Greek teenagers’ cultural taste and identity expression through a documentary-making project

Abstract

This article explores a film education project conducted on an extra-curricular after-school basis in a Greek secondary school in Tampouria, Piraeus. A documentary-making project exploring the area around the school was realized by a group of ten 15-year-old students under the supervision of their English teacher/researcher. The following case study explores how aspects of the students’ cultural taste and identity were expressed through this moving image literacy project, carried out in a foreign language. Various forms of data – observation, textual and audiovisual – are analysed within a social semiotic framework. The article seeks to demonstrate how the students’ cultural taste was formed by different kinds of global and local influences, and how aspects of their multifaceted identities were revealed during the documentary-making process, and expressed through the creation of media texts within a context of Greek education.