Migrants' Moving Literacies in a Seasonal Harvest School

Christine Seon "Sol" Rheem

Every August, thousands of workers converge in northeastern Maine for an annual fruit harvest. During the three weeks of the blueberry season, the Seasonal Harvest School (SHS) educates the rakers' children, who come from Indigenous First Nations and Tribes, Mexico, Puerto Rico, southeastern U.S. states, and from other towns in Maine. Focusing on the experiences of First Nations and Latine youth ages 13-16, this study analyzes the role that moving literacies play in the lives of migrating youth. I ask, (1) How do migrating youth learn about language, literacy, and identity as they move from place to place? (2) How do migrating youth's literacy practices shape and how are they shaped by seasonal migration? I am a Korean immigrant educator and scholar who has worked at SHS for ten years. Data collection includes participant observation, interviews, storytelling activities, audio recordings, and student work between 2022-2025. Data analysis combines discourse analysis and ethnographic storytelling, focusing on youth's 'small stories' as they move across time, place, and relationships. This study contributes to literacy education by introducing the concept of moving literacies, which draws on decolonial feminist theories to examine how First Nations and Latine youth author identities and enact solidarity across multilingual and multicultural contexts. Methodologically, this study takes a lyric approach to ethnography that centers fragmented storytelling as data, analytical unit, and mode of interpretation. This dissertation reframes mobility as a generative site of learning, countering narratives that privilege settled citizenship over migration.

About Christine Seon "Sol" Rheem

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education Department at Michigan State University. Prior to my Ph.D., I taught high school history to newly arrived immigrant students in Somerville, Massachusetts. I use ethnography to trace the knowledge that lives in the fragmented stories that migration produces. My interest in migration is shaped by my own partial and contradictory stories. I was born '선 (Seon)' in Seoul, Korea, renamed 'Christine' in English-language documents after immigrating to the United States at age 7, and later called 'Sol' by friends in Guatemala. I hold on to all of these names to complicate simple stories of identity, marking instead the ongoing experiences of loss, translation, and recreation that accompany migration. This orientation drives my research, writing, and teaching. In my research and teaching, I examine migration and multilingualism in education from anticolonial perspectives, with a focus on youth experiences. In my policy work, I use this expertise and my analytical skills to enhance programs that expand opportunities for migratory youth. As a writer, I use lyric nonfiction to dwell in the gaps and absences that migration creates, reclaiming them as sites of knowledge and resistance. I have published writing on critical theory, migration, and racial identity in Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Theory into Practice, and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. I hold a B.A. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Bowdoin College and an M.Ed in Secondary Education from Boston College.