Singing Homer : Modern Greek songs, digital literacy, and the experiential reception of the epics in secondary education

Abstract This article reports on Singing Homer , a two-year cultural project (2021–2023) in a Greek lower-secondary school that engaged students with the Iliad and the Odyssey through modern Greek songs. The project addressed persistent challenges in teaching Homer – linguistic difficulty, cultural distance, and questions of curricular relevance – by introducing music as a medium of reception and reinterpretation, through which students connected modern musical narratives with Homeric figures and themes. Students researched songs, transcribed lyrics, juxtaposed them with epic passages, and produced digital presentations and videos. Their artefacts, together with questionnaire responses, show how music mediated Homeric figures and motifs, encouraging affective engagement, critical comparison, and collaborative creativity. Findings indicate three main outcomes. First, music provided an emotional gateway: students consistently reported joy, pride, and surprise, which sustained motivation and opened interpretive depth. Second, participants articulated clear rationales for the modern value of Ancient Greek texts, linking Homer to cultural roots, ethical reflection, and adolescent identity. Third, the integration of digital tools and public presentation fostered twenty-first-century competences, including creativity, collaboration, communication, and digital literacy. The study theorises experiential reception as a pedagogical approach where students actively reinterpret classical texts through culturally familiar media. It offers a transferable model for re-energising Homer in today’s classrooms, demonstrating that epic can function simultaneously as cultural heritage and as a living pedagogical resource.