Educators Perspectives on Translanguaging and Trauma in Refugee Education: Insights from Multiple Contexts in Greece

Since 2016, Greece has functioned as both a transit and host country for refugees from Asia and Africa, generating a wide range of educational responses across formal, semi-formal, and informal contexts. Within these settings, translanguaging has emerged as a central pedagogical and psychosocial practice that mediates learning, inclusion, and identity reconstruction. This study investigates how educators working in diverse educational contexts describe the institutional and classroom conditions shaping refugee children’s learning, how they perceive and address the impact of trauma and displacement on students’ participation, and how they understand and employ translanguaging as a tool for communication and empowerment. Drawing on three interviews with teachers engaged in refugee education in Greece, the analysis reveals that translanguaging operates both as a strategy for comprehension and as a relational practice that fosters safety, belonging, and agency. The findings further indicate that teachers’ epistemological stances and institutional constraints influence the extent to which translanguaging can be integrated into classroom practice. By situating educators’ narratives within frameworks of trauma-informed and multilingual pedagogy, the study highlights translanguaging as a humanizing and agentive response to the educational and emotional realities of refugee children in Greece.