Supporting teachers who are refugees to be researchers: Teacher agency, well-being and inclusion

• In Event: Articulations of teacher agency in conflict-affected settings: Research with, for, and by teachers in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Proposal

Refugee teachers fulfil multiple roles within and beyond the classroom while being refugees themselves (Kirk and Winthrop, 2007; Mendenhall et al., 2015; Dryden-Peterson., 2017), acting as life coaches, mentors, peacemakers, community builders, social workers, lay psychologists and even as stand-in family members’ (Falk, 2023; Henderson, 2023). Despite these critical roles, refugee teachers face various barriers to securing adequately compensated positions and long-term employment. This severely limits the professional agency and overall well-being of refugees who are teachers.

This paper presents emerging findings from an ongoing KIX-funded research study, ‘Scaling Refugee Teacher National Inclusion Pathways for Enhanced Agency and Well-being’. The project is led by Jigsaw Education in partnership with UNHCR in Chad, Uganda and Zambia. Sitting within the GERE (Global Evidence for Refugee Education) research initiative, this ground-breaking research approach involves training selected refugee teachers in research methods, enabling them to become researchers of teacher agency, well-being and inclusion in the national systems where they are hosted. The research conceptualizes participation as a selection of options that permit the participant to engage with research at different levels of decision-making agency, depending on their interest and ability at each research stage (Hart, 1992). It recognizes that participants must be equipped to achieve increased levels of participation through rigorous training in research methods, including support to navigate power dynamics and issues of positionality (Barnes et al., 2023).

In line with the conference theme, the particular power of this research lies in bringing the voices of refugee and national teachers directly to decision makers through national, regional and global advisory groups and conferences such as CIES. The study bridges divides and implements a nexus approach, creating the potential for critical impact on the policies, practice and behaviors that affect all teachers’ agency in crisis contexts.
The paper will report on the research that ‘peer researchers’ - refugee teachers trained in research methods - will have conducted in Chad, Uganda and Zambia between June 2025 and February 2026. Using their training on the nature of research, interpretations of agency, well-being and inclusion, on research methods and analysis, peer researchers will contribute to crafting the paper.

Peer researcher feedback on their first training week suggests the research process is already having an impact on individuals. One peer researcher in Uganda described how the process of articulating their experiences in terms of agency is informing self-reflection and action: “I fell in love with definitions like Agency and Well-being…They taught me how to depend on myself.” One female Zambian research participant said that she was relieved because "the questionnaire and the interaction during the interview created some sort of safe space where I felt free to speak out the pent-up stresses about my work …your questionnaire seems to have naturally brought it all out of me".

Under the leadership of the peer researchers, our responsibility is to turn this personal transformation into policy and practice changes that will support improved agency and well-being for all teachers; supporting a nexus approach by supporting conditions for increased harmony in displacement contexts.

Author

• Alison Joyner, Jigsaw Education/Graduate Institute, Geneva