Globally, there were about 281 million migrants in the world as of 2020 (McAuliffe & Oucho, 2024). Specifically, by mid-2025, more than 117 million individuals have been forcibly displaced, including 36.4 million refugees, 73.5 million internally displaced people, 8.4 million asylum seekers, and 6.1 million people needing international protection. At the end of 2024, nearly 49 million of the forcibly displaced people were children (UNHCR, 2025a). As refugees and other people seeking international protection mainly originate from Afghanistan, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, and South Sudan, hosting mass influxes has been one of the most enduring poly-crises, particularly in Europe, with approximately 13.2 million refugees, including 6.2 million from Ukraine (UNHCR, 2025a).

Türkiye hosts 3.9 million foreign nationals (IOM, 2025) and is currently one of the largest refugee-hosting countries, with 3.2 million Syrians under temporary protection and 222,000 people of concern from Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Ukraine, and other countries (UNHCR, 2025c). It particularly hosts over 1.6 million Syrian children and 186,000 children of refugees and asylum seekers from other countries (UNICEF, 2019). By January 2023, the number of Syrian students enrolled in formal education reached 997,243 (UNHCR, 2025d). Particularly, 387,037 children of foreign nationals are enrolled in primary schools, including 361,777 under international protection (Ministry of National Education, 2022). Globally, UNHCR (2025b) reports that 67 percent of refugee children enrolled in school are in primary education.

Consequently, these dramatic numbers have posed considerable challenges and a pressing need for teachers and teacher education both nationally (e.g., Author et al., 2021, 2024, 2025; Celik et al., 2023, 2025; Karsli-Calamak & Kilinc, 2021; Kotluk & Aydin, 2021) and internationally, particularly across Europe (e.g., Borsh et al., 2023; Herzog-Punzenberger et al., 2023; Koukoulidis et al., 2024; Matthews, 2021; Tsiaousi & Chiou, 2024), to immediately respond to the changing demographics of schools and educational needs of all children effectively. Given the United Nations’ (2025) Sustainable Development Goal #4, to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” and major international policy documents such as UNHCR’s (2019) “Education 2030: A Strategy for Refugee Education”, European Commission’s (2020) Integration Action Plan (2021–2027), and conclusions of the Council of the European Union (2020) on European teachers, educators must urgently learn to respond to the needs of ethnically, linguistically, socially, and culturally diverse students in their classes/schools holistically, especially those from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. To that end, we argue for a shift in how we prepare and support educators and assert that culturally relevant education must be a central focus in teacher education and teachers’ ongoing professional development. As scholars in the fields of culturally relevant-responsive-sustaining education, teacher professional development, and immigrant and refugee education have operated in separate silos, we situate our work in Ladson-Billings’ culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) to address this gap and ultimately support educators who can holistically meet immigrant and refugee students’ educational needs in Europe and beyond by providing three student outcomes: (1) academic success, (2) cultural competence, and (3) socio-political awareness (Ladson-Billings, 1995a, 1995b, 2009, 2014, 2021).

Using a much-needed multi-stakeholder, interdisciplinary, dialogic, and collaborative approach (ECER, 2026), our study employs CRP as a lens and aims to explore the professional needs of teachers, counselors, and administrators/school leaders working with immigrant and refugee students in primary schools, alongside the supports for and barriers to their practices, towards a culturally relevant, schoolwide culture. Specifically, we ask the following questions: 1) Utilizing CRP as a theoretical lens, how do primary school teachers, counselors, and administrators describe their professional needs in their work with immigrant and refugee children? 2) What supports/barriers do they experience in educating immigrant and refugee children?

This study was conducted as part of a larger project that aimed at developing a culturally relevant professional development (PD) program for educators working with immigrant and refugee students in Ankara, Türkiye, which is among the top provinces with the highest gross enrolment rate of Syrian refugee students in formal education (UNICEF, 2019). Designed as a case study (Yin, 2014), our project sought to create a transformative and dialogic space for a purposeful sample of 60 primary school teachers, 30 counselors, and 30 administrators to work collaboratively and have critical conversations about immigrant and refugee students towards the collective goals of establishing a culturally relevant school culture and addressing educational inequities affecting these children. Through criterion sampling, participants were selected from primary schools hosting immigrant and refugee children. Besides, maximum variation sampling allowed for a variation regarding participants’ school districts, grade levels, number of immigrant and refugee students in their classrooms/schools, all providing richness into uncovering their professional needs. We used pre- and post-focus group interviews, video-recorded observations of PD sessions and field notes, classroom and school observations, collection of artifacts throughout sessions, participants’ reflections of activities and evaluative feedback, collaborative unstructured discussions among the research team and their reflective memos after PD sessions to provide an in-depth examination of the case (the PD program) through multiple data sources (Yin, 2014). In total, 9 PD sessions were developed and facilitated by the research team, each lasting around 4 hours. To develop a research-informed, needs-based, culturally relevant PD program for educators, we first explored the professional needs of teachers, counselors, and administrators for educating immigrant and refugee children, the focus of this study, through the lens of CRP. To that end, we conducted 17 focus groups in total, each comprising 4–10 educators and formed homogeneously within the professional groups: nine with teachers, four with counselors, and four with school administrators. Developing three semi-structured, parallel interview schedules, the interviews included both demographical and open-ended questions. A pilot study of one focus group interview with each group was conducted face-to-face, and the main interviews were done over Zoom to accommodate participants’ varying teaching schedules. The interviews lasted approximately one hour, were audio-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Currently, the data have been analyzed inductively and deductively using the content analysis method (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Creswell, 2013). To establish trustworthiness (Marshall & Rossman, 2011), we used several strategies, which will be presented further.

Preliminary findings, first, revealed that our participants needed to build knowledge and strategies to develop a sense of school belongingness among immigrant/refugee children, culturally relevant classroom management strategies and instructional/assessment methods, and alternative ways to foster parent involvement to support children’s academic success. Second, regarding cultural competence, educators’ professional needs emerged as building intercultural communication skills, cultivating empathy among non-immigrant students and their parents towards immigrants/refugees through different strategies (e.g., children’s literature, arts, play), learning how to resolve conflict constructively, responding to bullying at schools, and bridging home-school cultural disparities. Moreover, all groups reported on how to approach immigrant/refugee children’s experiences of trauma, loss, and stress, and building resilience, which were more challenging with diverse intersectional backgrounds (e.g., socio-economic status, gender, special needs). Participants often expressed frustration and professional dissatisfaction about educating immigrant/refugee students. Through the third, socio-political awareness tenet of the CRP, such feelings were often coupled with participants’ criticisms of vague legal, institutional, and national policies and regulations concerning immigrant/refugee children’s education, negative representations of immigrants/refugees in public through mass media, centralized structure and rigid control of K-12 education by the MoNE with limited authority given to administrators for school-level decisions, under-representation of immigrant/refugee populations in curricula and textbooks, and lack of financial/material supports to schools, all resulting in feelings of loneliness and isolation and hindering access to quality education in culturally diverse classrooms. In an era of financial crises, wars, increased nationalism, unpredictability, and immigration in the European region and beyond, participating at multi-stakeholder educational projects at national and/or international levels, strong partnerships between schools, universities, and governmental/non-governmental organizations within and across countries to put collective efforts on immigrant/refugee education were stated among the meaningful opportunities for educators’ professional growth, indicating critical hope and calling for more solidarity and collaboration among stakeholders as a community of learners.

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