Abstract
Preparing students to face migration depends on how schools are responding to the needs of the children and their families. The authors introduce Stories for Influence to help teachers scaffold children's understanding of migration so they can gain perspective, create, and share their own stories. Research shows how stories make us humans by exposing the humanity in both our own and others' migration stories. The authors use Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory, neuroscience, and socio-emotional aspects of storytelling to support the effectiveness of Stories for Influence. They also provide venues, such as the Out of Eden Learn framework, children's literature, and thinking routines and global thinking routines strategies to cognitively and emotionally engage children in constructing meaning and making sense of human events as igniters of their stories. Migration is approached from the Reimagining Migration (RM) educational framework that sees the presence of migrant-origin children as an asset.
TopIntroduction
The world is facing unprecedented challenges, and this time has underscored the importance of preparing children not only to understand what human beings are experiencing in a world on the move but also to develop empathy. An educator’s mission is to be prepared to facilitate this. Using stories for influence, educators can engage children in understanding migration and take perspective to promote acceptance and connectivity from both humanity and kindness.
Migration is a shared condition of our past, present, and future. The term migration comes from the Latin verb migratus, meaning “to move from place to place, change position or abode.” Humans have been moving from one place to another throughout our history for different reasons and circumstances. Today, the common causes that force people to emigrate are natural disasters, climate change, sociopolitical and socio-economic threats associated with poverty, violence and safety, among others. One quarter of all children under age eighteen across the developing nations have an immigrant parent (Reimagining Migration, 2020, para. 1).
Preparing students for a complex world depends on how schools are responding to children’s needs. Emigrant families and their children arrive in their new lands with a cultural and linguistic heritage that should be considered assets (Suarez-Orozco et al., 2018). Unfortunately, migration is commonly seen as a problem rather than an opportunity to celebrate diversity and learn from each other. Schools should break any type of stigma by providing students with appropriate and inclusive learning experiences for immigrant-origin children, their peers, and their families. It is critical for educators, when facing these challenges, to cognitively and emotionally engage students to understand the complexity of migration, promote empathy, and find the humanity in both our own and others’ migration stories.
Stories make us human. The authors have learned from their experience working with young children that storytelling is a powerful venue to engage children in conversations that can be extended to actions. Children learn to take perspective and share their own experiences at the same time by connecting with elements of other people’s stories. These types of experiences transmit the message that they are not alone.
This chapter aims to spark empathy, humanity, and altruism by showing how to use stories for influence. The authors define stories for influence as children’s cognitive and emotional engagement in tailoring the telling of a story to a specific audience. Their work is founded on theoretical foundations such as Brofenbrenner’s (1986) ecological model about the power of stories to influence others because children are affected by their physical and social environments. Children’s stories carry emotions and thinking. For Immordino-Yang (2016) emotional and social competencies impact learning. Both locals and newcomers face readjustment and tolerance challenges. Thus, it is important to connect the science of human development with recent neuroscientific insights into the fundamental social context. According to Immordino-Yang (2016), the nature of human biology informs us of the importance of a whole-child approach to education.
Furthermore, they implemented pedagogical frameworks, such as the Out of Eden Learn, at http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/visible-thinking to engage children in a powerful learning experience to understand migration and by using developmentally age and culturally appropriate approaches. The authors also used strategies such as thinking routines and global thinking routines, dialogue toolkit, and slow looking to engage children in stories for influence. Using these frameworks and tools, the authors seek to engage children in what are called stories for influence that are geared to understanding migration.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Dispositions for a World on the Move: One way to think about the dispositions is as the overarching learning goals of curriculum preparing young people for a world on the move. They are introduced below, highlighting cognitive as well as social, emotional, and ethical dimensions of learning and development.
Stories for Influence: The process of tailoring the telling of a story to influence a specific audience.
Out of Eden Learn: A Harvard Project Zero initiative that offers a free online learning community platform.
Neural Coupling and Mirroring: When the brain sees or hears a story, its neurons fire in the same patterns as the speaker's brain. “Mirror neurons” create coherence between a speaker's brain and the brains of his/her audience members.
Digital Storytelling: The combination of traditional, oral narration with multimedia and communication tools. The practice of DS is built on and from a story. A story, in the case of DS, is viewed as a chain of what information someone wants to tell and from what angle they choose to show it.
Thinking Routines: Harvard Project Zero research-based tools to promote thinking.
Global Competence: Boix-Mansilla (2016) defines global global competence as the capacity to understand and act on issues of global significance.
Slow Looking: A concept developed by Project Zero researcher Shari Tishman to invite students the practice of observing detail over time to move beyond a first impression and create a more immersive experience with a text, an idea, a piece of art, or any other kind of object.
Reimagining Migration: Is a learning framework that presents migration as an opportunity. RM is catalyzing a community of educational leaders and social organizations around making migration a part of their curriculum and culture so that all students can feel supported in their social, emotional, academic, and civic growth.
Visible Thinking: It flexible and systematic research-based conceptual framework, which aims to integrate the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. Visible Thinking began as an initiative to develop a research-based approach to teaching thinking dispositions.
Global Thinking Routines: Global thinking routines are simple patterns of thought that are used repeatedly in a learning environment to facilitate the development of global competence/consciousness among learners.
Learning Arc: A set of questions developed by the Reimagining Migration team to help people understand migration. It is centered on the belief that the goal of teaching about migration is not a matter of simply remembering information butt understanding it. Instead, it entails having the capacity to reason one’s way through and respond to a situation, a media report, a new refugee crisis, feeling-oriented enough to advance possible explanations, interpret or contextualize perspectives, and compare present developments with past ones.
Ecological Framework: Urie Bronfenbrenner’s theory that divided the person's environment into five different systems: the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem, and the chronosystem. The microsystem is the most influential level of the ecological systems theory.