For adult refugees who have learned orally all their lives, resettling in a context that revolves around print, means confronting a normalised disregard for one’s own ways of knowing the world. Little is understood about the oral learning strategies of adults who enter formal language education programmes for the first time. Moreover, the centrality of monolingualism in print literacy acquisition theory perpetuates the exclusion of these adults through the provision of inadequate curricula and insufficient teacher training. Such injustices require research attention, yet this gives rise to its own ethical challenges regarding the extraction and recognition of knowledge, particularly within a print-centred academic system that excludes oral communities. In this chapter we discuss the ethics and legitimacy of participatory knowledge co-construction, with reference to a current study in London with adult refugees who are learning to read and write for the first time, and in a language that is new to them, English. We consider possibilities for addressing issues relating to the imbalance of power in the research process, and we question what researching oral learning means for participants and researchers. We also examine how responding to participants‘ determination to learn to read and write in the dominant language of their new home influences perspectives on what constitutes the most ethical research design.