Practicing a Moving Literacies Curriculum with Indigenous and Latinx Youth in a Migrant Education Program

• In Event: Disrupting Deficit Logics: Centering Community Knowledge in the Design of Educational Research

Abstract

Every year, First Nations and Latinx families converge to harvest blueberries in a rural region of a northeastern U.S. state. From a larger ethnographic case study of the Seasonal Harvest School (SHS), a summer educational program for migratory children, I focus on the Moving Literacies Curriculum, a data collection method that was designed over 1.5 years of collaboration and dialogue with SHS. I conceptualize ‘moving literacies’ to encompass the range of interactions, understandings, experiences, and expressions that emerge from migrant farmworker children’s mobility and bi/multilingualism. My study seeks to document these literacy practices to understand how educational settings can sustain these abilities of Indigenous and Latinx youth to resist dominant narratives of education that privilege settled citizenship over mobile migrants.

This study is grounded in an understanding of literacy not as a neutral skill, but as an active, negotiated process influenced by history, context and power dynamics (Gutiérrez, 2008). Moving people draw upon multiple sources of knowledge as they move about across multiple worlds. The mobile youth of SHS draw knowledge from multiple reference points and express this in unbounded, creative, fluid, wild, fragmented ways (Anzaldúa, 1987; Cha, 1982), visible without the need to name, categorize, and assess the appropriateness or competence of the languaging practices that give these expressions life (Flores & Rosa, 2015, 2023). I theorize these expressions of knowledge that arise from moving as moving literacy practices.

My ten-year perennial relationship with this harvest in this rural area is marked by repeated migration, seasonal return. In this community, I am an educator, leader, and colleague, working to support the flourishing of this migratory community’s children. The Moving Literacies Curriculum is a result of flexible and ongoing conversation with research participants and my research site that incorporates SHS values and generates data to answer my research question.

The Moving Literacies Curriculum is composed of layers of multimodal, arts-based, land-based, activities that seek to engage youth to tell stories about the ways that they move through multiple places, understand how multiple histories shape them, learn from a variety of experiences that are part of their movement through multiple places. Data sources during the first phase will be student work as they explore and shape the Moving Literacies Curriculum, recordings of discussions, storytelling circles, student reflection, process interviews, and observations. A second phase will conduct three follow-up interviews with participants as they leave the SHS region after the harvest to return to their various residences. Data collection will take place between August - December 2025. The unit of analysis is “small stories” (Georgakopolou, 2008), a discourse analytic unit which sees how participants’ interactions with people and with texts can be analyzed as tales, tellings, and tellers that reveal the participants’ relationship to themselves, those around them, and their settings.

This study contributes alternative conceptualizations of literacies that center mobility as a source of knowledge, expanding educators’ thinking about the dynamics of language, literacy, power, and education.

Author

• Christine Seon "Sol" Rheem, Michigan State University