Research Engagement Among Language Teachers for Refugees and Migrants in Greece

This is a brief note to say that, together with my colleagues Chrysa Ntai and Paraskevi (Vivi) Diakogianni, I have just published a new article on teacher research engagement in Social Sciences. The article focuses on teacher research engagement, that is to say, how teachers engage with published knowledge¹ or produce knowledge themselves. In this post, I would like to summarise the main points of the article and share why I think that it’s relevant to language teachers.

Teacher research engagement in refugee and migrant settings

The central ideas underpinning the article are simple: One is that language teachers can become more effective at their jobs by learning from those who have invested time and effort to better understand language, teaching, students and education systems. The other one is that language teachers acquire knowledge over time, through experience, through trial and error and through purposeful experimentation — and this knowledge can be more useful if it is produced in a systematic way. Together, these two strands constitute what we can call teacher research engagement.

While teacher research engagement is, I would argue, useful for all language teachers, it is especially important in the context of refugee and migrant education. One of the things that is distinctive about such settings is that language education for refugees and migrants often emerges ad hoc.² This means that language teachers often have to fend for themselves, without much central guidance or previous precedent. In some ways, this is liberating, because it gives more opportunity for teachers to be creative; in some ways, however, it’s also stressful. Teacher research engagement responds to both of the above.

Following a useful distinction that Simon Borg introduced,³ we view research engagement as having (at least)⁴ two components: (a) engaging with research, as in reading about published knowledge, and (b) engaging in research, which involves trying things out in class and sharing one’s findings. In the context that concerns us, refugee and migrant education, the first dimension provides teachers with conceptual tools to strengthen their professional judgment. At the same time, the relative fluidity and limited institutional codification that characterise many refugee and migrant education settings create conditions in which the second dimension —engaging in research— can generate space for practitioner inquiry to inform practice directly.

Our article on research engagement

In our article, we report on a quantitative study on how language teachers who work with refugees and migrants in Greece engage with and in research.

Methods

In our study, we asked 48 teachers⁵ to complete a short survey based on Borg (2010) description of research engagement. For example, we measured their perceptions about their workplace with statements like “We have a culture of enquiry in our school”. Similarly, we measured their beliefs about research with statements like “Research is something best done by academics”. There were six groups of such statements, measuring:

• perception about workplace conditions
• perceptions about themselves as teacher-researchers
• beliefs about teacher research engagement
• beliefs about the desirable qualities of research
• research-related practices

For each statement, participants had to respond by selecting one of four predetermined responses, such as “This is very important for me” or “This is not at all important for me”. We then used descriptive statistics to analyse the data: medians to estimate central tendency (what most teachers seemed to believe) and Inter-quartile ranges to estimate spread (whether answers tended to cluster or if opinions were divided).⁶ We then did some more sophisticated work (a K-means cluster test), which is a statistical procedure used to identify patterns: in our cases, teachers with similar patterns of responses, which we postulated showed different profiles of research engagement.

Findings

The findings pretty much confirmed what we already knew, from the literature and from experience, about teacher research engagement. Teachers and schools claim to be positive towards professional development, but stop short of making time or providing incentives for this. Teachers claimed that they were just as knowledgeable about their practice as university-based researchers, they stated that they could do research, but suggested that academics should do it instead of them. Democratic qualities were deemed important in research, but teachers reported that they preferred to engage with research alone.

What was more interesting, and more original, was the description of the three teacher profiles we identified. The modest sample size and non-representative sampling strategy means that these profiles should be treated as tentative, but even so they reveal a variability that less granular statistics would have hidden: essentially, they pointed out at different modes of epistemic marginalisation. The different ways in which these experience epistemic injustice⁷ casts some doubt on ‘one-size-fits-all’ policies and initiatives to promote research engagement.

Teachers in professional precarity

The first profile comprised language teachers working in conditions of professional precarity. These teachers lacked easy access to opportunities for research engagement, and their responses were hard to compare with the other groups. In other words, these were teachers who were structurally excluded from research engagement.

For them, increasing research engagement primarily involves providing institutional support, such as access to the literature and opportunities to network and collaborate. Our work in the ReaLiTea project mainly aims to support this group of teachers. We do this by creating online spaces for collaboration, as well as giving teachers access to research content (e.g., through the OASIS database) and resources for accessing it with more efficiency and confidence.

Epistemologically constrained teachers

The second group consisted of language teachers whose workplace reportedly supported research engagement, but their personal attitudes were unhelpful. In a sense, it seems as if these teachers have internalised a hierarchy of knowledge which places academic research above their own professional meaning-making. This is a form of epistemic injustice operating at the level of belief.

For this group, the challenge of increasing research engagement might involve questioning foundationalist beliefs about knowledge and research. It also involves actively promoting the idea that academic and professional knowledge, while equally important, differ in scope, outlook and methods.

Agency-suppressed teachers

The final pattern we identified was teachers who reported that their workplace was negative towards research engagement. Although their beliefs were, reportedly, similar to the ones of the previous group, the main difference was the perception that their workplace undermined their standing as professional knowers.

For teachers with this profile, the challenge is one of overcoming the perceived limitations of the workplace, and restoring a sense of teacher agency.

What all this means for teacher research engagement

Language education for refugees and migrants in Greece, and elsewhere, continues to operate under conditions of policy volatility, fragmented provision, and uneven institutional support. In such contexts, calls for “evidence-informed practice” are common, but sustained engagement with evidence possible is not. The reasons, I believe, are not technical; they are structural and political. Our findings suggest that teachers report high levels of self-efficacy and a strong identification with professional development. What is lacking is coherence between institutional rhetoric and institutional practice.

The identification of distinct teacher profiles is particularly significant at a time when professional development initiatives often assume homogeneity. Policies that promote research engagement through generic workshops or compliance-driven expectations are unlikely to succeed if they do not account for precarity, workplace culture, and teachers’ epistemological beliefs. Some teachers require material support and access; others require intellectual reframing; others need institutional conditions that restore agency. A uniform intervention will miss these differences.

Teacher profile	Summary of responses	Epistemic injustice faced	Ways to address it
Teachers in precarity	Research engagement impossible (lack of access, time, etc.)	Structural exclusion from knowledge sharing and production	Improve access opportunities
Epistemologically constrained teachers	Research engagement possible and encouraged, but unhelpful beliefs about nature of knowledge, research, and division of labour	Internalised knowledge hierarchy	Challenge beliefs about research engagement
Agency-suppressed teachers	Research engagement possible but not valued; also unhelpful beliefs about nature of knowledge, research, and division of labour	Institutional silencing	Policy change

Conclusion

More broadly, refugee and migrant education sits at the intersection of language policy, social integration, and equity. Empowering teachers requires more than just improving classroom techniques; it also involves enabling locally grounded knowledge production in settings where precedent is limited and needs evolve rapidly. In this sense, research engagement becomes part of a wider project of professional autonomy and epistemic justice, where teachers function as legitimate producers of knowledge.

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Footnotes

1. In this post (but not in the article), I use the term ‘published knowledge’ instead of ‘publications’ or ‘journal articles’. My reasoning is that the kinds of knowledge that is relevant to language teachers does not always appear in journal articles and research monographs (and it does not have to!). It’s difficult to find a term that encompasses all these kinds of formats, from books to TikTok videos, so I am using ‘published (professional) knowledge’ as a placeholder until I can think of something better – ideas are welcome! ↩︎
2. This, by the way, was one of the main findings of a meta-analysis of 10 years of scholarship on the educational response to the refugee crisis in Greece (Motsiou & Kostoulas, 2025). ↩︎
3. Borg, S. (2010). Language teacher research engagement. Language Teaching, 43, 391–429. ↩︎
4. In our work in the Research Literacy of Teachers project, we propose three more aspects of teacher research literacy: foundational knowledge, theorisation, and communication. I don’t see this as an inconsistency, because research literacy and research engagement are interrelated but not identical. The former is something that teachers do, but the latter (literacy) is potential for action. ↩︎
5. Oddly enough, one of the reviewers took exception to the word ‘teachers’: they argued that since some of the respondents were studying for an MA, then they were students, not teachers. Peer review is a strange process, but even so, this remains is one of the most imbecilic comments I have received in about 20 years of academic work. ↩︎
6. Back when I taught research methodology, I wrote why this is the most appropriate way to deal with such (i.e., ordinal) data. ↩︎
7. Although I often talk about ‘epistemic injustice’ in this blog, I don’t think I have ever defined it, so this may be a good place to do so. ‘Epistemic’, to begin with, is just a fancy way to say ‘about knowledge’. Epistemic injustice is a term introduced by Miranda Fricker. It has two main components: testimonial injustice (when your views are discredited because of who you are, e.g., ‘just a teacher’ rather than an academic) and hermeneutical injustice (when you don’t have access to the tools to process or produce knowledge). I am mostly thinking about the latter here. ↩︎

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