Making Connections Between Migration Stories

What are the similarities and differences in our experiences of migration and how can we promote students’ abilities to recognize them?

In our learning arc we ask:

• How do local cases of migration relate to global patterns?
• In what ways do particular cases connect to human migration over time and around the
  globe?
• What can we learn from other narratives about migration to help inform our perspective?

Individual stories of migration often connect to patterns across time, geography, and across the experiences of different groups. However, those deeper connections are often obscured as we pay attention to the particularities of individual and group narratives or a particular news report. While paying attention to the details of a story matters, we want to encourage students to recognize the universal connections as well.

Below we offer two tools to promote learners’ capacity to make purposeful connections.

Migration Stories: What’s Below the Surface?

Use this graphic organizer to encourage students to look for thematic connections that are connected to the narrative of the text they are encountering.

Use this link to download the graphic.

Same-Different-Gain Project Zero Thinking Routine

This Project Zero thinking routine is designed to help learners develop life long habits of making purposeful and thoughtful comparisons.

Identify the two items you would like to compare [e.g. stories, places, cases, situations, texts, objects] Look and examine each closely . . . take your time:

• What do you see that is the same across the two? Name commonalities and patterns
• What do you see that is different? Name the differences you observe
• What do we gain from comparing the two?