Re-imagining Migration

Migration is reaching historic proportions, placing immigrant-origin children at the forefront of rapidly changing educational landscapes. While schools the world over are encountering a rapid growth and plurality of immigrant origin student populations –internal, international, voluntary, forced migration--most educators feel ill-prepared to understand these students and serve their needs. At the same time, xenophobia and myths about immigration are on the rise. Inside and outside of classrooms, misunderstandings about newcomers sow division, undermining social, economic, and democratic prospects for us all. Today in the US, one-quarter of all children under the ages of eighteen have an immigrant parent. Finding ways to facilitate their flourishing and successful social inclusion is both a demographic and a democratic imperative.

The Re-Imagining Migration is a collaboration between Project Zero and UCLA’s School of Education and Information Sciences and is co-led by Veronica Boix-Mansilla, Adam Strom, Carola Suarez-Orozco, and Marcelo Suarez-Orozco. It seeks to ensure that  young people grow up understanding migration as a shared condition of our past, present, and future in order to develop the knowledge, empathy and mindsets that sustain inclusive and welcoming communities.

Our Re-imagining Migration Educational Framework is designed to prepare educators and institutions to respond to the demands of changing demographics associated with human migration flows in the US and beyond. The Re-imagining Framework does not tell teachers what to do nor what exactly they should teach on a day by day basis. Rather, it seeks to shed light on some of the most transformative questions educators may ask as they interrogate and recast their practice to serve a growing number of immigrant-origin students and their peers. Five fundamental questions at the core of our educational vision:

• Who is the child?
• What matters most to learn in a world on the move? (See our five dispositions and thinking routines for World on the Move)
• How can we best engage with the topic of migration across the curriculum? (See our learning arc)
• How can we create powerful learning environments for all?
• And how can we prepare our educators best?

For educators working in schools, museums, libraries and communities interested in preparing immigrant-origin students, their families and peers to participate fully in contemporary societies this framework stands as an invitation to re-frame migration not merely as a pressing challenge but mostly as an opportunity to re-imagine a new approach to education—one destined to benefit all.

With the support of the Ford and Spencer Foundation we endeavor to create a foundational framework to educate the next generations for a world shaped by human migration as our shared human experience.