Teachers are viewed as dynamic agents of change in educating the global learner and building an inclusive society but, in most cases, they are native monolingual professionals who teach students of increasingly diverse ethnic origins. The teaching workforce in Greece has generally been rather reluctant to acquire new languages and intercultural skills.

The University of Patras in partnership with the municipality set out to address this deficiency with a training programme, inspired by its membership of the C4i (Communication for Integration) network. C4I principles and methodology supplemented by an action research intervention and instructional design approach has proven to be a reliable and sustainable teachers’ training model at the University of Patras. Collaborative professional learning seems to be an appropriate training approach for promoting intercultural learning and dismantling prejudice as it provides the opportunity for peer work, dialogue and negotiation focusing on narrative exchanges, respect and mutual understanding.

Effective teachers are expected to cultivate students’ intercultural competence enabling them to engage in everyday intercultural interactions free of stereotypes or prejudice or diversity-related rumours. In doing so teachers have to design learning experiences which foster reciprocal communication and collaborative intercultural action.    

More specifically, 250 trainee teachers were engaged (between March and June 2015) in an action research collaborative project as part of their multicultural course at the University of Patras. They were asked to design, implement and reflect/evaluate an anti-rumour campaign to combat prejudices, stereotypes and racist attitudes in workplaces of their choice.

Students were involved in instructional design activities for early childhood and secondary school environments or other NGOs, but also to actively communicate with diverse audiences and negotiate cultural differences through compacting prejudices and stereotypes. Engaging future teachers in authentic intercultural circumstances was viewed as a productive way to deal with real world diversity.

The professional training model was grounded on the notion that (prospective) teachers with high intercultural sensitivity are more likely to become (a) more confident global citizens having a deeper understanding of cultural differences; and( b) more sophisticated knowledge workers able to design intercultural oriented learning scenarios to deal with learners’ diversity.  

Initially, students were trained to become anti-rumour agents and identified themselves as designers of experiential, conceptual, analytical and applied learning activities based on the epistemological framework of ‘knowing processes’ and multimodality.    

The anti-rumour campaign was implemented during May 2015 in diverse workplaces such as schools and NGOs in the city of Patras, which deal with diversity and migrant issues. Prospective teachers formed learning teams of 4-5 persons to:             

• Identify the main rumours in each organization  
• Compile data and arguments to dismantle rumours          
• Maintain extensive communication with stakeholders and target groups (migrants, refugees, stakeholders, school children, parents, general public)    
• Create anti-rumour networks and multipliers      
• Design multimodal anti-rumour materials and activities (videos, radio spots, posters, policy guidelines, etc.)
• Implement anti-rumour activities at workplaces 
• Evaluate the effectiveness of their intervention (both the design process and impact on social change), and
• Reflect (in focus groups) on their learning process            
• Prepare a full report-campaign on their anti-rumour intervention              

At the end of the project, students completed the Intercultural Sensitivity Scale (ISS) in its five dimensions The pre and post ISS scores demonstrated students’ enhanced positive attitudes towards diversity after their semester-long engagement with anti-rumour strategy.

Students disseminated their work in a number of events, such as:              

• Children’s festival at DESECE at the University of Patras ( Patras, May 2015)          
• European Local Democracy Week (Delphi, October 2015)             
• Showcase conference with all the students, NGOs and schools participating in the implementation phase (Patras, November 2015)               

The longer term plan for sustainability of the work includes:

• Integrating this project as a practical component in one of the university courses at the University of Patras
• Enabling students to become volunteers/ anti-rumour agents in the local NGO network
• Integrating the anti-rumour concept/strategy as a theme in joint peer learning amongst ERASMUS students
• Building interuniversity ERARMUS agreements (starting from universities which are placed in the ICC network) to promote intercultural learning using the anti-rumour strategy.
• Combining an internship program between universities and NGOs/ schools to develop/implement anti-rumour campaigns        
• Building a lifelong learning certificate or post graduate program for anti-rumour agents using e-learning methodology
• Applying for research grants to develop and document intercultural indicators in different localities (in the context of ICC).