Faced with significant socio-environmental challenges (climate emergency; armed conflicts), societies are called to adapt their crisis response to build resilience in these socially-disruptive times (Nolte & Lindenmeier, 2023). In this troubling landscape, interculturality and multilingualism are also often perceived as a “threat” by members of society (Spencer-Rodgers & McGovern, 2002); a reality that is vividly experienced in school environments (Mansouri & Jenkins, 2010). In this context, higher education curricula should build critical social skills in the next generation of future educators -now pre-service student teachers- by engaging them in real-life social action projects with multilingual classrooms (Gerritsen, Duarte, Melo-Pfeifer, 2024; Zourou & Oikonomou, 2024).

Thus, this contribution presents and analyses the experiences of university students of the Department of Turkish Studies at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens who implemented an art-based social action with students of refugee and migrant background of the Sivitanidios Vocational Education Training (VET) School in Athens, Greece. The result of their action was the co-creation of comics depicting social issues that speak to the reality of refugee and migrant students.

The aim of this social action was to bring together higher education students and students of migrant and refugee backgrounds, engaging them in comics creation as a way to promote linguistic and cultural diversity. Their social action was facilitated through the collaboration of the Athens Comics Library. The action took place in Athens, from March to May 2025, and it was situated in the framework of the EU-funded BOLD project (Building on Linguistic and Cultural Diversity for social action within and beyond European universities, https://boldproject.eu/).

This contribution will analyze students’ attitudes towards social action as a transformative pre-service learning experience, as shared by them through pre- and post-implementation surveys. Eventually, the paper emphasizes on the value of social action and multistakholder collaboration for pre-service student teachers.

References:
[1] Nolte, I. M., & Lindenmeier, J. (2023). Creeping crises and public administration: a time for adaptive governance strategies and cross-sectoral collaboration?. Public Management Review, 1-22.
[2] Spencer-Rodgers, J., McGovern, T. (2002). Attitudes toward the culturally different: the role of intercultural communication barriers, affective responses, consensual stereotypes, and perceived threat. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, Vol. 26 (6), pp. 609-631. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S014717670200038X
[3] Mansouri, F., Jenkins, L. (2010). Schools as sites of race relations and intercultural tension, Australian Journal of Teacher Education (Online), Vol 35 (7), pp. 93-108, https://search.informit.org/doi/abs/10.3316/INFORMIT.818481711627897
[4] Gerritsen, N., Duarte, J., Melo-Pfeifer, S. (2024). Social action to foster linguistic and cultural diversity and inclusion in high education. BOLD consortium. https://boldproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/HAMBURGO-WP2-D2-SYNTHESIS-REPORT-SURVEY-ROUND-TABLES-FINAL.pdf
[5] Zourou, K., Oikonomou, S. (2024). Academia-driven social action transforming language studies and initial teacher education: mapping the field. Society for Research on Higher Education (SRHE) Conference 2024. December 2-6, Nottingham, UK.

Keywords: Social action, inclusive education, art-based learning, pre-service learning.