Dafni Ntefne Santsak

My name is Dafni (or Ntefne) Santsak and I hold a degree from the Department of Language and Intercultural Studies. During the current academic year (2024–2025), I am pursuing a Master’s in Digital Culture Studies at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.
I grew up in a multilingual environment where I engaged daily in what I used to call “mixing languages”, long before I learned the term translanguaging. Within this setting my linguistic repertoire initially included Greek, Turkish and German, while later expanding to include English, Arabic, Spanish and Romani.
My relationship with education was shaped first and foremost by my personal experience, having attended both (bilingual) minority schools of the Greek community in Istanbul and the monolingual mainstream education system in Greece. Later on, through my academic studies and my participation in the research group VLLRG, I had the opportunity to take part in the ActInPrison program, an experience that allowed me to grasp the complex nature of educational processes in ways I had never considered before. Together with my volunteer involvement in the pilot implementation of the educational material Say it in Broken Greek by the group Apo Koinou, in a shelter for unaccompanied minors run by ARSIS, I came to understand the need for and the importance of discovering new, non-hierarchical, ways of (collaborative) learning and of creating inclusive common spaces.