Thirteenth International Summer School on Mind, Brain and Education
2018 October 16–20
Migrants and Refugees in the 21st Century: Children in and out of schools
Directors of the School:
Kurt W. Fischer, Antonio M. Battro and Sebastián J. Lipina
Director of the Course: Marcelo Suárez Orozco
Program Officer of the School: Lula Majdalani
Harvard University (USA)
Veronica Boix Mansilla is a Lecturer in Education and Senior Principal Investigator at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses the nature of quality interdisciplinary work, the development of global competence among children and youth, and conditions that foster teachers’ capacity to educate for global competence with quality within and across disciplines. She is the Research Director “Re-Imagining Migration”, which examines how to prepare teachers and youth for a world shaped by human flows. Veronica co-developed the OECD-PISA global competence framework and is the author of multiple publications on interdisciplinary and global education including “Educating for Global Competence Preparing our Youth for the World.” She serves as an advisor to the International Baccalaureate, the OECD, and the DC Public Schools among other institutions.
Migration as opportunity: Rethinking teaching and learning for a world on the move
Migration is reaching historic proportions, placing immigrant-origin and refugee children at the forefront of fast-changing educational landscapes. Educational systems in post-industrial societies are receiving a larger number and plurality of immigrant students, yet most educators have little or no preparation on how to serve these children best. Professionals working in schools often misunderstand immigrant-origin children’s assets and needs, unwittingly reproducing the very social inequalities that their institutions are called upon to reduce. What do educators need to understand to respond to the demographic and democratic imperatives of our time? In this session we will examine the need for a research-based, actionable framework to inform the education of immigrant-origin youth and their peers. We will discuss an emerging approach to teaching about and through the experience of human migration. This approach casts migration as a constitutive human narrative able to give a renewed sense of purpose and meaning to our educational efforts. Concomitantly, it proposes migration as an opportunity to rethink foundational educational constructs including our idea of the learner; our conceptions of learning, pedagogy and curriculum; our ideas about environments where human development and learning thrive; and our understanding of teacher growth in a world on the move.