The Meaning of Education in the Lives of Successful Migrant Farmworker Students: Identity, Self, and Science

200 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2003.Migrant farmworkers constitute a substantial and increasing percentage of the agricultural workforce in this country. The migrant farmworker culture, which is spread across lines of ethnicity, class, and vocation, place this population of student at risk of dropping out of school. The obstacles impeding the educational success of migrant farmworker students have been well documented. The purpose of this study was to investigate the meaning education has in the lives of educationally successful migrant farmworker students in the hope that it would illuminate factors contributing towards migrant students' success in school. Using a narrative methodology, this research looks at how the student participants construct a "personal identity" in such a way that they can answer questions around who they are (and why) and who they want to become (and why) and the role of education and schooling in this process. The results show that this further involves students coming to understand who they are with regard to school subjects such as science. The implications for science education includes more fully promoting the possibility of science becoming an inclusive dynamic of the self to an extent that it is included in where students see themselves going in life. In so doing, science can become a part of the ways in which students describe advancing their education in a broader sense.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD