The elusive search for funds of pedagogy to build socially just schooling

1. The elusive search for funds of pedagogy to build socially just schooling Dr Lew Zipin Centre for Research in Education University of South Australia

2. RPiN’s ‘funds of knowledge’ approach • Adapted from Moll and colleagues • Using knowledge familiar to learners in their lifeworlds beyond school to build a curriculum that engages learners from non-elite positions in social structures (& scaffolding to capacities for success in ‘standard’ academic curriculum) • As seen from a Bourdieuian perspective: lifeworld-based funds of knowledge challenge the selective power of elite cultural capital

3. A parallel RPiN push: Uni researchers ask teachers to reflect on pedagogy • Teachers asked to re-think their pedagogies to support a funds of knowledge approach • Consternation when, beyond emphasis on ‘caring relationships’, teachers don’t readily articulate about pedagogies • Yet Uni researchers treat pedagogy as a classroom issue, without attention or search for what I call ‘funds of pedagogy’: i.e. ways of knowing, and of trans-acting knowledge, in learners’ lifeworlds; as if funds of knowledge are merely knowledge contents • Similar lack of funds of pedagogy in literatures from Funds of Knowledge movement – despite the ‘founding’ text, ‘Formation and Transformation of Funds of Knowledge’, by Velez-Ibanez & Greenberg

4. Suggestive argument: funds of pedagogic knowledge are more challenging to reproductive curriculum-as-usual than are funds of content knowledge Consequently, they run into stronger barriers to recontextualisation: that is, transferral and re-re-formation of ‘funds’ from lifeworld to school-world.

5. Gonzalez, Moll et al. on difficulties of recontextualisation The guarded gates of school curriculum are fronts of struggle over what Gonzalez, Moll et al. (2005) call a complicated process of recontextualizing not only the [funds of] knowledge obtained through the research [in students family and community lifeworlds], but the perspectives ... that led to that knowledge. (p. 19)

6. Bernstein on recontextualisation Bernstein (1990) amplifies this complexity, defining schools as ‘pedagogic recontextualizing fields’ (p. 198) that are affected by the power relationships ... between the school and the primary cultural context of the acquirer [i.e. learner] ... The school may include as part of its practice recontextualized discourses from the family/community/peer relations of the acquirer for purposes of social control, in order to make its own regulative discourse more effective. Conversely, the family/community/peer relations can exert their own influence upon the recontextualizing field of the school and in this way affect the latter’s practice. (p. 199)

7. An illustrative RPiN dialogue T1:[My project] again is clay animations…. [T]he kids this term have been looking at things that affect them, like bullying and harassment … [but] I found it really difficult and the kids found it really difficult … to link it in with the community. L: What we’re really trying to get at … [is] the ‘virtual schoolbags’ concept, you know, it’s like there’s stuff that these kids are carrying culturally that could be used in school … the official curriculum doesn’t really invite it but … it’s in their cultural lives … so we use … terms like ‘funds of knowledge’ ... [I]f we can … [analyse] what’s in their virtual schoolbags, and then make curricular use of those, it’s strongly connective, wherever we’re starting from, I think. (Virtual schoolbag is Thomson’s (2002) metaphor for how learners ‘carry’ cultural knowledge and dispositions from lifeworlds into the school-world.)

8. T1:Well I’m learning a lot about the kids; I’m not learning so much about their wider community, but certainly delving into their own schoolbags … because the kids have come up with topics that bother them … [Year] 8s and 9s tend to havenot a selfish view but certainly a kid’s … middle school students are still very, very self-centred … around their own very, very small, local world – they have very, very poor general knowledge, very poor wider community knowledge … I did really try very hard to elicit from them anything that was community based, and they were far,far better at the personal issues that bother them. T2:That’s got to do with meta-cognitive development, doesn’t it? … A toddler’s whole world is mum and dad … and the world gets bigger the older that you get, and these guys are still at the stage where their whole world is their family, their school, and perhaps any sporting teams that they might be involved in, or any other extra-curricular activity.

9. Continuing the argument about challenges for recontextualisation • It’s not a simple process of abstract institutional mechanisms that guard the gates between lifeworld and school-world: the barriers are part-and-parcel of living phenomenological processes within the school. • At a more or less subconsciously strategic level, a reciprocal inter-subjective negotiation takes place among teachers and students to keep lifeworld and school-world separate.

10. Students from non-elite positions have, by the middle years, accumulated humuliations and hurts, and deploy habitual defence mechanisms against the invitation to ‘expose’ their lives – especially at levels of deeper disposition (habitus). They react with indications of preference for the ‘devil they know’ (e.g. worksheets, individual projects, surveys of peer musical tastes), not trusting the offer of a new curriculum angel, suspecting a ‘devil in disguise’. Trust takes time to build, and thus sensitive persistence from teachers.

11. Teachers ‘co-operate’ with these strategic gambits to deflect the funds-of-knowledge invitation, (mis)reading students’ school-world ‘non-responsiveness’ as reflecting their ‘immaturity’. Deep down, teachers may ‘know’ better; but many institutional constraints that pervade their institutionalised work-worlds give them reasons to be ‘risk-averse’ and so to put a redesign of curriculum around a deep funds of knowledge/pedagogy approach in a ‘too hard basket’, preferring ‘tamer’, compromised curriculum units.

12. There is thus an inter-subjective dynamic of reciprocal recontextualisation: a tacit devil’s bargain among teachers and students to avoid risks of transporting deep funds of lifeworld knowledge into school-world curriculum and pedagogy. In the process, student ways of inhabiting institutionally constrained ‘small worlds’ in school permit teachers to view them as inhabiting small worlds outside of school as well.

13. Further RPiN ‘evidence’ for this argument: T1 was hardly alone in her reading of students as inhabiting worlds too small for a deep and full-on funds of knowledge approach. When RPiN teachers initially broached doing curriculum units connected to community-based lifeworlds, many students resisted (passively or actively); and a number of teachers came to quick conclusions that they aren’t ‘age-ready’. Often, rather thin ‘student-centred’ curriculum work resulted, without deep connection to social-cultural lifeworlds beyond school.

14. Conclusion Efforts to transfer lifeworld funds of knowledge into learning assets within school-worlds run into complex recontextualisation processes in which students and teachers (and Uni researchers) are tacitly complicit. Deeper ways of knowing (funds of pedagogy) less easily permeate the boundaries. ‘Lighter’ lifeworld enrichments – of more content than trans-active modality – are of value to engage non-elite learners. Yet funds of pedagogy, which tap into lifeworld-based dispositions, or ways of knowing, offer richer and deeper resonances of familiarity for inciting learning engagement. It is thus a vital matter of social-educational justice to research lifeworld funds of pedagogy and build them into schooling redesigns.

15. CODA When Teacher 1’s students got into the process of creating clay animation stories around ‘bullying and harassment’, she saw how deep and extensive into local community (and broader social structure) the lifeworld knowing that they drew upon really went. She pushed past inter-subjective negotiation of lighter and thinner work: hers was one of the strongest RPiN units.

16. Full Papers For the paper on which this presentation is based, see the September 2009 issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 317-331. Rob’s and Sam’s presentations are also based on papers in this Discourse symposium on RPiN, which further includes papers involving the authorship of other RPiN colleagues.