Migrant Students Scaffolding and Writing their Own Stories: From Socio-Culturally Relevant Enabling Mentor Texts to Collaborative Student Narratives

Children of migrant farmworkers drop out of school more than any other group. They need and deserve academic support that is socioculturally relevant to their lives. This article describes an innovative summer literacy program for intermediate and middle level children of migrant farmworkers that presented them with more than two dozen children’s picture story books with migrancy themes and systematically documented their responses to the books. Then, using these mentor texts and their responses as scaffolding, the students collaborated to create semi-autobiographical, illustrated narratives about growing up as migrants. These student-created CPSBs challenge our society’s erasure of and hostility toward migrants.