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This paper presents an overview of some of Michael Cole’s work, starting with his pioneering research in Liberia with the Kpelle (and later, with Sylvia Scribner, studies of literacy with the Vai, ...

This article discusses a sociocultural approach we have developed, which we refer to as funds of knowledge. The emphasis of the funds of knowledge work has been to develop both theory and methods through which educators can approach and document the funds of knowledge of families and re-present them on the bases of the knowledge, resources, and strengths they possess, thus challenging deficit orientations that are so dominant, in particular, in the education of working-class children. In this article, I present a translocation view of funds of knowledge and what we can learn theoretically and methodologically from this body of work. I review four studies conducted in different countries and sociocultural contexts. In each context, the researchers reorient the concept of funds of knowledge to address issues germane to their settings. The four studies from New Zealand, Spain, Australia, and Uganda used funds of knowledge to generate new ideas and positionalities regarding work with teachers, students, and families. None of the projects simply replicated the original studies conducted in the United States. The four studies documented empirically and represent pedagogically families and students as resourceful and helped educators arrange environments that are academically sound and strongly oriented to building on such resources for learning.

This article presents a variety of issues related to the effects of restrictive language and educational policies that ultimately limits important resources for English language learners (i.e., services, funding, time, and information). The authors spotlight the state of Arizona as an unfortunate case of language control through policies, which has the promise of being replicated in other areas of the United States. As these forms of control make their way into everyday classroom life, English language learners are further stripped from essential educational opportunities when denied the right to draw on their own social, cultural, and linguistic resources for learning.

The author provides an overview of a “funds of knowledge” approach and presents three different adaptations of the approach with a common theme of expanding teachers' and students' resources for le...

The main purpose of this paper is to articulate a theory of human identity from a Vygotskian perspective. In doing so, we use the term “funds of identity” inspired by the “funds of knowledge” approach. We use the term funds of identity to refer to the historically accumulated, culturally developed, and socially distributed resources that are essential for a person’s self-definition, self-expression, and self-understanding. Funds of knowledge—bodies of knowledge and skills that are essential for the well-being of an entire household—become funds of identity when people actively use them to define themselves. From our point of view, identity is made up of cultural factors such as sociodemographic conditions, social institutions, artifacts, significant others, practices, and activities. Consequently, understanding identity requires an understanding of the funds of practices, beliefs, knowledge, and ideas that people make use of.

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on funds of identity. First, we emphasize the extent to which history and time are constitutive dimensions of culture and experience and the affect this has on funds of identity and meaning construction. We then go on to explore some connections between lived experience and funds of identity. We prefer to use the term lived experience – rather than emotional experience, the term used by Nogueira (2014) – in order to emphasize (i) that cognition/thinking/meaning are inextricable from feeling/emotion/sense and (ii) that learning and experience are intrinsically situated in a matrix of life trajectories and ecological-transactional aspects throughout one’s life. Finally, in light of the commentaries by Nogueira (2014) and Hviid and Villadsen (2014) , we discuss the applicability of the concept of funds of identity in educational settings. Funds of identity are inscribed into artefacts – drawings, documents, images, tasks, etc. – and transported throughout the different sites connected to a person’s life trajectory. In our view, these artefacts can be used as resources for establishing connections within schools and beyond them. This implies seeing the students’ funds of identity as resources for learning and seeing schools as a context that must also be linked to other practices and activities in which people are involved.

