Understanding Migration Today

About This Lesson

The first two lessons of the text set introduced students to the concept of human migration through literature and storytelling. This lesson shifts the focus to an informational text that details contemporary migration trends and terminology. Students will explore some of the factors driving recent global migration and learn about its various forms, such as internal, international, and return migration. By analyzing and discussing graphs and nonfiction text, students will have opportunities to connect this new information to their prior knowledge. 

The lesson concludes with a reflective writing exercise where students consider the personal, local, and global significance of learning about migration. Ultimately, this lesson aims to broaden students’ understanding of contemporary migration and prepare them to engage with personal narratives in the next lesson, which will add nuance and complexity to the statistics and terminology they will examine today. 

Essential Questions

• Why do people move? 
• How can our migration experiences and those of our ancestors shape our sense of who we are and where we belong?
• How can literature and storytelling broaden our perspective and build empathy for the human experience of migration?

Guiding Questions

• What are we talking about when we talk about human migration? 
• What are some current trends in human migration? Why do they matter?

Facing History Learning Outcomes

• Make real-world connections that explore historical and contemporary contexts in literature.

Lesson Plan

Activity 1: Build Schema for the Topic of Migration

Remind students that in the last two lessons, they considered how borders can be divisions and unifying forces, and they read a short story about how it can feel to leave a place and people we feel deeply connected to. Acknowledge that these lessons may have started to raise questions about migration in the world today. Let students know that in this lesson, they will engage with an informational text that provides an overview of some recent migration trends and terminology. This information will help prepare them to engage with migration literature in upcoming lessons, and it can provide context for some information and terminology they may be encountering in the news and online. 

Explain that students will discuss five questions in small groups. The questions correspond to sections of this lesson’s explainer, What Is Migration? They help build schema and invite students to consider what they might already know or think they know about migration trends and terminology. 

Move students into groups of three. Project or write the questions on the board one at a time for the triads to discuss. Don’t spend more than two minutes on any of the questions. Then move on to Activity 2. 

• What is the definition of “migrant”?
• Why do people migrate?
• What is the difference between international migration and internal migration?
• What is the difference between immigration, emigration, and return migration?
• What is the difference between a refugee, an asylum seeker, and an internally displaced person?

Activity 2: Read and Discuss a Migration Explainer

Inform students that next, they will be learning about recent global migration trends and terminology that can help them answer the discussion questions. The graphs and statistics in the reading for today’s lesson are from 2020–2022. Let students know that this is because there is often a lag between data collection, analysis, and publication for large reports (see Teaching Note 1).

Pass out the What Is Migration? explainer and the What Is Migration? Discussion Questions handout. Read the handout instructions to the class. 

Follow the steps to model the activity with the first two sections of the explainer:

• Read aloud the question from the first section of the explainer, “What is the definition of ‘migrant’?”
• Project the What Is Migration? Discussion Questions handout. Have students spend two minutes responding in the first row of the chart to the three prompts while you record your own ideas on the board:
  • What surprised me?
  • What did the author think I already knew?
  • What challenged, changed, or confirmed what I already knew?

Share your answers, and then have a few volunteers share their ideas with the class. Encourage students to add new ideas that resonate with them to their charts. 

Repeat these steps as a class with the second question, “Why do people migrate?” Then instruct the triads to follow the steps for the remaining sections of the explainer. 

When all of the groups have completed their charts, facilitate a conversation in which volunteers share their ideas with the class.

Activity 3: Reflect on the “3 Whys”

Conclude the lesson by asking students to do an individual reflection in their journals using the “3 Whys” thinking routine, which was developed by our friends at Project Zero. If there isn’t time in class, students can complete this activity for homework. Explain to students that they will be making personal, local, and global connections to the topic of migration by responding to the following three questions: 

• Why might learning about current global migration statistics and terminology matter to me? 
• Why might it matter to people around me (family, friends, classmates, and community members)? 
• Why might it matter to the world?

Extension Activities

Go Deeper with a Migration Webquest

This lesson provided a high-level overview of some recent global migration trends and key terminology for talking about migration. If you would like your students to go deeper, you can introduce them to the interactive version of the IOM’s World Migration Report 2024. 

Here is just one way your students might engage with this interactive report to deepen their understanding of global migration:

Ask students to look through the interactive World Migration Report 2024 from the International Organization for Migration and read the titles or descriptions that accompany each visual.  

Next, instruct them to choose one section of the report that interests them. They should start by reading the text and then explore any accompanying visuals to see what they learn. 

On a separate sheet of paper or a new copy of the What Is Migration? Discussion Questions handout that you recreate for this extension activity, have students respond to Beers and Probst’s three questions:

• What surprised me?
• What did the author think I already knew?
• What challenged, changed, or confirmed what I already knew?

If time allows, have students repeat this process for a different section of the interactive report. Please note that some sections are far more detailed than others.