To Greek language educators in diasporic classrooms

The initiative “Voices of the Other Greek America” aims to produce insights, perspectives, and empirical knowledge “hiding in plain sight” across the community’s interior social life. It invites us to listen, discuss in the open, and take action to address the violence of exclusions and the devaluing of non-normative others. In other words, to generate interventions confronting situations of inequality.

The second essay in this initiative, Anastasia Panagakos’ “A Letter to the Other Greek America” is also relevant to Greek language and culture educators. It offers ethnographic information which raises the all-important question about the kind of educational system Greek America envisions for its youth.

She writes,

“To those third and fourth gen Greek Americans who were told they weren’t ‘Greek enough’ yet continued to attend adult Greek school even when the daskalo told them that all the studying and practice in the world would never make them sound Greek, let alone be Greek.”

This practice of exclusion clearly connects with the problematic ideology of “authentic” Greekness, an ideology of identity producing hierarchies, devaluing and injuring multiethnic and multiracial young people, or students who do not conform to a teacher’s normative understanding of Greek identity. I am not aware of any ethnographic study which documents––responsibly and independently––the various ethnic, gender, national and other ideologies operating in the language and culture classrooms of the parishes and the communities. I hope it exists, if so please let me know.

But based on my personal experiences and conversations with teachers and trustworthy parents, there are damning situations: instances when teachers reproduce traditional gender roles; stress ethnoreligious versions of identity at the expense of secular arts; speak about the “Greek race” and its exceptional attributes, reproducing ethnocentrism. Students bullying classmates with same-sex parents. Parishioners whispering about young Greek Americans being terrified by vitriolic political views within Parishes produced by individuals with authority about Others.

Panagakos’s letter could also be read as a letter to all those involved in the diasporic educational system: superintendents, teachers, specialists offering training seminars in language (and inevitably cultural) education, parents, community leaders.

The ethical and political (1) stakes are enormous, given that they connect with the making of the diasporic next generation––its cultural and civic values.

This urgency involves the teachers of language I wish to repeat. As we all know, language teaching is not a neutral enterprise. Language works as a powerful vehicle communicating values and ways of being in the world as a culturally textured person and citizen –– and this is what we are talking about here, the making of Greek American (and Greek Australian, and Greek South African etc.) citizens.

The cultural texts that educators chose to assign for language learning are saturated with ideology. The question is not merely how we teach language but also what readings we employ for this purpose.
Ultimately, as many of us keep repeating with little to no response, the conversation is about the various modalities of Greek identity. As early as 1984, Robert A. Georges wrote about “The Many Ways of Being Greek.” There is the diasporic modality where cultural mixing and unexpected identity assemblages do not conform to official narratives of a single/true/superior/genuine (often seen as Helladic) Greek identity.
Educators ought to open themselves to the diasporic realities in the communities and acknowledge diasporic theorizations of identity. Can we afford to keep working with parochial perspectives of Greekness as omogeneia when it results to this painful situation?

“To all the non-Greek youth who love Greek folk dancing but never get to lead a dance, because leadership is reserved for those with a pedigree going back to some obscure xorio in Macedonia. And yet you still entered the dance with your heart, soul, and body even when the person next to you didn’t want to hold your hand” (Panagakos).

The routine everyday violence that excludes and injures. And others swept under the rag of the model ethnic, one can imagine. Panagakos recognizes the need to empower those subjected to it on a regular basis. The responsibility of the educators is enormous.

There is available scholarship on achieving isotimia in our classrooms and on pedagogies based on theories of diasporic identity formation. But so often, so disappointingly so often, these aspects are sidelined in initiatives for language preservation.

Given the stakes, a wide-ranging conversation on the ethics and politics of early diasporic education is due, well, yesterday…

Note

1. Political in the manner I define it here.

December 23, 2025