People, Stories … On The Move (LS-GR-309)
In this learning scenario, pupils are guided to give some thoughts about people moving around the world and through the years. It is a try for pupils to understand some reasons that people have to move from their places and –sometimes- to go far away.
The pupils can also realize that the phenomenon of human migration (voluntary and involuntary) is diachronic, for various people and groups from different countries. This can be achieved by reading and combining some objects’ stories with families’ stories.
Reading migration stories
Starting my lesson in the computer lab, I had divided the pupils into groups of 4, in advance. They are 17 years old and they have been familiar with Europeana’s platform since last year, during another learning scenarios’ implementation. Their English knowledge is C1/C2 level. I uploaded the worksheets in advance on the PC’s desktops that my pupils would use during the lesson. The ICT teacher, Periklis Georgiadis, helped me with this.
In worksheet 1, I asked them to search for the meaning of migration using a resource found on Europeana Collections. They had to answer in the cooperative online PowerPoint presentation what is voluntary and involuntary migration. I showed them, using the projector, a video found on Europeana called “Share your migration story”.
Reading migration stories
As a next step, I explained to them the second worksheet. Each group had to read two Europeana migration stories, one from Greece and one from another country, and to answer the following questions in the ppt presentation:
- Who is narrating the story?
- Who moved?
- Where did he/she move from?
- To where?
- Why?
- What are the feelings of the person/persons moved?
- What was the migration’s journey you read about? Draw it on the map.
The presentation
In the next hour, each group presented the finding to the whole class. The presentations were interesting for all the pupils. The most interesting point was the maps with the journey that people of the stories made. In the end, we discussed the reasons that make people move and we think again what voluntary and involuntary migration means. You can see their presentation here (in Greek).
In the next teaching hour, I made a synopsis of the previous lesson’s presentations. We also discussed their human migration’s conclusions (i.e. reasons for moving, moving people’s emotions etc). I also asked the pupils about objects in their family that could “tell” a story, similar to the migration stories the groups worked on in the previous lesson.
A brainstorming session took place with the ideas of the pupils of the whole class. The task was to share pupils’ family stories on Europeana’s page “Share your migration story“.
Conclusion
Speaking about migration is an interesting and diachronic topic that pupils want to work on. It is not a situation that only some people live in; in most of the families, there is a migration story from the recent or the far past. Using Europeana’s stories motivated them since the stories were made by everyday people for their own aspect and not from specialists (i.e. historians). They have the opportunity to see the writer’s aspect, their emotions, the migration journey. It is worth saying that they liked working in groups in the computer lab and presenting their findings to the whole class.
Would you like to know more about this learning scenario? You can download it below:
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CC BY-SA 4.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and provided by a contributor called Anthie, for the migration stories