Background/Context Arizona's most recent English Language Learner (ELL) legislation, starting in the school year 2008-2009, requires all such students be educated through a specific Structured English Immersion (SEI) model: the 4-hour English Language Development (ELD) block. The basic premise behind this particular model is that ELL students should be taught the English language quickly so they can then succeed academically. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study This study is the first attempt to look at a random sample of school districts across the state of Arizona under the 4-hour ELD block policy. The goal of the study is to better understand what are the positive aspects and the major challenges of implementing the 4-hour ELD block in Arizona. In particular this study aims to answer the following research questions: (1) How is the 4-hour ELD block being implemented? (2) What are the perceived benefits of the 4-hour ELD block for students and for schools? and (3) What are the district leaders’ concerns about implementing the 4-hour ELD block? Population/Participants/Subjects Of the 65 school districts randomly selected as potential participants, 26 agreed to participate in this study. The district response rate of the study was 40%, and the informants were the English Language Coordinators (ELC), who are the individuals most knowledgeable about how the 4-hour ELD block is implemented in their district. The sample of school districts that participated in our study is representative of the state of Arizona in terms of enrollment patterns. Research Design The researchers designed a phone survey for ELCs. Qualitative data analyses were used to examine the responses of the 26 ELCs. More specifically, a coding scheme was created to assist in the process of organizing and analyzing the data. Findings/Results Analyses reveal that the vast majority of ELCs think that, as a result of the program, there is an increased focus on English Language Learner (ELL) students’ English language development. Regarding the challenges of the program, ELCs think that the implementation of the 4-hour ELD block has: a) neglected core areas of academic content that are critical for ELL students’ academic success, b) contributed to ELL students’ isolation, c) limited ELL students opportunities for on-time high school graduation, and d) assumed that English language learning can be accomplished within an unrealistic time-frame and under a set of unrealistic conditions. Conclusions/Recommendations Given the data collected, we recommend that school districts explore alternative models of ELD instruction. These alternative models of ELD instruction need to take into consideration the local context of school districts, their resources, and existing research. Furthermore, we recommend that ELL students are offered additional programs or types of support that can help them become English proficient, while acquiring the academic content needed for succeeding in school. It seems reasonable to state that a combination of programs and support can be more effective than one prescriptive instructional approach. Finally, we recommend that school districts monitor progress and effectiveness by looking at multiple indicators. In particular, we strongly suggest that school districts keep track of reclassification, re-entry, and opting-out rates.

This article presents a variety of issues related to the effects of restrictive language and educational policies that ultimately limits important resources for English language learners (i.e., services, funding, time, and information). The authors spotlight the state of Arizona as an unfortunate case of language control through policies, which has the promise of being replicated in other areas of the United States. As these forms of control make their way into everyday classroom life, English language learners are further stripped from essential educational opportunities when denied the right to draw on their own social, cultural, and linguistic resources for learning.

Educational researchers have assumed that the concept of funds of knowledge is related to specific forms of capital. However, scholars have not examined if and how these theoretical frameworks can complement each other when attempting to understand educational opportunity for under-represented students. In this article, we argue that a funds of knowledge approach should also be studied from a capital perspective. We claim that bridging funds of knowledge and capital has the potential to advance theory and to yield new insights and understandings of students’ educational opportunities and experiences. Finally, we provide a discussion of key processes — (mis)recognition, transmission, conversion, and activation/mobilization — to which educational researchers need to pay closer attention when attempting to understand the attainment of goals in under-represented students’ lives.

As the site of confluence of several disciplines interested in language acquisition and use, the field of applied linguistics is the overarching domain of research dedicated to the study of second ...

In commemorating the landmark Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision, this lecture also honors the Mendez v. Westminster case of 1946, a successful challenge to the segregated schooling of Mexican and Mexican American students in California. The author summarizes the Mendez case, its relation to Brown, and its sociocultural aspects, including educational conditions at the time, the collective and intercultural agency of the participants, and the process by which the Méndez family successfully brought the case to fruition. With this case as backdrop, the author then addresses contemporary educational issues and presents educational innovations that, much like Brown and Mendez, seek to mobilize the social, cultural, and linguistic processes of diverse communities as the most important resources for producing positive educational change.

ResumenLuis C. Moll, puertorriqueno de nacimiento, es uno de los referentes mas destacados de la investigacion educativa en el ambito hispano de los Estados Unidos. Sus trabajos sobre el desarrollo linguistico y la alfabetizacion bilingue de los ninos inmigrantes de habla hispana en ese pais son conocidos y reconocidos como parte de la vanguardia en la investigacion sobre la forma en que la cultura y la educacion se conjugan en el desarrollo humano. Asimismo es uno de los grandes valedores de la teoria vygostkiana en el mundo hispanohablante, y ha desempenado en este campo una importante labor de bisagra entre sus colegas de origen anglosajon y los de origen latino. Esta entrevista profundiza en su formacion como investigador: se pretende con ella dar a conocer su trayectoria educativa y humana, asi como conocer los proyectos en los que en este momento esta inmerso y que son fruto de dicha trayectoria.

Luis C. Moll, Puerto Rican by birth, is one of the most prominent researchers in Latino education in the United States. His avant-garde works on Hispanic children's linguistic development and bilingual literacy are well known and renowned for their implications in the research on the impact of culture and education on human development. He is also one of the most notable advocates of Vygotskian theory in the Hispanic world, and his labor in this field has played an important role as a meeting point between United States' and Hispanic scholars. This interview examines his formation as a researcher: the intention is to provide an account of his educational and human trajectory, as well as to relate those projects he is involved in at the moment and that can be considered the result of such trajectory.

