Teaching and Teacher Education 23 (2007) 1102–1112 The contribution of action-research to training teachers in intercultural education: A research in the field of Greek minority education Kostas Magos Ã,1 Arahovis 20, 10680 Athens, Greece Received 2 November 2005; received in revised form 5 July 2006; accepted 19 September 2006 Abstract The article describes the framework, the methodology and the results of an educational research in the field of Greek minority education. The aim of the research was to explore whether action-research can help educators from the majority develop empathy for their minority pupils. The schools where the research took place are placed in Thrace, an area of North-Eastern Greece, which borders with Turkey.The research showed that the teachers’ training brought changes in their perceptions and attitudes related to their general ideological beliefs concerning otherness, their professional role and their educational work. r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Teacher training; Action-research; Intercultural education; Minority education; Teachers’ beliefs 1. The need for the teachers’ intercultural training Significant research (Bender-Szymanski, 2000; Grougeon & Woods, 1990; Wright, 1992) points out that the teachers’ views and attitudes towards ethnically and culturally different students are influenced by prejudices and stereotypical represen- tations, which may result in discriminations. These discriminations in most cases filter out ethnically and culturally different students on the grounds of their ethnic and cultural background. Moreover, even the presence of ethnically and culturally different students at school is considered by many teachers as ‘‘an additional problem which entails anxiety, a feeling of professional insufficiency and the wish to transfer the problem to the neighbouring schools’’ (Sedano, 2002, p. 264). It has been proved (Banks, 2002; Boyle-Baise, 2002; De Valk, 2003) that teachers’ poor insight into intercultural issues impedes, to a great extent, the development of cultural pluralism at school. Ac- cording to Le Roux (2001, p. 19) ‘‘the intercultural experiences and stimuli for the teachers’ primary and in-service training tend to be occasional, limited and are peripherally added to an over-loaded curriculum’’. As a result, when teachers are due to deal with ethnic, cultural and other kind of differences in class, they either deal with them in a completely inappropriate way or they frequently ARTICLE IN PRESS www.elsevier.com/locate/tate 0742-051X/$ - see front matter r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.tate.2006.09.001 Ã Tel.: +30 6973050052; fax: +30 3688506. E-mail address: kmago@tee.gr. 1 A teacher and a teacher trainer in the field of intercultural education.