2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Migratory/seasonal farmworker (MSFW) families in the United States are defined as those living a mobile lifestyle following the crops across the country. The mobile lifestyle of migratory families impacts their children by creating financial instability, structural barriers, and interruptions to their education. This inconsistent access to high-quality education as a result of frequent moves and lack of resources in the regions they live in has pushed and ignored migratory students out of the popular conversation in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) regarding broadening participation. Thus, this work revised existing measures of the frameworks of funds of knowledge and social capital, which will help to empirically examine how bodies of knowledge (e.g., skills, experiences, and knowledge accumulated from home) are transformed and supported by migratory students’ circles of influence (e.g., social networks and community assets that assist students in navigating social structures) given their unique context of being MSFW students in STEM education. A survey was distributed to program directors of the College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP), which is a federally funded program that assists children of migratory families during their first year of college. The survey was created from two prior validated instruments on funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth. A total of 108 undergraduate migratory students in STEM fields who were either previously or currently associated with CAMP responded to the survey. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to confirm the underlying theoretical relationships between the survey items and the predicted constructs. Results supported a two latent construct model with six items that make up the instrument: 1.) knowledge/experience outside of school and 2.) social networks in the form of neighborhood friends. These results add to the ongoing conversation of combining the frameworks of funds of knowledge and with forms of capital (e.g., social capital) to create one that is more comprehensive and identify specific networks and places that support the development of funds of knowledge of underrepresented students in STEM. The results from our study suggest that migratory student’s neighborhood friends play a significant role in the development, activation or exchange of funds of knowledge to navigate STEM spaces.