Building Relationships with Families and Funds of Knowledge

This is one of the seminal articles on Funds of Knowlege: "Public schools have relied on a deficiency model to structure instruction for minority children that underestimates the funds of knowledge that U.S.-Mexican households contain. We argue that these funds are not only a key to understanding the cultural systems in which U.S.-Mexican children emerge, but are also important and useful assets in the classroom."

This is one of the seminal articles on the concept of "Funds of Knowledge", discussing how research into students' households can inform classroom practice.

In this article, Zipin celebrates the concept of Funds of Knowledge and the ways that it challenges the way "academic curriculum selectively privileges cultural capital embodied in elite social-structural positions." It then examines issues with how this concept is often applied: the "problematic tendencies to build curriculum around (1) light (i.e. positive) but not dark knowledge from learners’ lifeworlds; and (2) knowledge contents but not ways of knowing and transacting knowledge (funds of pedagogy)."

This article provides an overview and analysis of the literature on Funds of Knowledge.

This article provides another review of the literature on Funds of Knowledge.

"The purpose of this qualitative study was to identify the unique funds of knowledge among three Hispanic families living in the same city, specifically, how parents supported their children’s mathematics learning through funds of knowledge."

"Drawing on a synthesis of foundational and extant Funds of Knowledge (fk) scholarship that traces the framework’s theoretical origins and development, this manuscript proposes a unified corpus of six core tenets for fk, as an extension to current theoretical understandings of the framework."

"This paper critically explores theoretical, conceptual, and methodological dimensions of three social-justice oriented educational approaches: Bourdieuian Analysis of Capital (BAC), Funds of Knowledge (FK), and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW)."

"Diversity in cultures, languages and identities is a valuable resource in urban education. There is empirical evidence to support this assertion in the existing literature on funds of knowledge and funds of identity. However, the main focus of such research is on the tacit knowledge, skills, and resources that students—and their families—are explicitly aware of."

"This theoretical article explores the concept of community funds of knowledge and identity to complement the two related notions of funds of knowledge (focused on the knowledge and skills of families) and funds of identity (students’ practices and lived experiences)."

"This paper explores the funds of knowledge approach to pedagogy and educational research from a social justice perspective. In response to the suggestion made by some authors that the approach should be integrated with a capital perspective, we argue that this would work only if the concept of capital is understood in a certain way."

"Funds of knowledge and identity approaches emerged to combat deficit perspectives and address the achievement gap and exclusion of underrepresented students in border contexts in the late 1980s. The initial aims of such approaches find a renewed sense of purpose in the super-diverse contexts of twenty-first century societies, which compel us to rethink current approaches to language education."

"Funds of Knowledge (FoK) is a frequent framing used in teacher education to support monolingual teachers’ understanding emergent bilinguals’s (EB) multilingual resources. Yet, without critical inquiry and interrogation, FoK can reproduce subtractive beliefs about multilingual families’ multiliteracy practices (MLP)."

Edited by one of the premier international voices for the funds of knowledge approach, and in particular funds of identity theory, chapters foreground first-hand, participatory, research-practice experiences with learners, schools, and local communities. These experiences demonstrate the positive, social-justice inspired pedagogical actions that result in, and reveal, powerful possibilities for a decolonialised, antiracist praxis that aims to eradicate deficit thinking in education

In this research article, the authors examine the intersections of culturally sustaining pedagogy and critical family engagement to explore the possibilities for equitable family-school partnerships in urban schools. Based on the common values of trusting and caring relationships and power disruption within those fields, as well as data from a multi-year qualitative study of teachers and their relationships with students’ families, the authors introduce the framework of teacher-family solidarity.