Students designated as English language learners (ELLs) are a rapidly growing population in urban contexts (Milner, 2012; Moore, 2012). More than 5 million ELLs from all over the world attend public schools in the United States and they speak at least 460 different languages (Kindler, 2002, in Rios-Aguilar & Gandara, 2012). It has been estimated, however, that between 80% and 89% of all English language learners speak Spanish as their home or heritage language (Goldenberg & Coleman, 2010; Gandara & Hopkins, 2010). These students are often immigrants or are born to immigrant parents and are mostly Latinos (Pew Hispanic Center, 2011). In this chapter, we address the partnerships between Latino immigrant families, teachers, community members, and university faculty toward the education of ELLs. We engage the concept of funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) to illuminate relationships between these students’ cultural, social, and linguistic repertoires and the institutional context of schools. In addition, we utilize Freire’s (1970) concept of praxis (awareness and action) as we pay particular attention to power relations as related to the literacy education of ELLs in contexts where historically underserved populations are educated. In so doing, we problematize educational ideologies, embodied in educational policies and school practices that can produce dialectical tensions between local household, community knowledge, and institutional structures. For example, the adoption of certain educational approaches or school rules and consequences about using fi rst language and literacy during classroom instruction, reductive pedagogy, inadequate assessment tools can potentially pose such a tension. Alternatively, we advocate for an ecological view of learning and a comprehensive approach to the education of ELLs that begins with teacher education programs centering on the resources families and communities bring to the classroom.

Increasing availability of funds for development, design, and evaluation of alternative learning environments has challenged educational researchers to develop and validate innovative and effective interventions. The focus on accountability has resulted in an accelerated effort to record events, activities, and participation in substantive ways that suggest significance, statistical and otherwise, and that warrant further program improvements and modification. Yet, relying on traditional individual standardized measures—ones that are specifically designed to discriminate among students and that are better suited to the study of controlled experiments in laboratories rather than the sporadic and often spontaneous interactions common to learning settings in and out of school—leaves educational researchers generally ill equipped. Even as alternative educational programs are financially supported, the sanctioned means with which researchers and program developers document success of all educational programs have progressively narrowed, favoring traditional experimental designs with an emphasis on whether it works rather than on understanding why the program is successful. In this article, we used a multimethod, multilevel analysis to document the underlying dynamics of specific alternative learning contexts to identify generalizable principles while allowing for local variation.

For the past few years we have been developing a longitudinal study of biliteracy development in children by following, all within the same dual-language school, a case study cohort of 20 students throughout their elementary school years. This cohort sample represents considerable diversity in terms of ethnicity, social class, and language proficiencies upon starting school, with just a few children fluent in both Spanish and English as early as kindergarten. The study reveals that all students, not only those in our study sample but in the entire school, and regardless of their sociocultural characteristics or initial language profile, became literate in both languages. Our analysis identifies several characteristics that give the school its additive personality. For present purposes, we highlight only three such characteristics. One is that the school features, in contrast to most high-poverty schools, a highly qualified and diverse teaching corps, most of them (88%) female, as is the norm. All of the instructors are certified bilingual teachers--most hold a master's degree or higher--and have taken academic courses in both Spanish and English and have taught in a dual-language program for more than 9 years. This highly qualified staff not only help give the school its academic emphasis and direction, its academic identity we could say, but also facilitate a particular social setting, cultivating a supportive environment for the development of biliteracy in all students in which the teachers, among other things, protect the students (and themselves) against the often blatant attacks and insults by English-only advocates. A second characteristic relates to the deliberate development of confianza (mutual trust), a term borrowed from our analysis of household funds of knowledge (Gonzalez, Moll, & Amanti, in press). In the original work, we used it to refer to the necessary trust households need to establish social relations of exchange; in fact, we referred to confianza as the glue that held the households' multiple (and sometimes fragile) social networks together. Here we extend this concept to refer to the nature of the social relationships among administrators, teachers, and students that help establish the particular "culture" of the school; a culture of caring, if you will, to borrow from Noddings (e.g., 1992), that came to characterize the school and helped define who these teachers are in relation to each other and to the children (see also, Bryk & Schneider, 2002). In particular, the administrators entrust the teachers to help make pedagogical and policy decisions for the school. This trust helps teachers define themselves as a particular type of professional, and as a particular type of person, with the necessary funds of knowledge to make curricular decisions that help define the nature of the educational relationships in the school. A third characteristic is that of ideological clarity. The teachers became well aware of how much teaching is a political activity, especially after defending the children's language rights in their efforts to preserve the current dual-language arrangement. It would be accurate to state that the administrators and teachers are constantly vigilant of any attempts to either alter the dual-language agenda of the school or impose an English-only curriculum and do not hesitate to activate the school's social network of parents and other allies to defend the school. In this setting, therefore, biliteracy is, without vacillation, a clear academic goal promoted through a duaManguage pedagogy and sustained by an ideology that favors the development of both languages in all children. The school, consequently, is not only successful in producing biliterate students, a rare achievement in U.S. schools, but also successful despite the heavy ideological and programmatic pressures of the state to dismantle bilingual education, a consequence of the state's English-only language policy, and the current emphasis on high-stakes testing, also conducted only in English. …

