The Role of Environmental Safety Zones in the Critical Consciousness of Latina/o Migrant Farmworker Youth

• In Event: 44.065 - Literacies of Social Transformation: Enacting Freirean Perspectives Across Contexts

Abstract

Objectives
Migrant farmworker youth often face social isolation, linguistic and cultural barriers, difficulty in transferring credits across schools, and low expectations in K-12 schools (Cranston-Gingras, 2003). Though K-12 schools often place the blame on migrant farmworker youth and their families for students’ challenges in school (Martinez et al., 2001), many migrant farmworker youth are critically aware of how K-12 schools produce the conditions for them to fail. As a result, migrant youth often opt out of K-12 schools. This presentation explores the role of educational contexts in the critical consciousness (Freire, 1970) of migrant farmworker youth and how they enact literacies of social transformation as they transition from K-12 schools to a GED granting migrant education program.

Theoretical Framework
To examine the environment of educational contexts, I drew upon what San Pedro (2014) calls the Environmental Safety Zone (ESZ). The environmental safety zone is described as: “a zone around each of us that prevents or allows our ideas, knowledges, and experiences to grow and become realized. This includes the contexts and situations in which we are located within schools, at home, in the community, and so on” (San Pedro, 2014, p. 51). As individuals in K-12 schools, migrant youth also navigated their Internal Safety Zone (ISZ), the ideas, knowledges and cumulative identity up to the present point, within the environmental safety zone. Critical consciousness is analyzed as reflection and action to change one’s reality (Freire, 1970). Freire (2009) affirms that “only the leaders’ own involvement in reality, within a historical situation, led them to criticize this situation and to wish to change it” (p. 67).

Methods
This paper is a part of a larger three-year ethnographic study of the schooling experiences of migrant farmworker youth in a High School Equivalency Program (HEP) in the Midwest. As a cultural worker (Freire, 1998) in the program, the presenter collected and analyzed semi-structured interviews, platicas (informal discussions), and observations for this paper.

Results
A comparison between the schooling experiences of migrant farmworker youth in K-12 schools and in a High School Equivalency Program revealed that migrant farmworkers youth were critically aware of how K-12 schools created an environment where migrant youth faced difficulty in credit transfers, racial tensions, low expectations, and English-only policies. Although they consciously criticized and attempted to change these conditions, they were pushed to the margins of K-12 schools. However, in the High School Equivalency Program migrant youth were at the center of the environmental safety zone. As a result, critical consciousness was a central component in the successful education of migrant farmworker youth in pursuit of the GED.

Scholarly Significance
This paper highlights how educational environments influence the critical consciousness of youth and their potential to enact literacies of social transformation. Ultimately, this paper suggests that centering migrant farmworker youth at the center of the environmental safety zone facilitates possibilities for the development of critical consciousness and learning.

Author

• Lorena Gutierrez, University of California Riverside