a crime fiction writer, in English with captions in Greek, translations of Jeffery Eugenides, Christos Tsiolkas. Many texts are available in translation, making them suitable candidates for modules on translation choices. There is visual material and popular culture that place Greek cultural icons such as Karaghiozis in the American context.
A second approach is to include texts that involve bilingualism, translanguaging, and the poetics of linguistic play between Greek and English, including translation.There is also ample material on linguistic play involving anagrams and homophony, which could lead to the discovery of unexpected and playful affinities between Greek and English.
At this juncture, I ought to bring into the conversation our non-heritage students, a diverse and vital demographic that includes international students and those with multiple heritages. Instead of working with the duality of heritage/non-heritage students, I prefer to think of this population in terms of affinities and partial commonalities. Some children of immigrants may bring to the classroom an affinity for the experience of living with bilingual and bicultural realities. Diasporic material can offer resources to engage with issues beyond heritage, including the circumstances leading to socioeconomic mobility, the experience of migration, otherness and belonging, gender, self-representation, the ideological dimensions of identity narratives, ethnic and racial hierarchies, and the poetics of identity and translation.
I close with this thought: Our language classroom is a site of knowledge production about diasporic histories and experiences. This happens in a variety of ways. For their class projects, students often chose to tell family, or personal stories. This includes their interviews with family members. Classes which incorporate the interaction of our students with their peers in Greece, and which include comparison of their experiences, produce an ethnographic treasure trove. In other words, the language classroom is a key place for understanding the “next generation.” We may wish to think collectively about ways to enhance this function and disseminate the results.
Yiorgos Anagnostou
A Workshop on Greek Linguistics. The Laboratory for the Study of the Greek Language. The Ohio State University. April 18, 2026.