From Headlines to Human Stories: Migration in Classrooms

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Across Europe, conversations about migration are often loud, polarised, and distant from everyday experience. But in classrooms, something quieter – and more transformative – is taking place.

Through the DEAR project Global Education Time (GET), teachers and students in eight countries are bringing global issues like migration into learning spaces in ways that feel real, relevant, and human. The project’s resources – developed and tested across classrooms – are more than teaching tools. They are catalysts.

Two classrooms, in Ireland and Bulgaria, offer a glimpse of what that change can look like.

In Dublin, at Kingswood Community College, students weren’t satisfied with how migration is discussed online. The noise, the extremes, the lack of nuance didn’t reflect what they were learning in class. With the support of GET Teaching and Learning Units and their teacher Niamh O’Halloran, student Sol Stuart helped turn that frustration into something creative.

The result was Polarised, a documentary that explores how online environments shape opinions and push conversations to extremes. But more than that, it became a space for students and viewers to reflect on how perspectives are formed, and how easily they can harden.

Hundreds of kilometres away, in a lower secondary classroom in Bulgaria, the shift was happening differently. Here, migration was explored through encounter. Using role-play, photos, videos, and direct testimonies, teachers created space for students to connect with real stories. Slowly, the abstract became personal.

The reactions were immediate.

“I didn’t know migrants had families like ours,” one student admitted.

Another reflected more poetically: “Difference is like two songs that sound more beautiful together.”

For their teacher, Ms. Ginka Nedelcheva of “Hristo Botev” Primary School, the impact was visible in real time: “Their stereotypes fell apart right before my eyes.”

These moments – whether through filmmaking in Ireland or lived encounters in Bulgaria – point to the same shift. Migration stops being “an issue” and becomes a human story.

At its heart, this GET project shows that when students are given the tools, space, and trust to explore complex topics, they can rethink, reframe, and rehumanise. And bring global conversations a little closer to home.

See more on the GET Resources page here.