Context
As a research team, we came together with a shared interest in migration, student storytelling, and youths' border-crossing experiences. We developed the migration storytelling curriculum to engage with the literacy research that speaks to the nuanced experiences of youth who have experienced border-crossing at different scales in different learning contexts and non-immigrant identifying students who have rarely been positioned to see themselves as part of the social and political discourse around migration and movement.
We have gone through two iterations of the Migration Storytelling curriculum and shared it with a community of educators and researchers. Since the fall of 2024, we have collaborated with teachers from a history and civics classroom serving emergent multilingual students, as well as a MENAA (Middle Eastern, North African, and Asian) Literature class. Our teacher colleagues have adapted the curriculum for their students and classroom contexts. We are having ongoing conversations with teachers and researchers to build our collective work in migration storytelling.
Ongoing Work in Schools
Sharing our work
The following recording was taken for the Northwestern E4 (virtual) Brown Bag on April 24, 2024. "Studying youths’ migration narratives and learning across spatial and temporal scales." In the first part of the presentation, Eva describes an observational study of transnational digital literacies in the everyday lives of adolescents of Mexican and Chinese heritage. Then, Eva and Patti detail the collaborative design of the Migration Storytelling curriculum and the research that took place in a high-school English classroom where students engaged in inquiries and storytelling on migration.
The following poster (click here) was presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) in 2025 by Tori Choi, a doctoral student at Northwestern University. It analyzes how a student named Stella created a migration story about Colombian-American actress Sofía Vergara.
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