In today's episode, we dive into an excerpt from the audiobook, Literacy's Democratic Roots by Tom Newkirk, which focuses on the powerful concept of funds of knowledge. This term coined by Luis Moll and his colleagues refers to the rich, culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills that students bring from their home and communities. Through this body of research, Tom explores practical ways to integrate these funds of knowledge into your curriculum. You'll hear about real-life examples, such as how a sixth-grader's candy-selling experience was used to teach scientific concepts and nutritional values. These insights will inspire you to view your students' backgrounds as valuable assets that can enrich classroom learning.
Below is a full transcript
Tom Newkirk:
Chapter Two, Funds of Knowledge. Funds of knowledge are the historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual help, individual functioning and well-being as noted by Luis Moll and his associates in their essay, Funds of Knowledge for Teaching. This term encompasses practical knowledge for, among other things, home repair, cooking, planting, hunting, healing, child-rearing, and entertaining. Originators of the term distinguish it from the more general term, culture, which is more often associated with folklore such as storytelling, crafts, and the arts. They stress that children come to school well-stocked with information and interests that we can draw on in school learning.
Let's start with candy. In the early 1990s, an education professor, Luis Moll, and a team of two anthropologists and a classroom teacher set out to document the funds of knowledge in a working-class, Tucson, Arizona community, and to use their findings to make the school curriculum more culturally relevant to students. They trained a group of teachers to visit households and use open-ended ethnographic questioning to learn about the household expertise that they might bring into the classroom. During one of the visits, they noticed sixth-grader Carlos selling candy that he had brought in from Mexico where he spent his summers. Indeed, half the children in his class regularly traveled to and from Mexico, and Carlos in particular was a real entrepreneur, a participant in international commerce. In another visit, the teachers learned that one of the parents in Carlos' class made and sold pepitoria a Mexican treat. So the teachers decided to use candy as an inquiry theme.
The class generated questions including, what ingredients are used in the production of candy in United States and Mexico? And they were surprised to see how many fewer ingredients were in Mexican candy. Mrs. Rodriguez, the candy making mother, came to class and demonstrated how to make pepitoria. While it was cooking, she talked to the class about how to make different kinds of candy, US and Mexican food consumption and the nutritional value of candies. Once the pepitoria was finished, the students packaged, priced and sold it.
This is a good example of the relationship between spontaneous and scientific concepts as asserted by Lev Vygotsky in the book, Thought and Language. These border-crossing students had formed their own opinions about their preferences between US and Mexican candies, different levels of sweetness, for example. Teachers built the school-based scientific concepts, scientific method, nutritional value, artificial versus natural coloring, candy consumption, and production, upon the everyday spontaneous concepts that students brought to the class. These everyday concepts bring life and relevance to learning, and the scientific concepts help students see these experiences in a systematic way. In other words, schooling is not simply about validating funds of knowledge, but about using them.
Let us pause for a moment and appreciate the term, funds of knowledge. Funds implies wealth, a deep reservoir of resources to draw on and spend, implicitly refuting the pervasive deficit models that have minimized what students of color bring to schooling. And knowledge, not simply experiences or culture, but actual knowledge, insights, and skills gained through experience that have or should have the same status as any school learning. That is the implicit claim so elegantly put forward in the term. As already indicated, Moll crafts his pedagogical work on the socio-cognitive work of Lev Vygotsky. And one Vygotsky quote is particularly significant. "That the school has been locked away and walled in as if by a tall fence from life itself has been its greatest failing. Education is just as meaningless outside the real world as is fire without oxygen or as is breathing in a vacuum."
In an interview with a high school teacher working in Chandler, Arizona, I got a sense of just high, how impenetrable this fence has been. She went to the same high school that Rudolfo Anaya, one of the founders of Chicano literature had attended, but she was never introduced to his classic, Bless me Ultima, until later in college. The same was true for another Phoenix high school teacher whom I interviewed. She was an A student in high school where she read Shakespeare every year completely unengaged. "I did the packets," she said. It wasn't until college when she read Sandra Cisneros and Gloria Anzaldua that she found reading addressed to her a tall fence indeed.
For Vygotsky and Moll, his outside knowledge is key to engaging children and to making school meaningful. It's the oxygen of learning. But this outside knowledge interacts or can interact with the objectives of school, and it is this meeting, this dialect that is central. Schools, for example, can introduce genres, vehicles for students to use and extend their understanding and passions. They can provide a vocabulary to help name some of these experiences and let students see them in a more abstract and systematic way. For example, my friend and reading specialist, Ellen Keene, insists on teaching young readers what terms like, inference and schema mean.