The authors highlight the omission of English language learners and their unique needs from reports such as that of the U.S. National Reading Panel. Situating their conversation in a sociocultural and socioeconomic context, they discuss how schools can and should help all children.

This chapter examines the epistemological claims about the validity of certain kinds of knowledges as they relate to language and language policy. Although ethnographic and qualitative research operates within complex historical fields, we extend these methodologies to incorporate a moral discourse embedded in critical research focusing on equity and justice. We locate our methodological stance as an acknowledgment that language policy is not simply official, but that these governmentalities are the accumulation of circulating discourses around language, immigration, globalization, and nation-state formation. We examine these articulations in three arenas: (1) the imposition of structured English immersion (SEI) in our state as the default program for English-language learners (ELLs); (2) the formal and informal language policies that have evolved in the wake of state referenda and court decisions; and (3) the impact of antiimmigrant discourses on local-level school policy and practice, including the role of advocacy and activism among teachers of English-language learners. The interrelation between language ideologies and the specific circumstances in which some ideologies become hegemonical will be examined within these three arenas.

For most people, the term apartheid evokes images of forced racial separation and police repression in white-dominated South Africa. Apartheid is an Afrikaans word, meaning literally “aparthood,” or the condition of being apart. The legal system of Apartheid between 1948 and 1994 institutionalized racial segregation, keeping people physically, economically, politically, and socially apart from one another. Apartheid race laws established a segregated and grossly unequal system of medical care, transportation, housing, employment, recreation, and education. This abhorrent system and requisite brutality that kept it afl oat was dismantled in the early 1990s and offi cially ended in 1994 with the election of Nelson Mandela as president (Waldmeir, 1997).

The work in this article has a basis in a long-term research paradigm investigating the "funds of knowledge" of diverse populations. This conceptualization adopts an anthropological perspective for viewing the households of low-income and minority students as repositories of diverse knowledge bases. In the BRIDGE project, the focus has been on understanding the mathematical potential of households, as well as "mathematizing" household practices. The transformation of mathematical knowledge, however, has been somewhat problematic. Our experience until now indicates that, whereas other classroom knowledge domains (language arts, social studies, etc.) may draw in a rather straightforward fashion from households, mathematical knowledge may not be so easily incorporated. This article describes a theoretical refinement of the concept of funds of knowledge, and will endeavor to conceptualize the distributed nature of mathematical community capital.

This article addresses issues related to biliteracy development in children. It presents 2 case examples as illustrations, 1 of "incipient" biliteracy, obtained in a kindergarten classroom, and 1 of "instructed" biliteracy, obtained in a third-grade classroom. Both examples highlight how children use the social processes and cultural resources at hand to develop their literate competencies in Spanish and English. In addition, special challenges, such as the predominance of reductionist forms of schooling, and special resources, as found in "additive" circumstances for learning, are discussed in relation to the formation of biliteracy in classrooms.

One of the fundamental values built in to current special education practice is the notion of equity for students with disabilities. In a review regarding the least restrictive environment (LRE), Yell (1995) said, "LRE is a principle stating that students with disabilities are to be educated in settings as close to regular classes as appropriate for the child" (p. 193). Although almost all stakeholders agree with these goals in principle, there is significant and heated debate in the professional community about how to achieve these goals. Much of the discussion on LRE seems to reflect a specific place-a physical context such as the general education classroom. In this article, we draw on a sociocultural framework to propose an expanded view of LRE. Specifically, we argue that a focus on the physical setting is not the most appropriate unit of analysis. Rather, we suggest that the same placement or setting can be either facilitating or restrictive, depending on the social organization of specific activity settings that comprise a given context. A different view is provided by sociocultural theory, which proposes a unit of analysis that includes the individual in interaction with a specific activity setting.

