Quick Digital Learning Day Lessons on Immigration by Students for Students

Officially, Digital Learning Day is February 17^th, but you can teach digital learning day and engage students (#DLDay) any day of the week on immigration with our mini-lessons! We pair historical political cartoons with short video clips produced by young adults on immigration themes and provide rigorous questions for student reflection and class discussion. No more than five minutes in length, these films inspire dialogue, critical thinking and creative teaching on immigration.  Additional activities are provided to extend learning and explore the themes covered in the films.

Our digital learning mini-lessons on immigration makes it easy to: insert and adapt short lessons, ask students to draw connections between historical and present immigration themes, engage students with multimedia, and underscore the power of young voices.  

Shadows of immigration past hangs behind the same Americans barring entry to new arrivals. Credit: The History Project, University of California, Davis

How to Use the Mini-Lessons

The mini-lessons include questions that can be used as warm-ups, homework, extra credit, in-between time during standardized testing days, or extended into full lessons in order to provide students with both historical context and real-world accounts on the impact of immigration today. Currently, we have three mini-lessons but plan to include more in the future. 

Teachers have to flexibility to adapt the guide to best meet classroom needs and extend learning with suggested activities.

Extend the Lessons

 

While we include suggested activities that build upon the themes discussed in the films, it is the perfect opportunity for students to cultivate their own voice through a digital storytelling project and/or service-learning. 

• Cross Borders with Digital Storytelling – Using digital storytelling to capture immigration stories is a powerful way for teachers to create opportunities for “empathetic moments” among students and shape classroom environments. Our most popular lesson plan for K-12 students makes it easy to implement in the classroom. 

 

•  Combine Digital Learning with Service Learning – Our current community grants recipients are using digital technologies to reach beyond the classroom walls to study immigration issues that matter to them. Read about our current inspiring teachers who use podcasts and digital immigration narratives to learn more about immigration and a previous project where students brought awareness and assistance to migrant farm workers in their local community. Use this lesson plan to create a similar service-learning initiative in your community – and of course, feel free to apply to our next round of community grants.

We’d Love to Hear What You Think! Let us know your thoughts by emailing us or by filling out a brief feedback form. We’re also on twitter – use the hashtag #DLDay, our handle @ThnkImmigration, and @OfficialDLDay.

The Immigration and Nationality Act Is Worth Remembering With Students

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Immigration Act of 1965 at the foot of the Statue of Liberty on October 3, 1965. Photo Credit: Yoichi Okamoto/LBJ Library

Fifty years ago, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed on October 3, 1965 at the base of the Statue of Liberty. Though at the time, Johnson stated the act was “not a revolutionary bill,” hindsight has proven otherwise. The 1965 act marked a significant shift in U.S. immigration policy away from selecting immigrants by national origin and has had a lasting impact in shaping America today as a richly diverse nation.

Why is this act important to know about?

Before 1965, immigrants to the U.S. largely came from Northern European countries based on numerical limits first enacted in the 1920s. In fact, just prior to the law’s passage, Ireland, Germany, and the United Kingdom received nearly 70% of the quota visas available to enter the U.S. After the bill passed, the demographics of the U.S. shifted as the U.S. implemented an immigration policy that favored family reunification, skilled immigrants, and the elimination of the race-based quota system. As a result, immigrants from other parts of the world – notably Latin America and Asia – began to come to the U.S.

According to a recent report released by Pew Research, “among immigrants who have arrived since 1965, half (51%) are from Latin America and one-quarter are from Asia.” The report further shows that without the 1965 act, our nation would be incredibly less diverse today. Comparatively, U.S. ethnic and racial composition would be: 75% white, 14% black, 8% Hispanic and less than 1% Asian. We’d also be slightly older without the arrival of so many immigrants.

What prompted such a significant change?

Scholars often cite the social reforms of the civil rights movement as well as World War II and Cold War era national security concerns as reasons that prompted this significant immigration reform. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) notes that “the Allies in World War II and the West during the Cold War risked losing support from Third World countries whose peoples were excluded by openly racist immigration laws.” More recent scholarship by Thomas Gjelten in his book Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story offers an in-depth account of the congressional process, specifically the emphasis on family reunification, and the act’s unintended consequences.

What does this mean for the future?

Pew Research also projected immigration trends fifty years from now.  By 2065, no racial or ethnic group will constitute a majority of the U.S. population.  We will increasingly become more diverse with a growing multiracial population. Notably, the share of the foreign born Hispanic population is estimated to fall to 31% while the share of Asian immigrants will rise to 38%.

What does this mean for the classroom?

By 2050, one in three children under the age of 18 will be either an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. As the U.S. immigrant student population grows, the need to cultivate positive, diverse classrooms and libraries, ones that are reflective of all students and various immigration experiences is ever more prescient. Important also, will be the need to actively weed out hate from the immigration debate , welcome immigrant students into the classroom, and value how immigrant students strengthen American schools.

Additional Resources

We offer many resources including lesson plans and grants to teach about immigration past and present, but we are especially pleased this week to release a short lesson created by ESL and Human Rights teacher at Newcomers High School, Julie Mann.  “Lessons on Acceptance and Forgiveness: A Tale of Two Americas” focuses on changing negative perceptions of immigrants based on the story of Rais Bhuiyan and the Ted Talk by Anand Giridharadas, “A Tale of Two Americas.” The lesson is appropriate for high school students and adaptable for many reading levels.