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Session chair: Prof. Nabila Louriz, Université Hassan II de Casablanca, Casablanca (Morocco) 

Individual contribution 

Dr. Elena Pérez Hernandez, Universad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid (Spain)

EducamosContigo: A Digital Accompaniment Model for Developing Transversal Competences and Promoting Social Equity in Higher Education

EducamosContigo is an innovative telematic educational programme that combines formal, non-formal, and informal learning to foster transversal competences among university students, while offering online academic accompaniment to adolescents in vulnerable situations. Grounded in Kolb’s experiential learning theory (1985, 2015), Engeström’s activity theory (2001), and Navarro and Tudge’s neoecological approach (2023), the programme promotes reflective practice, teamwork, and ethical engagement through guided supervision by education professionals. Each semester, more than 140 students from different disciplines dedicate three hours per week to activities integrating telematic accompaniment, online training, and online group supervision. Preliminary evaluations of EducamosContigo indicate that participation in this university-led telematic accompaniment programme fosters the development of transversal competences such as collaboration, team work, and listening skills, while contributing to social inclusion through digital support for vulnerable adolescents. Recent analyses of students’ learning portfolios (Cajavilca, Cerrillo, & Pérez-Hernández, 2025) provide empirical evidence of critical digital literacy as a key driver of personalised learning within the programme. The study identified an internalisation of critical reflection on issues such as digital divide the social impact of ICT, and misinformation, underscoring how EducamosContigo promotes a progressive and situated understanding of students’ own learning practices. These findings align with earlier research highlighting the programme’s pedagogical innovation and its role in strengthening professional competences in real contexts (Muñoz Teno et al., 2024). Given the shared educational challenges across Europe and Africa, particularly regarding the digital divide and youth inclusion, EducamosContigo offers a transferable model for equitable digital education. Its design could be adapted for intercontinental collaboration among higher education institutions to strengthen their training capacities and social contribution.

Collective contribution

Pr. Maria Iakovou- National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens (Greece)

Pr. Thalia Dragona - National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens (Greece)

Dr. Resty Naiga - Makerere University, Kampala (Uganda)

Language beyond Learning: Designing Language Pathways to Social Inclusion in Greece and Uganda

Since 2015, Greece has served as the main entry point for displaced populations fleeing war, violence, persecution, and destitution. National social inclusion policies towards refugees and migrants have oscillated between discourses of assimilation and exclusion, reflecting broader social tensions. Similar discourses on social inclusion as well as monoculturalism versus multiculturalism have long characterized attitudes towards the only officially recognized Muslim minority in northeastern Greece. Uganda, on the other hand, is the world’s third-largest refugee-hosting country, currently sheltering over 1.7 million refugees in need for a refugee self-reliance model having far-reaching implications for social cohesion among refugee and local communities due to rising conflicts over water and land. In both Greece and Uganda, language constitutes a central barrier to inclusion, mediating relations between the populations in question and local communities and often determining the degree of participation and belonging. 

Across both contexts, there is a growing need to design, implement, and evaluate interventions that integrate language into real-life social practices, thereby enhancing participants’ capacity to navigate complex sociopolitical realities. 

This tandem talk positions language as a social practice intertwined with identity, agency and participation rather than as a mere communication tool. Drawing on principles of Collaborative Action Research, case studies from Greece and Uganda, involving refugees, migrants and ethnic minorities explores how participatory, research-informed interventions can transcend linguistic barriers to foster inclusion and empowerment. They illustrate how embedding language learning in authentic, community-oriented contexts enhances knowledge co-construction, intercultural understanding and critical consciousness. 

A methodological framework is presented redefining language as a catalyst for social change and transformation under conditions of displacement, conflict and exclusion. 

This work further demonstrates how participatory approaches can effectively bridge academic theory and social practice.

Dr. Aránzazu Gil Casadomet-  Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Madrid (Spain) 
Dr. Hafissatou Kane, Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar, Dakar (Senegal)  
Cognitive and Applied Linguistic Research Group 

In recent decades, it has generally been observed that the field of linguistics has grown rapidly in terms of the number of papers published every year, the topics examined, and the emergence of new theories, approaches, methodologies, and perspectives, as a result of its increasing intersections with other disciplines and the real word (Yan and Zhang, 2023). The same authors identified the most frequently explored topics through corpus analysis and manual checking, divided into multilingualism, language teaching and learning, psychopathology, cognitive linguistics, methods and tools. Topics such as bilingualism/multilingualism, translanguaging, language / writing development, models, emotions, foreign language enjoyment (FLE), cognition, and anxiety are among the most frequently explored. However, it is commonly observed that linguistic research at the University of Dakar, and more generally, at the other Senegalese universities, has not investigated many areas. Therefore, the present project aims to introduce new fields of linguistics to help fill a gap in the current linguistic curriculum, encourage research-led teaching and enhance the faculty’s innovation and international visibility. To this end, we propose establishing a research group called the “Research Group on Cognitive and Applied Linguistics”, organised around three themes: (1) cognitive and psycholinguistic approaches, (2) corpus and digital linguistics; and (3) multilingualism and second language acquisition. The project’s primarily objective is to gradually integrate teaching by proposing special topics or optional modules (Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics or Corpus Methods for Linguistics), incorporating components of these fields into existing courses, and supervising student projects. The project also plans to build internal and external alliances. The group will collaborate with colleagues in related fields to demonstrate how cognitive or corpus methods can complement their work. It will also seek external partnerships, primarily with CIVIS university members, research groups, and networks, to organise joint workshops and short-term exchanges, involving students and young researchers.