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 sew division, undermining social, economic, and democratic prospects for us all. Today in the US, one-quarter of all children under the ages of eighteen across  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.

As a research initiative we seek to advance an empirically-based actionable framework to inform the practice of teaching about and through migration, preparing educators and children for a world on the move. We work closely with teachers, school and district leaders, NGOs and museum educators to craft and document best practices leading to:

• a deeper understanding of immigrant origin children;
• a set of empirically tested signature pedagogies;
• understanding of learning environments where immigrant youth and their peers can thrive, and
• an integrative characterization of educators’ development as they prepare to educate for a world on the move.

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.