Empathizing with Migrants: Multimodality and Partnership in Teachers’ Professional Development

The demographics of the Mediterranean islands like Malta have changed drastically in the last 10 years mainly due to migration flows from the south and east. During the scholastic year 2018-2019, Maltese schools had a 12% non-Maltese population overall, but in some coastal areas, this meant an 80% shift to a cohort of non-Maltese students. Teachers have been abruptly faced with the need to adopt multicultural and inclusive pedagogical approaches for which they did not feel they were fully equipped. This article describes the creation of a multimodal video production aimed at filling in this gap. It is based on the Partnership Studies philosophy, proposed and expounded by the anthropologist and social activist Riane Eisler, and on the Blue Option, a cooperative and proactive approach that looks at the “sea” as a space for encounter, understanding, and new intercultural awareness. The video has been tested with two groups of teachers in training, in order to investigate whether, and in what ways, it inspires student-teachers to express empathy with the migrants. Positive results have been extrapolated from the written reflections of the participants.