The world has become a global village, but this hasn’t made it any easier for third and fourth generation children of the diaspora to be fluent in Greek. If anything, the ties are slowly slipping away with many Greek community groups finding youth less interested in preserving their heritage let alone their mother tongue.
But at Preston Primary School, an inner northern city of Adelaide, you can see Chinese youngsters bopping along to Greek lyrics to tunes by Notis Sfakianakis and Indian kids dancing little Greek jigs in the corridors.
All this student engagement is thanks to an enthusiastic teacher/musician Simone (Asimina) Karanicolas (aka Thespinis Asimina) from Adelaide who is making Greekness cool for kids, and she’s grabbing their attention through Youtube.
For Ms Karanicolas the idea of incorporating Youtube videos into her teaching happened by accident. “I was sick one day in May 2018 and the relief teacher didn’t know how to present a song I’d prepared for the kids, so I recorded a video and sent it to her,” Ms Karanicolas said. She came back to a rock star’s reception with the students telling her she was famous because they had seen her her on TV and that’s how the idea kicked off.
“My students are into Youtube and gaming so I thought that making videos would be a great way for them to access knowledge outside the classroom,” she said, adding that she is also a fan of using a body-based approach and flipped learning – a new pedagogical theory where classroom-based learning is inverted so that students are introduced to the material and familiar with it even before they get to the lesson.
“In some of my classes I have no Greeks, so motivating them, getting them to see the material as relevant to their lives and teaching them Greek is quite a challenge,” she said. “To save time and get them excited, I create my Youtube videos to entertain them. The kids listen up and come to class ready for us to engage and we can use lesson time to deepen their understanding through revision.”
“I’ve always had a strong Greek side,” Karanicola said, referring to her roots from Chios on her mother’s side and Pontian and Macedonian elements from her father.
And its not just students having fun, parents are enjoying the videos also and she’s attracted some mature age students too as part of her growing Youtube audience.
Each video becomes a little bit more elaborate. Role playing has entered the equation, and Ms Karanicolas now plays an entire cast with the introduction of a cop, yiayia and all manner of characters.
Initially created as a method of teaching, Ms Karanicolas is becoming a student of videography. “If I wasn’t passionate about it, I wouldn’t be doing it as it takes a long time to create these videos,” she said, adding that she’s in a competition with herself to make each video better than the one before.
When she was young Ms Karanicola thought of growing up to be a performer or musician, and had many different influences from metal to Kate Bush and from Eleftheria Arvanitaki to Melina Kana. “Teaching happened by accident, but I guess I did what I wanted to do, and I’m still performing but in a different way to what I had imagined,” she said, pointing to her students that learn through entertainment and her youtube videos that combine her love of Greek culture, music and language.