UPRISE Newsletter No. 2
Listening to Thrace’s Educators: What UPRISE Has Learned So Far
Since 2024, the UPRISE project, Unity in Diversity: Promoting Religious Inclusivity in Greek Muslim Education, has been building an evidence base on how public and minority primary schools in Thrace handle Religious Education for Muslim pupils. Two major research strands have now delivered their results, offering the clearest picture yet of what inclusive religious education looks like on the ground, and what still stands in its way.
Main Project Update
UPRISE has completed its core research phase, combining an in-depth qualitative study with a multi-group participant quantitative study. The quantitative research was carried out in stages: it began with a pilot study that tested and refined the instruments, continued with a detailed documentation of the methodology and data collection procedures, and concluded with a full-scale survey and analysis. Together, the qualitative and quantitative strands give the project a rare 360-degree view, rich, first-person accounts from educators, followed by statistically robust confirmation across a much larger sample.
The project wanted to answer to the following question: how is Religious Education actually delivered or withheld for Muslim pupils in Thrace, Greece and what can be improved?
The qualitative study gathered semi-structured interviews with 30 educators, public-school teachers, Islamic religion instructors, school principals, and Muslim teachers in minority schools, to map everyday practices: how exemptions are processed, how exempted students spend that time, what materials and teaching methods are used, and how sensitively religious diversity is handled. The quantitative survey then reached 114 educators (Public Primary School Teacher, Minority Primary School Teacher and Islamic Teacher) across Thrace’s public primary schools, testing whether the patterns seen in interviews held up across a much wider group.
Key Results
Attitudes are strong; systems are weak. Across both studies, educators consistently express positive, inclusive attitudes and describe genuine efforts to make Muslim students feel respected. Yet both strands converge on the same conclusion: the obstacles are structural, not attitudinal. The late appointment of Religious Education teachers emerged as the most frequently reported barrier, suggested by the large majority of public-school teachers and by almost all Islamic instructors surveyed. This mirrors the qualitative findings, which described Imams arriving mid-year, sometimes as late as January, disrupting timetables and leaving Muslim pupils without dedicated instruction for months.
Materials are scarce, especially for Islamic instructors. While teachers in minority schools rely heavily on an approved textbook, Islamic instructors in public schools have no official manual at all, a gap confirmed at scale in the survey, where Islamic teachers reported far higher rates of material shortages than either public-school or minority-school teachers.
Exemption practices remain inconsistent. The interviews documented wide variation in how schools record exemptions and occupy exempted students, from structured remedial work to simply “sitting idle.” The survey confirms this pattern: the large majority of public-school teachers report defaulting to generic worksheets or unrelated assignments, rather than a coherent inclusive activity.
Technology is a bright spot, with one caveat. Educators across all groups reported broadly positive, comparable attitudes toward digital tools. The one meaningful difference to emerge from the comparative analysis concerned how useful teachers considered technology in practice: minority-school teachers rated it noticeably lower than their public-school or Islamic-teacher counterparts, a likely signal of unequal infrastructure rather than differing pedagogical outlooks.
Timetabling is a shared strain, reported across all educator groups, with Islamic instructors flagging the problem most consistently.
Next Steps
Read together, the two research reports tell a coherent story: Thracian educators are, by and large, willing and motivated to include Muslim students meaningfully in school life, but they operate within a system that lacks timely staffing, clear curricula, adequate materials, and stable scheduling. The findings suggest that religious inclusion is less constrained by teachers’ attitudes and more strongly influenced by organizational conditions, availability of resources, and institutional coordination.
Building on this evidence, the project will now move toward developing:
- Practical toolkits and training modules that translate the research findings into ready-to-use resources for schools;
- A digital learning platform, informed by the technology-use findings, with particular attention to equitable access for minority-school teachers;
- Guidance materials on exemption management and curriculum design, addressing the structural gaps identified in both studies.
By pairing the depth of the interviews with the breadth of the survey data, UPRISE now has solid, triangulated evidence to guide these next steps, moving religious inclusion in Thrace’s schools from good intentions to well-supported practice. Additionally, findings from both reports will also be published as scientific articles, extending their reach to researchers and practitioners beyond the UPRISE partnership.
Stay Connected
Follow the project’s progress and access all public materials on the UPRISE website: https://uprise.he.duth.gr/en/home-page/. You can also find us on Facebook / LinkedIn, where we share updates, events and resources as they become available.