Student Funds of Knowledge

How do you plan to draw from your student's funds of knowledge?

Being able to find ways to draw from student’s funds of knowledge is really important in implementing a culturally responsive teaching. Moll, Amanti, Neff & Gonzalez provide a study on how to gather this information in their own classrooms by utilizing “a combination of ethnographic observations, open-ended interviewing strategies, life histories, and case studies that, when combined analytically, can portray accurately the complex functions of households within their socio-historical contexts” (132). While this may be a preferable method, it might be difficult to do regularly with so many students and especially within school cultures that are more distrustful of teachers. As such, I also hope to incorporate direct and prompted consultation strategies (See “Student Input and Strategies”) as a means of assessing what students are bringing into the classroom and what they might want to bring in. This might look like utilizing questionnaires at the beginning of the year or at different points of the semester, as well as class conversations or interviews with individual students about things like what their parents do, what they like to do in their spare time, or different knowledge they have that they learned outside of the classroom. (A sample list of items that can come up through asking specific questions or learning more about the students is located to the side with more specific and in-depth items from the study).

What is interesting about student funds of knowledge that makes it slightly different from culturally responsive teaching is its focus on the lives of individual students rather than the larger cultures that the students might belong to. “Although the term ‘funds of knowledge’ is not meant to replace the anthropological concept of culture, it is more precise for our purposes because of its emphasis on strategic knowledge and related activities essential to households’ functioning, development, and well-being. It is specific funds of knowledge pertaining to the social, economic, and productive activities of people in a local region, not ‘culture’ in its broader, anthropological sense, that we seek to incorporate strategically into classrooms” (139). As such, this knowledge can be drawn more specifically from students, rather than trying to find information on specific cultures from online resources or individuals, and can relate to a large universe of potential areas and interests that can get other students interested in sharing their own understandings of similar knowledge. With this in mind, frequently allowing students to incorporate the knowledge that they have acquired outside of the classroom in projects and assignments can be really meaningful. Also, by creating assessments that “recognize strengths outside the range of traditional measurements,” this allows educators to better acknowledge how “socialized patterns of abilities and achievement may vary, on average, from one group to another” (Sternberg 2007, 152). This ultimately ties into culturally responsive teaching and allows educators to incorporate different ideas of who is intelligent based on the consideration of different cultures into their classroom.