The didactic potential of migration biographies

Inferences and conceptual development of middle school students who encounter reconstructed content about migration

Abstract

Migration is a major social issue and currently a relevant topic in social studies in Sweden and other Nordic countries. Teaching migration may be difficult because it affects the pupils’ lives and involves intertwined aspects of knowledge and values in several school subjects. This leads to questions about how teaching it can contribute to pupils’ understanding of themselves and their surrounding world. The potential of migration biographies, which are stories about people who have migrated, is discussed through an analysis of an interdisciplinary unit about migration for 10–12 years old Swedish pupils. The teaching was conducted in three classes, and the observed lessons were recorded and analysed from a Bildung perspective of Klafki and framed using the Model of educational reconstruction.

The results show how migration biographies could be relevant from a content as well as a pupil perspective. The biographies made the conceptual development of pupils possible through stories and tasks that seem to deepen and widen their understanding of migration. Moreover, results of the present study affirm the gradual changes of pupils’ concepts within social studies presented in previous studies on conceptual change. This study strengthens previous research by empirically showing how pupils use inferences as a tool to reconcile previous knowledge with new. In addition, it shows how pupils’ encounters with migration biographies provide didactic spaces for knowledge, values, and feelings. This is relevant for how pupils understand migration and how they could empathetically relate issues of migration with their own lives.