About CNSC Education

Thanks for looking at this resource.  It represents the teaching skill and expertise of many who have contributed exercises and materials to it.  It is our hope that you will find here the resources to guide your religious community through a transformative educational program that will enable them to work for compassionate justice in their community.

The program is designed to be a tool for the educator in a religious community to learn about immigration issues and to teach their community.  Starting with the origins of migration we will look at five stages on the Cycle of Migration: Origins, Sojourn, Land of Opportunity, Living in Fear and Deportation.  The final session, Responding in Service, is a necessary step to help a community which has journeyed together in this series process that journey and use what they have learned to make a difference in the lives of migrants facing an oppressive system.  The Cycle of Migration is a pattern that will be familiar to migrants of diverse national origins and is not limited to a particular kind of immigrant or refuge.  By taking a holistic view of the cycle of immigration this program seeks to recognize the motivations of migrants to leave their homes and the challenges that they face as they enter a new nation and culture as well as taking an honest view of who benefits from immigration and who is disadvantaged by it.  Though immigration is not a crime, it often has victims: the people forced to migrate and the families that have been torn apart in the process.

The teaching method used in this resource is designed to lead participants into a transformative educational experience.  By rooting the interpretation of materials presented in the experiences and personal resources of learners, learners are lead to change their outlook in a foundational manner.  Everyone has a foundational personal narrative framework that governs the ways they approach new experiences and information.  This is simply the idea that past experiences affect how new experiences are perceived.  At the beginning of each session the learner is asked to access their narrative framework through educational exercises before encountering new material.  New material is then reflected upon in light of its significance to the community and individual narrative frameworks.  Finally learners are asked to share what insights they have gained into their own thought process and framework.  The last session of the series askes learners to take these insights and apply them to their thoughts and behavior on a corporate and individual level.  This last step is where learners have the opportunity to do something with what they have been learning in a discerning and intentional way.  Throughout the program the educator must be sensitive to the needs of the group and the change that is working within them as they examine the very roots of how they see the world.

This resource is presented in an online format.  It as been built to allow for much broader access than would be possible with traditional print distribution.  It has been designed to be useful to New Sanctuary chapters around the country to give them concrete tools that make education on immigration not only approachable by organizers but a calling anyone can answer with their religious community.  This is an open document.  Anyone who can access it on the internet is free to use it in educating their community.  The creators ask for no fee for its use but only that users build back into the resource by designing their own exercises and posting them on this site for others to use as part of the resource.  As such, the resource is also a living document that will grow according to the needs of those who utilize and build back into it.  This curriculum is compatible with any media on the internet through external links to other sites.  By the power of crowd-sourcing this hosted resource will be more comprehensive and powerful than a print resource ever could.