Education Week - March 6, 2019 - 24

COMMENTARY

18
THE PROBLEM WITH
LITERACY PROGRAMS

19
CONSEQUENCES OF
A TEACHER STRIKE

Recognizing Migration Is an Educator's Imperative

Jared Boggess for Education Week

By Adam Strom & Veronica Boix Mansilla
e have all seen the
haunting images.
Migrants from
Central America,
men, women,
and children on
their journey
north, alone or in
caravans, seeking asylum at the border gate,
held in jails or interned in camps. But most
of the 244 million people worldwide living
outside the country of their birth never make
the headlines. They are parents and children,
doctors, nurses, policemen, business owners,
teachers, students, and neighbors, and they
are central to the present and future civic life.
In our country alone, it is becoming increasingly uncommon to find a city, town, or
county in which immigrants do not play a
role. Migration is an integral part of the story
of the United States. Recent reports from the
Southern Poverty Law Center and the AntiDefamation League suggest that xenophobia
and myths about immigration are on the rise,
fueled by a 24-hour news cycle, partisan positioning, and misuse of social media. Misunderstandings about newcomers sow division,
undermining our social, economic, and democratic prospects.
Our schools are not immune to the turmoil.
Twenty-six percent of school-age children in
the United States today are either immigrants
or the children of immigrants. Many such students feel especially vulnerable because of
threatening immigration enforcement activities in nearby neighborhoods and the recognition that many educators feel ill-prepared
to meet their needs. Committed educators nationwide have welcomed immigrant students
into their schools, but their approaches have

also been partial, leaving room for unintended
harmful consequences.
At Re-Imagining Migration, an organization
created to ensure that young people grow up
understanding migration as a shared human
condition, we work with districts, schools, museums, and community organizations to prepare young people for the world and create inclusive and welcoming communities. We have
noticed three blind spots that often challenge
educational efforts:
1. Newcomer bias. When questions about
immigration come up for schools, most eyes
turn to the most visible cases of newcomers to
our nation and neighborhoods. Complicating
matters, many newcomers are often isolated
by language, and their success is often solely
gauged through their English proficiency, at
the expense of developing their full human potential and civic identities. Making migration
the sole domain of English-learners, rather
than all immigrant-origin children and school
faculty at large, exacerbates restrictive notions
of who is part of "we" and who will remain a
"they" for the foreseeable future.
2. Current events bias. In the current
political climate, we have seen an increased
focus on migration through the lens of current
events. We keep hearing from our collaborators in the field that educators are looking for
guidelines about how to address the migrant
caravan, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or DACA), or other current events.
This eagerness to tackle real issues in class
is progress toward making learning relevant
to children and society. However, treating the
experiences of migration solely as a matter of
current events strips migration-one of our
most basic human experiences-of its deeper
historic and scientific contexts. As a species,

24 | EDUCATION WEEK | March 6, 2019 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

humans have been on the move since we first
walked on the planet. Those journeys make
up our scientific record, our literature, and our
histories, and they merit being treated in informed interdisciplinary ways.

What is my
responsibility in
constructing
welcoming and
inclusive societies?"
3. Special project bias. In school curricula,
migration is often covered ad hoc. Storytelling,
mapping family origins, and civic-action projects are popular and valuable, whether they
take place in an occasional English/language
arts class or after school. Yet as long as these
projects remain outside of the mainstream
educational life of schools, they will remain
disconnected from the academic outcomes on
which schools are assessed.
The study of migration raises fundamental
questions about our shared human experience:
Who are we? Where do we come from? Why do
people leave their homes? What is the meaning of borders? Who is responsible for the people who straddle more than one nation? What
is my responsibility in constructing welcoming
and inclusive societies?
Students can revisit these questions over

time and across disciplines. Responding to
changing demographics of our nation's schools
also requires teachers and educators to rethink our own biases and assumptions.
Preparing our youth for a world of increasing and at times catastrophe-driven migratory flows will call for the renewed efforts of
a broad range of educational and cultural
institutions. This year, the first cohort of ReImagining Migration fellows-a select group
of trained change agents-are leading pilot
innovations in a range of educational learning
spaces.
In Charlotte, N.C., our fellows have revised a
freshman language arts unit to explore migration through literature. In Washington, fellows
at the National Gallery of Art are designing
new teacher workshops to engage migration
through the arts. And at the independent
Washington International School, also in the
nation's capital, a fellow's biology students
are tracing human migration through genetic
markers and historical events over time.
Faced with the magnitude of human migration, such responses in classrooms, schools, districts, and museums are necessary to prepare
young people to navigate a world on the move.
If educators do not dedicate the attention required to develop a well-rounded approach to
education about the experience of migration,
we will leave a generation unprepared to take
on the civic challenge of their lifetime. n
ADAM STROM is the director of Re-Imagining
Migration, an organization housed at University of
California, Los Angeles's Graduate School of Education
and Information Studies. VEROINICA BOIX MANSILLA
is the research director at the organization and a senior
principal investigator at Harvard Graduate School of
Education's Project Zero.

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Education Week - March 6, 2019

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