Migration has always been an intrinsic part of human societies across the globe. People have been mobile to lead a nomadic life, to explore the planet, to flee persecution and violence, to find work or to pursue education. Across Europe, classrooms are prime spaces where migration plays out, as students come from different nationalities and cultures. Yet, migration is often dealt with as a side-topic in school curricula. This stands in stark contrast to the omnipresence of migration in public debates, which are often rife with assumptions that have been challenged by scholarly research about the drivers and consequences of migration.
The project Teaching Immigration in European Schools brings academic knowledge of migration to European classrooms to convey a more comprehensive understanding of how migration shapes societies across Europe, and hereby foster students’ critical thinking. The project has two specific objectives: (1) to develop guidelines for teaching migration at school in a participatory way through focus group discussions with migration scholars, teachers from European countries, students, migrants, and storytellers; and (2) to design ten 45-min teaching modules covering central aspects of migration across the world, oriented towards students of middle and high schools and centres of lifelong learning. These modules will be made openly accessible, in five different languages, through a website.
TIES is hosted by the International Migration Institute at the University of Amsterdam with the German Institute for Global and Area Studies as cooperation partner.
Collaborators: Kerstin Brinnich, Katharina Natter, Simona Vezzoli
Student assistants: Dunja Battouy, Josef Neubauer
Funding: 2019 National Geographic Explorer Grant NGS-64631E-19
Dates: September 2020-August 2023
Website: https://teachingmigration.eu/
