When a global crisis hits the headlines, international classrooms feel the impact immediately.
Pupils arrive carrying a jumble of TikTok fragments, overheard adult conversations and genuine anxiety, leaving teachers to navigate what a responsible classroom response looks like.
This matters especially because in diverse, transient school communities, crises are not distant abstractions. They enter classrooms filtered through pupils’ own experiences of moving countries, adapting to new places and living across cultures.
For years, the dominant response has been to centre empathy. That instinct comes from a good place. But in international settings, especially, empathy can become the endpoint too quickly.
Pupils may express concern without developing understanding of why crises happen - the structures, systems and patterns beneath the human stories they are seeing, the context in which a situation develops and why some people do not have the choices that others do.
Of course, when a crisis is directly affecting a pupil or family, pastoral care has to come first. But if we want pupils to make sense of a news-heavy world, we need to move beyond what can sometimes become accidental “empathy theatre” and put data before drama.
That does not mean removing the human element. It means sequencing it more carefully.
Talking about global crises in international school classrooms
Step 1: Starting with what pupils know
In our Year 5 migration unit, for example, we begin with the pupils’ own journeys. Many children have a personal story of movement, whether that means relocating across borders, leaving extended family behind or learning how to adapt to a new culture.
We map those journeys and talk about why families move. Some reasons are exciting, some are difficult and most are mixed.
Starting here gives pupils a genuine point of connection. It grounds migration in lived experience rather than borrowed emotion.
Step 2: Using narrative distance
From there, we widen the lens through fiction. For example, when pupils began bringing anxious questions about the war in Ukraine into the classroom, we did not open live news feeds. Instead we turned to our Year 5 anchor text, Francesca Sanna’s The Journey.
The book follows a family forced to flee their home and travel towards safety. Because the setting is intentionally non-specific, pupils are not immediately pulled into the full emotional force or political complexity of the event.
Instead they can think about displacement, uncertainty and belonging through a story that feels safe enough to enter, but serious enough to matter.
Step 3: Bringing the issue closer to home
A story alone, however, is not enough. To bridge the gap between fiction and global reality, we next bring the learning into the pupils’ immediate local context.
We examine visible patterns of labour migration in the city around us, looking at who moves for work, what kinds of roles draw people across borders, and how those decisions are shaped by family need, legal frameworks and economic inequality.
For primary pupils, this makes the mechanics of movement visible and immediate. It helps them to see migration not just as a sudden humanitarian crisis, but also as a structural feature of modern economic life.
Step 4: Moving from story to structure
Only then do we turn fully to structural analysis. Because the groundwork has been laid, the geography can now do its heavy lifting.
Pupils build frameworks of push and pull factors for migration, from conflict and economic instability to safety, work and education. They map migration routes and examine how borders, rivers, mountains and distance shape movement.
They build timelines, and notice patterns. Gradually, migration stops looking random or simply tragic. It becomes something shaped by systems, constraints and decisions.
This is what I mean by data before drama. Human stories are not excluded, but emotional engagement becomes a bridge to deeper understanding. The texts and local case studies may differ by setting, but the curriculum logic remains the same.
Step 5: Applying the same thinking to current crises
In Year 6, we apply the same logic when pupils raise contemporary conflicts.
We do not ignore those questions, but we do not teach each crisis as a standalone tragedy either. Instead we connect them to broader work on global systems: resource distribution, power, international institutions and the mechanics of aid.
When pupils suggest a bake sale or fundraiser, we do not dismiss the instinct. We use it as a starting point.
What has to happen before aid reaches people? Who controls access? What role do infrastructure, transport corridors, coordination and political decision-making play? Those questions move pupils from good intentions towards genuine understanding.
Why this matters now
Focusing on structure does not blunt empathy. It strengthens it. When care is built on knowledge, it becomes more resilient and less performative.
Pupils are then better able to interpret what they are seeing, ask sharper questions and avoid being pulled solely by the emotional force of the latest headline or image.
By putting data before drama, we give them something steadier: a way to recognise patterns, ask better questions and make sense of complexity.
Liam Murphy is humanities curriculum lead at Kellett School, The British International School in Hong Kong
