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MA/PhD Theses Abstracts of Current Students & Alumni |
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Ganapathy, Sandyha (MA). Step Ahead to Success: An Anthropological Analysis of Education and Migrant Farmworking Youth, (Greenbaum). 2001.
Migrant and seasonal farmwork continues to be one of the lowest paying, most dangerous, and least stable forms of employment. Earnings for farmwork are not commensurate to the amount of labor exerted, and income levels for migrant farmworking families fall well below the poverty level. The type of work performed is very physically strenuouos. Farmworkers must contend with high risks of pesticide poisoning, over-exhaustion, and machinery-operating injuries (OSHA 1995). The availability of these jobs are dependent on mercurial growing seasons. In order to sustain themselves, families must migrate along growing streams and according to harvest calenders (Association of Farmworker Programs 1991: 8). Despite these conditions, millions of individuals and families seeks migrant farmworking jobs as their primary means of making a livelihood.
Pursuing a higher and technical education is often seen as the key to finding adequate employment or a better paying job. Ideally, the children of farmworkers should be able to move out of a migrant farmworking lifestyle by acquiring the necessary skills to find other employment. However, the nature of migrant farmworking makes the pursuit of education especially difficult. Families must move every season in order to sustain themselves economically and learning processes become discontinuous with the transfers between school systems. Subsequently, migrant youth have one of the highest rates of drop out.
Various educational and social service agencies are attempting to address the problems in the education of migrant youth by providing supplemental programs and services, such as after school-tutoring, mentoring, and summer programs. "Step Ahead to Success" is one such program being implemented by the Florida Department of Education- Adult Migrant and Seasonal Farmworker Programs. In order for this program and other such programs to be effective, it is important to get input from the population that is to be served. The research conducted for this thesis focuses on understanding the challenges in pursuing an education from the perspective of members of the migrant community in Hillsborough County and Pasco County. The purpose of this is to learn from members of the community how best to address these educational challenges and devise and implement effective educational programs.
Through a series of in-depth individual and group interviews, fifteen community members provided valuable insight at, issue of education. The community members ranged in age from 16 to 45 and spoke about their own experiences in the school system as well as the experiences of their children, family members and neighbors. They offered substantive analyses about the importance and need for certain services and also about the ineffectiveness of other services. With this type of knowledge, educational and social service agencies should be more effective in their work to improve the educational and employment prospects of the migrant community.
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