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Adults |
| Teaching in migrant camps
poses unusual challenges, quite different from those of a conventional
schoolhouse. Teams of instructors carry out portable supplies in
teaching boxes or bags. They set up easels and whiteboards in impromptu
classrooms, like the "commissaries" or kitchens of the early
potato camps.
Workers are often sleepy, even bone-weary after an early start and many hours in the fields. There is much coming and going, noise and distraction. Teachers sometimes find out only at the last minute that the camp has "broken" or closed with the end of the harvest and their students are gone. But in-camp teaching also has its own special rewards as well as its frustrations. The need is great, and students' hunger to learn is compelling. |
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| Adult Basic Education,
offered in in-camp or on-site classes, and the Literacy Volunteers of
America - Livingston Count's one-on-one tutoring help meet literacy
needs for native speakers of English. In-camp programs also teach basic
numeracy and life skills.
The large population of migrant farmworkers who come to the United States from other countries, and sometimes even their children, need another kind of language instruction. The LVA-LC program trains Center staff and students in teaching English as a Second Language. They then work with Latino, Haitian, and other migrants in camps. From 1992 to 1996, the Center's Movin' On Up (later called FIELDS) offered workers in western New York training in job readiness skills and linkages to job training programs and other services. |
 When
the Center first set up evening classes in migrant camps for farmworker
youth, they found "60 year old teen-agers" who wanted to
learn. Just as the Teen-Age Program was an in-camp extension of the
Children's Demonstration School, so that program in turn led into
in-camp instruction and vocational education for adults.
Like other rural poor people, the farmworker population has a high rate of functional illiteracy. School dropout is common. Geographic mobility, low and intermittent income, and social marginality all contribute to perpetuate an education gap between farmworkers and the rest of the work force. As the work force changes and field work gets mechanized, new skills will be necessary, even for the many adults who have long earned a proud and honorable living in the fields. Education in literacy, numeracy, life skills, and vocational training can provide these skills. |
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