General approaches to multiculturalism run the risk of overlooking an increasingly diverse student population that deserves special consideration and attention: students from immigrant backgrounds whose families toil the fields in order to provide better educational opportunities for their children. This book's purpose is to guide educators to think deeply about their roles and responsibilities in the education of children of farmworker families in our nation's schools. Readers will view their classrooms, schools, districts, and the migrant programs they lead in a broad and inclusive manner through the lens of cultural proficiency. The initial steps when embracing cultural proficiency entails thinking reflectively about one's own values and behaviors and the school's policies and practices toward children of farmworker families. Cultivating a willingness, openness and commitment to meeting the challenges and opportunities of this often-invisible aspect of diversity is an important first step for the development of effective educational practices for migrant students and their families. The cultural proficiency framework can inform staff development models for working effectively with migrant students and their families.

In an era of crescent cultural globalization, cultures originally from south of the U.S. border are fighting to stay alive inside the classrooms of compulsory educational institutions. Day after day students in these settings are suffering the effects of a cultural McDonalization. These effects pollute their skills as well as their vernacular voices. Social sciences are created neglecting what students and parents bring in the form of a primeval culture. Hence, history is explained in an archaic context, nation-state model, perhaps valid for the nineteenth century but entirely dmod for the current social configuration. This critical (auto)-ethnographic research searches to answer these questions by hearing the vernacular voices that are empowered by the funds of knowledge within each barriohood and are prepared to give rise to a zone of cultural comfort (ZCe. In such zone, Latin-American cultures and the mainstream culture illuminate each other. After more than ten years of learning and teaching in the United States, tha author has come to realize that California has the optimal scenario within public schools to create a model of communicative actions.

General approaches to multiculturalism run the risk of overlooking an increasingly diverse student population that deserves special consideration and attention: students from immigrant backgrounds whose families toil the fields in order to provide better educational opportunities for their children. This book's purpose is to guide educators to think deeply about their roles and responsibilities in the education of children of farmworker families in our nation's schools. Readers will view their classrooms, schools, districts, and the migrant programs they lead in a broad and inclusive manner through the lens of cultural proficiency. The initial steps when embracing cultural proficiency entails thinking reflectively about one's own values and behaviors and the school's policies and practices toward children of farmworker families. Cultivating a willingness, openness and commitment to meeting the challenges and opportunities of this often-invisible aspect of diversity is an important first step for the development of effective educational practices for migrant students and their families. The cultural proficiency framework can inform staff development models for working effectively with migrant students and their families.