The start of the new school year brings a perfect opportunity to develop classroom or whole-school activities for children to get to know one another and get to know their teachers. Exploring migration histories is a fantastic way to do this, helps you learn useful information about your pupils and also acts as a meaningful foundation for the rest of your School of Sanctuary learning activities throughout the year.
At City of Sanctuary UK, we believe learning about the experiences of people seeking safety shouldn’t be done in a vacuum but within a wider exploration of migration.* We encourage approaches that underscores how migration is something with which we are all intimately connected, helping to make this relevant to everyone within your community.
- Introduce the Activity
At the start of the week explain that you are going to explore your school’s connections with the wider world.
Ask teachers and school staff to prepare short case studies of migration stories from their own homes/families: they may have traveled to the UK themselves; worked or studied abroad; had a relative who moved abroad; or they may want to go further back in history and explore a story from their relatives. Try to include a range of migration stories and journeys to enable children and families to see those similar to their own reflected. You may want to share the stories and ask children to guess which teacher/staff member it belongs to, or you may want to explore them in different ways.
This fun activity will help children learn surprising things about their teachers and school and help children prepare for writing their own migration stories.
- Individual Research
Next, ask children to go home and research stories of migration from their own homes/families – this might be their own, a relative’s, a family friend’s or someone else with whom they are closely connected and it can be recent or far in the past.
To help, send children home with some guided questions they can think about and/or ask about. This may be questions like:
- Who is this migration story about?
- Which country did they travel to?
- When did they travel?
- Why did they travel?
- Did they speak the language of the country they arrived in? Are different languages spoken at home today?
- What were their experiences in the new country? What was good and what was different or difficult?
- Can you find and include a photo relating to this migration story?
- Share with the school
- Share with your school
Children can share their migration stories in school to learn about one another and think about all the reasons people move. Older pupils might be able to explore commonalities and differences across stories, learn about key terminology to define different people’s journeys, and start to understand why some journeys may be longer or harder than others.
You may be able to use this activity to also identify different languages spoken at home you otherwise didn’t know about, or stories or connections that you can invite parent/carers/ relatives to share at other relevant times in the curriculum.
We encourage you to create a visual display in a public space where students can add their stories to a map, highlighting your class’s or school’s connections to places around the world. This can act as a powerful reminder of everyone’s relationship to the wider world and help ensure children’s stories and histories are recognised and represented.
*Reminder: People seeking sanctuary are migrants… People move, they always have done, and they always will.
At City of Sanctuary UK we see people seeking sanctuary as part of wider communities of people who cross borders to live. Whilst they have specific urgent reasons to do so, anti-refugee and asylum-seeker rhetoric fits within wider anti-migrant discourse and separating people seeking sanctuary from these wider discussions of migration can reinforce false and harmful binaries of those ‘deserving’ empathy and understanding and those that don’t.
People move, they always have done, and they always will. Everyone should be treated – and spoken about – with humanity, dignity and respect.