Implementation of ‘Migration And Cultural Diversity’ (SOI-TR-78)

I am Burhan Sel, a primary school teacher of 3rd-grade students. I notice that The Europeana Learning Scenario “Migration & Cultural Diversity” created by Zehra Güleniş, was very useful for my students. Therefore I chose to implement it because I believe it facilitates migrant students’ orientation.

Introducing, socializing and teaching

I have got a lot of refugee students in my classroom. There are many in my school who speak different languages, come from different cultures, have not received the same emotional attention from their families, and are not used to teamwork and cooperation.

Socializing these students, showing them the right behaviour, teaching them, introducing the school to the parents and explaining how they will add value to their children, is a very difficult and demanding process.

Preparation

We searched the Europeana Platform to find testimonials of refugees, their lives and difficulties. The students saw a lot of migration stories and pictures on platform. Refugee students understood that there were constant migrations and immigrants in the world.

Interaction area in the FCL

We used migration and art, migration and music and migration and science. 21st century skills such as to bring refugee and immigrant students together, produce artwork together, manage to play together, learn to tolerate each other, try to understand the rules of school and classes, understand what the right behaviour is, and embrace different languages, religions and appearances and we designed our class as a Future Classroom Lab to make individuals trying to recognize learning outcomes.

Practice in classroom

During the class, the students were divided into groups. Refugee students were placed in each group. A ‘What is my name’ activity was conducted by students. Then the students created a common product together, with legos. Altogether, they made music with musical instruments and performed artistic activities.

Mapping & Categorizing

Each group discussed how immigration feels. Each group began to understand the story of the immigrants in the group. These stories were recorded with improvisation and uploaded to our school platform.

Did you find this story of implementation interesting? Why don’t you read about the related learning scenario?

Migration & Cultural Diversity created by Zehra Güleniş

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 –The featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana, provided by UCD School of History and Archives.