Migrant Students Scaffolding Their Stories: From Critiquing Socio-Culturally Relevant Mentor Texts to Publishing Collaborative Narratives

The children of migrant farm workers dropout of school more than any other group. Migrant children need and deserve substantial and well-focused support that is missing from most public schools. This paper presentation will describe research findings from an innovative summer literacy program for children of migrant farm workers. The program presented intermediate and middle-level students with over two dozen children’s picture storybooks (CPSBs), and systematically documented their responses to the books. Then, using these mentor texts and responses as scaffolding, the students collaborated to create their own, semi-autobiographical, illustrated, professionally-published narratives about growing up migrant. These student-created CPSBs challenge our society’s tragically pervasive narratives of erasure of and hatred toward migrants.