Everyday Funds of Knowledge and School Discourses
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EVERYDAY FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE AND SCHOOL DISCOURSES
INTRODUCTION
Those who live, work, and study in schools know that schools are places where many different kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing, talking, and being (i.e., discourses) come together. The potential for competing knowledge and discourses is especially high in classrooms where students and teachers of different backgrounds and experiences come together. What’s more, those who live, work, and study in schools typically recognize that certain kinds of knowledge, knowing, believing, and valuing have more power than other kinds. In particular, academic knowledge and discourses tend to have more credence inside school than do home, community, or peer group ways. The recognition that difference abounds in schools suggests the need for intensive and systematic study of the varied knowledge and discourses that youth bring to and experience in school. The intent of this chapter is to lay a foundation of research that has been generated on the funds of knowledge and of discourse documented in students’ lives outside of school and to connect that work to studies of school, or academic knowledges and discourses students are expected to demonstrate in school. I use the phrase “to demonstrate” rather than “to learn” purposely, because it remains an open question as to whether students are explicitly taught academic discourses in school, or whether those who enter school with budding proficiency in those discourses—a kind of linguistic capital (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990)—are groomed for development in those discourses, whereas those without linguistic capital fail to achieve. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S I N T H E O R Y A N D RESEARCH ON FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE AND DISCOURSE
Two bodies of research and theory are central to this discussion. First is research that examined students’ home cultures to determine whether differential levels of achievement in school might be explained by differences between the cultural practices of home and those demanded by school. Cross-cultural studies, such as the extensive project M. Martin-Jones, A. M. de Mejia and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Discourse and Education, 341–355. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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ELIZABETH BIRR MOJE
conducted by Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole (1981), also contributed to the focus on cultural difference by demonstrating that how students performed on certain academic tasks was more about whether they had practiced such tasks as a part of their everyday lives than it was about innate ability or about access to particular sociocultural tools. Scribner and Cole, like many other sociocultural theorists, documented that learning was a matter of engaging in certain social and cultural practices over time, with those practices producing not only knowledge, but also ways of knowing. One articulation of the concept that people learned certain kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing outside of school as well as in school was the concept
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