This workshop draws on two related projects that can help to a) understand how teachers and schools can facilitate the inclusion of migrant students, and b) facilitate the process of change that can help them do so. To understand how schools can meet migrant students' needs, we draw on the insights generated by Teaching That Matter for Migrant Students (TEAMS) study. This research project has  examined teacher agency and collaboration for supporting migrant students within different schools and systems in Sweden, Finland, and Scotland. To achieve the second aim, we demonstrate how the Agents of Change Toolkit (ACToolkit) can be used to facilitate opportunities for knowledge exchange and collaboration between teachers, researchers, school leaders, educational authorities, and other professionals.

Drawing on one case study from the TEAMS research project, looking at how students can be supported to integrate into the school community, and how staff can be supported to support migrant students, the workshop will give participants opportunity to engage with the recently completed ACToolkit knowledge exchange project. They will be able to explore some of the serious games which accompany this process, and to consider how they may use the ACToolkit in their own setting to practically support the process of identifying and making changes in their inclusive and equitable approaches and practice related to supporting the integration of migrant and refugee students.

Recent estimates from the United Nations (UN) point out that over 15 percent of the world’s 260 million migrants are children and young people. In 2020, more than 17,500 child refugees and migrants arrived in Europe (UNICEF, 2020). Since then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has initiated the biggest inflow of migrants since the Second World War. At the time of writing, an estimated five million people have fled Ukraine and there is no end to this crisis in sight. Most Ukrainian refugees are women and children of school age. This new wave of refugees exacerbates an already accelerated rise in the number of migrants globally as people continue to move for economic reasons or to escape natural disasters and conflict. Consequently, the social and cultural makeup of school-age populations is changing rapidly, creating challenges for schools and teachers in national education systems that were designed to meet the needs of local populations. The current crisis highlights the urgent need to consider how schools can accommodate the increasing diversity of student populations as a common feature of modern educational systems rather than a situational crisis or problem of migration.

Research shows that teachers can and do act as agents of change (Pantić, 2015; 2017; Pantić & Florian, 2015, van der Heijen et al., 2015). However, school leadership and teachers often feel unprepared for dealing with the challenges of including refugees and other migrant students. This is due to assumptions embedded in the institutional contexts of their work, the lack of adequate support, or their own unexamined beliefs about teaching and learning in the contexts of increasing diversity of student populations (Florian & Pantić, 2017). Within this context, ACToolkit was co-designed together with practitioners in Scotland as an artefact that can facilitate the development and implementation of theories of change that can promote inclusion of all students (see e.g. Laing & Todd, 2015), engaging relevant actors in accessible research-based activities that are also practicable and collaborative. ACT is a practical toolkit for schools and teachers designed to help them identify and enact the changes required to improve education around the SDGs, particularly SDG4 ‘Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all’ (UNESCO, 2021).

The Agents of Change Toolkit project created knowledge exchange opportunities for teachers, researchers, leadership, educational authorities, designers, and out-of-school educators via a series of seminars and workshops, and co-designs an engaging, practical toolkit for schools and teachers to identify the changes required to improve education around the SDGs. Case studies of specific change projects related to migrant integration and how these were implemented in Scotland are being developed and will be shared during the workshop. The project draws on research and theories of change (e.g. Laing & Todd, 2015) to ensure that the toolkit is engaging, accessible, and effective and it includes research-informed, pedagogically sound, educational games, made freely available online. Game-based learning has considerable potential for efficient delivery of both knowledge and behavioural outcomes (Abbott, 2019a; Games & Social Change, 2015) and a learning-objective-centric workflow for teachers has already been piloted by Abbott (2019b). The Agents of Change Toolkit project (ACT) used an interdisciplinary co-design methodology to create ‘serious’ games (and other toolkit elements) in consideration of theories of change towards particular purposes for particular schools using scenarios related to SDGs., in this case for facilitating integration of migrant students in schools.

The ACToolkit enables educators to incorporate research about inclusive education and teacher agency into schools’ self-evaluation and development. Importantly, the toolkit guides school staff to evaluate the impact of change in and on their school communities, which is sometimes missing from the whole-school improvement efforts. The workshop will illustrate the usage of ACToolkit using the case for facilitating migrant integration in schools. Implications for educators in making use of the Toolkit to support their response to the increasing student diversity or other the SDGs will be discussed, and there will be opportunity for participants to discuss how the Toolkit and serious games could be applied in their contexts.

Abbott, D., (2019a) Game-based learning for postgraduates: an empirical study of an educational game to teach research skills. Higher Education Pedagogies, 4 (1). pp. 80-104. ISSN 2375-2696 Abbott, D., (2019b) Modding Tabletop Games for Education. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11385. pp. 318-329. ISSN 0302-9743 Florian, L. & Pantić. N. (2017). Teacher Education for the Changing Demographics of Schooling: Policy, Practice and Research. In L. Florian & N. Pantić (Eds.) Teacher Education for the Changing Demographics of Schooling (pp. 1-5), Springer International. Games and social change: In-between screens, places and communities, (2014 – 2015), [project], https://gtr.ukri.org/project/9C80BC05-ECAE-4BBD-9D1A-32C85BCFAACC van der Heijden, H.R.M.A., Geldens, J.J.M., Beijaard, D. & Popeijus, H.L. (2015). Characteristics of teachers as change agents, Teachers and Teaching, 21:6, 681-699, DOI: 10.1080/13540602.2015.1044328 Laing, K. and Todd, L. (eds) (2015). Theory-based Methodology: Using theories of change in educational development, research and evaluation. Research Centre for Learning and Teaching, Newcastle University. Pantić, N. (2017). An exploratory study of teacher agency for social justice. Teaching and Teacher Education, 66, 219-230. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.04.008 Pantić, N. (2015). A model for study of teacher agency for social justice. Teachers and Teaching; Theory and Practice, 21(6), 759-778. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2015.1044332 UNESCO. (2021). Leading SDG 4 – Education 2030. https://en.unesco.org/themes/education2030-sdg4 UNICEF (2020). World Migration Report: 2020. https://gdc.unicef.org/resource/world-migration-report-2020