In 2015, over 500,000 newcomers arrived in Europe, most of whom were escaping war in Syria or elsewhere. Of those 500,000, half were children (Fifield, 2015). These children experienced violence, social breakdown, distressed parents, loss of family members, ambiguous loss (when a person isn't sure what happened to someone) and incredible psychological trauma and stress, leading at times to anxiety and fear, nightmares and difficulties in sleeping. In addition, many of the children hadn't been to school in a year or more. A year earlier in the United States, thousands of unaccompanied or separated minors from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador made their way to the US border (and they continue to come), most of whom were escaping situations that threatened their physical and psychological safety. They too experienced trauma and interrupted schooling. Other adults leave their home countries looking for a better life for their children, including better access to healthcare and education, or better job opportunities. Others still, spend most of their lives traveling from one country to the next, or they live half of their time in one country and half in the other, or they follow their loved ones around the world as they migrate or maybe they just want to explore the world.

Globalization and the increased movement of transnational migrants around the world underscores the need for educational responses to migration that attend to the linguistic and cultural diversity of demographically changing student bodies. Europe's migrant crisis, the increasing number of unaccompanied or separated children moving across national boundaries and other recent events in migration reify the need for educators to consider migrant students at all levels of curriculum development and implementation. Thus, on a professional level as a teacher and teacher educator, I was propelled to write this book to help people understand migration experiences through the telling of individual migration stories (and metaphorical/metonymical analysis of them) that would hopefully develop empathy for globally mobile students.