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This article investigates use of digital storytelling as a learning activity in education about migration. Based on a study in two Norwegian schools and two adult education centers for refugees and migrants, the article analyzes student's digital stories and observations of the process of production. Counter to research on the promise of digital storytelling to promote diverse perspectives, personal experience and creativity, our findings show that digital stories as a learning activity includes powerful standardization drivers. The standardization limits diversity in students' knowledge and experience from coming into view in the final product. The identified standardization drivers are: (1) discursive blueprints of refugee experience, including the narrative about the 'Good Refugee' and idealization of the destination country, (2) challenges with representing traumatic experiences through photographic imagery, and (3) material affordances in the production process such as google algorithms. In conclusion, we argue that critical engagement with the involved modalities and standardization drivers is a condition for using digital stories to foster critical thinking about migration.

This study investigates how teachers working with newly arrived adolescent refugee students reflect on these students, their situation within the educational system and in Norwegian society. We research the ways in which these reflections engage with the various understandings of the ubiquitous and 'fuzzy' notion of immigrant integration, a concept which we approach critically. The empirical data consists of interviews with teachers in three Adult Education establishments in Norway. Our aim was to identify the narratives of integration the teachers draw on and (re)produce, and to discuss these in relation to policies and perceptions of integration in Norwegian schools and society. Our analysis identified three narratives of integration, namely (1) Integration as having social relations with 'Norwegians', (2) Integration as acquiring knowledge and (3) Integration as endorsing 'Norwegian' values. These narratives exist alongside a corresponding image of the newly arrived migrant students as socially unintegrated and as educationally and culturally deficient. The article's main argument is that the teachers' narratives, despite their complex and multifaceted character, are embedded in an educational and societal context where the longstanding Norwegian ideal of cultural sameness leads to added pressure on immigrants to assimilate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have learned that we, as teachers and teacher educators, need to be aware of the risk of reproducing uncritical approaches in educational interventions on migration. - Without crucially reflecting on their own practice, even social studies teachers dedicated to anti-racist thinking risk reproducing assimilationist values. - The article argues that this risk can be mitigated when teachers critically evaluate their own practice as a precondition for facilitating transformative learning in their students. Purpose: The article aims to critically reflect on a classroom situation where we, as upper secondary social studies teachers, were complicit in reproducing and soliciting assimilationist values in a student assignment. Design/methodology/approach: We use a critical reflective model to 1) reflect on our discomfort at this complicity, 2) analyse the assimilationist values reproduced, and 3) redesign the assignment to promote inclusive citizenship. Findings: The article exposes the risk and potential of being vulnerable about our practice as teachers and of opening the classroom as a safe space for critical thinking. Findings: More research is needed on how social studies teachers understand integration and how they (re)design their own assignments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on six English-language "media blogs" authored by Israeli and Lebanese bloggers during the 2006 Lebanon war. These blogs were featured in the global Western media and represent a wide spectrum of political allegiances. The authors used their blogs to promote their interpretations of the war to their global readership communities. Their attempts at persuasion were undertaken directly by means of political discourse, and indirectly, by means of references to global popular culture. Using a rhetorical approach, I examine the extent to which these strategies-used by bloggers across both national and ideological divides-exhibit commonalities of form and content. I demonstrate that there is commonality in rhetorical forms across ideological and national divides, as well as some commonality of rhetorical content across the national divide. Finally, the comments sections of these blogs reveal the limited effects of persuasion on the other national blogger community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]