Moll and Gonzales

This article focuses on the “funds of knowledge” that come from different social and cultural backgrounds and how these “funds” can help influence the classroom and its students in a positive way. Often minority students who are learning to speak English are overlooked and treated as if they aren’t as intellectually “sound” as students who speak the dominant language fluently. Students and families in this situation are sometimes altogether ignored as households who have worthwhile knowledge and experiences to bring into the classroom, as well as, influence literacy practices in general. This article serves to debunk this implication.

The social networks that a student and his/her family are involved in all provide “funds of knowledge” which relate to a households origins, family members employment, occupations, and “labor specific to household activities”. These “funds of knowledge” learned outside of the classroom provide significant value in fostering a children’s development inside the classroom. What I really like about this article is that it suggests that having access to many languages and many cultures “creates the expanded possibility of not only one but two (or more) social worlds” (70). This gives the “language minority” way more access and understanding to multiple forms of literacy which only serves to help them more than it hinders them.

However, the education system, at least in this country, appears to me to be looking at literacy in one way, the “English speaking way”. It doesn’t openly welcome any type diversity and often views it as hindrance to formal education standards set up by fluent English speakers. This limits all the things we can do to really make students enjoy education and want to be involved in the learning process. By disregarding where they’re from, where their families are from, their social context in general, we are limiting our view of literacy as well as limiting our view of them as learners. By acknowledging and embracing what students “funds of knowledge” from outside the classroom bring inside the classroom, instruction inside the classroom can only strengthen. By creating alternative projects and assignments that relate to them and capitalize on their “cultural strengths” literacy can transform and become even more universal.