Project Description

THIS RESEARCH IS BASED ON THE CONCEPT OF FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE (2005).  This concept intents to describe the accumulation of ideas, experiences, memories, rituals and practices that are essential for individual functioning inside of a community. Funds of Knowledge are, then, inscribed in the community. Therefore, another name for funds of knowledge is community knowledge . This community knowledge often is not valued by state institutions and their agents for example, school and teachers. 

    The model of funds of knowledge pursues the idea that in order to create continuity between school knowledge and community knowledge it is necessary to discover the values that human subjects assign to their daily practice. There are two main objectives in discovering these resources of knowledge. The first one is to help teachers recognize the cultural experiences of their students as members of a particular cultural community.  The second one is to bring these experiences to formal teaching settings, especially those related to language socialization and second-language education.

    Given the success of previous experiences in research based on the theoretical framework proposed by Funds of Knowledge and Bilingual Education scholarship (González, Moll and Amanti, 2005; Zentella, 2005), this project is aimed at studying the interplay of schooling, communication competence, and language socialization in teachers of bilingual education in St. Croix, Virgin Islands who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent. In this sense the main objective of our research is to assess if teachers can recognize and learn about their students’ community knowledge and, if so, how teachers could use this knowledge in schools as an effective learning tool.

  
    We believe that Funds of Knowledge is an exceptional tool for teachers because in the process of researching and integrating community knowledge to the school curriculum teachers will create a bridge to integrate students’ daily practices into schools. To achieve this goal teachers need to get involved in community activities as learners. This re-positioning of the teacher will change the traditional hierarchy that structures the relationship among teachers, parents, and students. By playing the learner role, teachers help students to develop their cultural capital , without alienating them from their cultural environments.

    As González, Moll and Amanti (2005) have argued, social relationships are powerful tools in the construction of knowledge. Consequently, learning is the result of the reciprocity among researchers, teachers, students and their culture. In order to create reciprocity the first step is to transform the role of the teacher into that of a learner, so that the hierarchy between teachers and parents becomes more symmetrical .

     Also, by discovering students’ funds of knowledge, teachers can generate a curriculum based on the students’ life experiences- one which is based on a definition of culture that equals praxis. In that sense, this research considers that the framework of funds of knowledge inevitably proposes a rupture with traditional models of schooling. In such models, roles and normalized practices are fixed into the figures of the teachers and the parents. A successful schooling process will be possible by teachers guiding students into learning, and parents becoming supporting, secondary figures present only during school visits. This research envisions the possibility of helping teachers reconsider this traditional paradigm, challenging it by becoming active learners of their children’s cultural capital and by developing trust-based relationships with their parents, who are, in many ways, guiding lights into their discovering of community knowledge.

This rupture opens for an examination of teacher-parent relationships. Therefore, this study will also evaluate teachers’ communication competence with parents and their community. Communication competence (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1984) relates to the ability to choose a communication behavior that is both effective and sensitive. The model most often used to describe competence is the component model (Spitzberg & Cupach, 1984) which includes three factors: knowledge, skill, and motivation . Based on this model, this research will assess if teachers are competent communicators. In order to be a competent communicator, one must be able to recognize which dialogic skills are necessary in a particular situation, have those skills, and be properly motivated to use those skills. Communication competencies are needed in order to transform the hierarchical relationships fostered by traditional models of schooling.

    The island of St. Croix offers a multicultural context that is ideal for the implementation of a research project based on the premises of funds of knowledge and communicative competence. There is recorded history of constant flows of Puerto Ricans who migrate to the U.S. Virgin Islands and settle in St. Croix. Most of them are working class monolingual Spanish speakers who move to the island in search of economic improvement. Children from this community are generally categorized as Low-English-Proficiency Students (LEP). This means that they are placed in transitional bilingual classrooms so that after two or three years of bilingual education they can be integrated into regular classes.

    In fact, this research project has developed from a series of interviews with teachers of bilingual education in St. Croix carried out in May, 2006. While developing these interviews we were compelled by a number of questions that arose. Some of them were: Why do teachers of ESL think there is “little cultural integration” of members of the Puerto Rican community living in St. Croix to the island’s culture? How do teachers rationalize that “lack of integration”? Are Puerto Ricans culturally stigmatized in St. Croix? If so, what is the role of language as a marker to maintain, and at the same time resist, cultural stigmatization? How is school tied to these phenomena?

    It was impossible to answer these questions in just one visit. We came back to Puerto Rico with a tremendous desire to extend our knowledge and create a research project that would help us understand and develop more information about the schooling processes and the Puerto Rican Diaspora in St. Croix. Still, these areas of study were not related to researchers’ areas of expertise. Looking out for ways to articulate a research project, we discovered other experiences in research that challenged traditional models of schooling, one of them being Funds of Knowledge. In fact, the framework in which Funds of Knowledge is based presents the possibility of incorporating our interest in culture, education, and communication and thus move our research agendas into new areas of interest.

    There is a more ideological reason to develop this research, and it is tied to another consequence of Funds of Knowledge. Since this approach re-conceptualizes community knowledge, another perception of the migrant students has to emerge. “The idea that poor students shared a ‘culture of poverty’ that was considered to be antithetical to school achievements led to the development of a ‘cultural deficit’ model in schooling. Poor and minority students were viewed with lens of deficiencies, sub-standards in their socialization practices, language practices, and orientation toward scholastic achievement” (2005, p. 34). By giving voice to the community in the process of learning its funds of knowledge, teachers will attain a broader definition of culture where diversity is a central concept and tolerance is desirable and possible.