Critical race theorist, Tara Yasso, has created a framework called, Community Cultural Wealth, that elaborates the resources that children in communities of color bring the schooling. In her article titled, Whose Culture Has Capital, A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community, culture, or Wealth, she identifies six admittedly overlapping forms of capital. Aspirational capital, the ability to maintain hopes and dreams for the future, even in the face of real or perceived barriers. Linguistic capital, the capacity to use multiple languages and be proficient in recounting stories, parables, and proverbs. Familial capital, those cultural knowledges nurtured among familia, kin, that carry a sense of community, history, memory and cultural intuition. Social capital, the ability to use networks of people and community resources. Navigational capital, the skills of maneuvering through social institutions. Resistant capital, the persistence to oppose and resist subordination and injustice.
The predominant deficit models in her view are blind to these forms of capital. There are a number of other important concepts or teaching frames for students of color that overlap with funds of knowledge. Among these are Goldie Muhammad's, equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy in her book, Cultivating Genius, Alfred Tatum's, textual lineages in the book, Reading for Their Life, Lorena Harman's, culturally sustaining practices illustrated in her book, Textured Teaching, and Gloria Ladson-Billings' culturally relevant pedagogy in her essay, But That's Just Good Teaching, The case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy.
Jessica Lander, a high school civics teacher and author of Making Americans, Stories of Historic Struggles, New Ideas and Inspiration in Immigrant Education, argues that the immigrant experience can be an asset in schools. Lander says, "Their journeys to America have often made them masters of negotiation, problem-solving, teamwork and language. For one of my students, English is not a second language, but his 10th. They develop powerful skills as linguistic and cultural translators for their families and remarkable perseverance honed by learning to live in a new land." Educators must figure out how to become aware of these strengths and how to leverage them in the curriculum.
Who are you? The concept of funds of knowledge has particular relevance for marginalized groups. Moll focused his attention on Mexican-American students in the Southwest who were often given low-level tasks to do in school. His associate, Kathy Amante writes, "The type of educational practice often prescribed for working class and minoritized students is rote learning in small incremental steps. I find this type of teaching to be stifling and unnecessary. My students are as capable of developing and carrying out their own inquiry-based research projects as students of any background. In addition, when learning incorporates topics central to students' own lives, they become more confident and engaged learners."
This belief in the wealth of knowledge students possess is especially relevant for English language learners who can practice the craft of invisibility. They may stay silent during class discussions, perhaps embarrassed by their accents or by the times they are asked to repeat themselves when they do try English and are unable to formulate responses on the fly in a fast-moving conversation. If they are called on, there is that startled look and defensive minimal response. In other words, a teacher might be tempted to make judgments about verbal ability, even intelligence, based on this silence. It can seem like nothing is there, a deficit to be sure. But I'd like to argue the concept is profoundly useful for teaching writing to all students. If all writing, indeed all learning, comes from some autobiographical base, it is important for teachers to know some of that autobiography. The more we know, the more effective we will be in engaging students in writing, indeed, in schooling altogether.
Don Graves once posed this challenge, make three columns. In the first column list, without checking your roster, all of the students in your class. In the second column, name something that each student knows or can do. In the third column, put a check if the student knows that you know this about them. When I try this with my college classes around the second week, there are always two or three students I forget in the first column, often a Jessica or Jennifer who doesn't speak and disappears from my view. The exercise prompts me to see and get to know that student. Learning this information is obviously helpful in developing meaningful writing choices, but on a more fundamental level, it provides a point of contact. If, horror of horrors, I find that one of my students is a New York Yankees' fan. We definitely have something to talk about.
I will argue, along with Moll and his colleagues, that we can leverage these competencies and interests to fulfill educational goals. They can be topics for stories and inquiries, but they have importance beyond that. In our classes, we see a part of the student, and if we're honest, writing and reading may never be central to their identity, hard as we might try to make it central. But if we look more widely, we can recognize other skills. A student may be a superb soccer player, or do voluntary work in an animal shelter, or fix cars with their dad, or take care of brothers and sisters. In effect, a student says to us, "I am more than you see of me in this class."
By taking a wide angle view of students, we can build lasting connections to students who may not have thrived in our classes. We see, for example, that quiet, young girl who rarely speaks in class is a fierce defender on the soccer team shouting out directions to teammates. That image is important. There is more to me than you see.
Edie:
To hear more from Literacy's Democratic Roots, you can stream or download the audiobook wherever you get your audiobooks. Thanks for listening. And let us know what you'd like to hear about in our time together. To learn more and read a full transcript, visit blog.heinemann.com.
About the Author
Thomas Newkirk is the bestselling author of Minds Made for Stories along with numerous other Heinemann titles, including Writing Unbound, Embarrassment, The Art of Slow Reading, The Performance of Self in Student Writing (winner of the NCTE’s David H. Russell Award), and Misreading Masculinity. He taught writing at the University of New Hampshire for thirty-nine years, and founded the New Hampshire Literacy Institutes, a summer program for teachers. In addition to working as a teacher, writer, and editor, he has served as the chair of his local school board for seven years.