In this conversation, a group of educators discuss professional development and identity, representation in academe, assessment of linguistically diverse students, current movements in literacy instruction, teaching style and process of instruction, content of instruction, and teacher training from their perspectives as Latino and Latina researchers.

The International Handbook of Research in Children's Literacy, Learning and Culture presents an authoritative distillation of current global knowledge related to the field of primary years literacy studies. Features chapters that conceptualize, interpret, and synthesize relevant research Critically reviews past and current research in order to influence future directions in the field of literacy Offers literacy scholars an international perspective that recognizes and anticipates increasing diversity in literacy practices and cultures

Conceptualizing the households of working-class Latino students as being rich in funds of knowledge has had transformative consequences for teachers, parents, students, and researchers. Teachers' qualitative, ethnographic study of their own students' households has unfolded as a viable method for bridging the gap between school and community. The focus of the home visit is to gather details about the accumulated knowledge base that each household assembles in order to ensure its own subsistence. Teachers also participate in study groups that offer a forum for the collective analysis of the household findings, and they form curriculum units that tap into the household funds of knowledge. New avenues of communication between school and home foster confianza, or mutual trust.

Lupita, a third-grade student, pulled up a chair to a table and sat next to some classmates. She was doing research on the Sioux as part of a broader classroom project studying Native Americans, and had spent part of the morning selecting books from the school library with information about that cultural group. The students themselves had selected Native Americans as the general topic of study and were doing independent and collaborative research on their particular groups of choice. Lupita had already written several questions about the Sioux that would serve to guide her study. These questions were all in Spanish, her first language; the books she selected were all in English, her rapidly evolving second language (Moll & Whitmore, 1993). Eventually, with some assistance from the teacher, for the texts were difficult, Lupita was able to read portions of the books that contained relevant information to answer her questions, and she translated the information into Spanish so that she could incorporate it later into an essay summarizing her findings. Her classmate, Yolanda, doing research on the Yaquis, had developed a questionnaire in Spanish to interview a teacher aide who is Yaqui and trilingual in Yaqui, Spanish, and English. She would also write her report in Spanish but other children chose English, for they had the option of using either language as needed to complete their tasks. In yet another activity within this same classroom, a group of children decided to read a set of story books the teacher had assembled about the topic of war and how they affect people's lives (Moll, Tapia, & Whitmore, 1993). As the children read the books and discussed them among themselves and with the teacher, they struggled in understanding realistic but fictional accounts of events about other people, at other places, and in other times. They borrowed from each other's experiences in making sense of the stories, relating them to their own lives, and evalu

The questions and issues that underlie bilingual education are constrained by deficit views about the abilities and experiences of language-minority students. In general, most research has emphasized how well students acquire English, assimilate into mainstream culture, and perform on tests of basic skills. Employing a sociocultural perspective that acknowledges the many resources that are available to children outside of the school, the author describes how research about children's communities can be used to enhance instruction. For this to work, researchers and teachers must redefine their roles so that they enter into collaborative working relationships that focus on ways of bringing about educational change.

(1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory Into Practice: Vol. 31, Qualitative Issues in Educational Research, pp. 132-141.

(1990). La Zona de Desarrollo Proximo de Vygotski: Una reconsideracion de sus implicaciones para la ensenanza. Journal for the Study of Education and Development: Vol. 13, No. 51-52, pp. 247-254.

This paper proposes an alternate model of Vygotsky's zone of proximal development. It is argued that conceptions of the «zone» emphasizing the transfer of skills from adult to child are too narrow, theoretically misleading, and of limited instructional utility. The concept is then examined in relation to Vygotsky's broader theoretical and practical concerns. Examples taken from a recent classroom observational study are provided to illustrate how the concept of the zone can facilitate a critical assessment of children and of the social system created for the children to learn. The focus is on the appropriation and mastery of mediational means, such as writing, assessed not only or necessarily through independent performance after guided practice, but by the ability of children to participate in qualitatively new collaborative activities. The role of the adult isn't to provide structured cues to facilitate performance, but through exploratory talk and other social mediations assist children in taki...