Humanization and Social Dreaming: A Case Study of Changing Social Relations in a Summer Migrant Educational Program

Broadly, this is a study of the creation of intellectual space through talk-in-interaction in the 2002 Statewide Migrant Student Leadership Institute (hereafter, simply the Migrant program), a month-long academic and residential program for high school aged students from California's migrant worker community. Essentially, however, it is an exploration of the idea of humanization founded on the close socio-linguistic examination of the development of social scientific and philosophic reasoning and expression in an intellectual apprenticeship. Utilizing anthropological, sociolinguistic, and philosophical modes of inquiry in concert, I examine two Social Science class sessions, post-program research interviews and student evaluations to create a fine-grained portrait of how intellectual space in the program was created and sustained as well as students' subjective experience of the curriculum. I draw from four principal information sources (1) After reviewing approximately forty-hours of audio-video recordings of Migrant program Humanities and Social Science classrooms, I decided to focus on approximately six hours of one Social Science classroom that feature (a) a whole-group lecture/discussion on "the first day of school" in the Migrant program and (b) a lecture/discussion on the educational pipeline, college preparation, and Latino admissions to the University of California system that highlights the limits of intellectual inquiry in school-like settings; (2) Three recursive iterations of content logs (CT) of the above AVR's; (3) Post-program student evaluations conducted on the last day of 2002 program; (4) Research interviews of two migrant students conducted in their home communities approximately one year after their participation in the 2002 program. I conclude the study with an elaboration of Marx Wartofsky's ideas on models, tertiary artifacts, and human development. The fruit of this concluding discussion being an analysis of the fertile and efficacious everyday life created, nurtured, transgressed, contradicted, and sustained in the Migrant program.