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FKT is part of a broader anthropological research project that is attempting to map the funds of knowledge in several Native-American, Mexican-American and African-American communities. Topics developed in the larger project focus on basic anthropological concerns, such as community infrastructure, family economy, workforce participation, and language planning.
FKT concentrated its initial work in the Tucson area, home of several culturally diverse groups. The Mexican-American community includes members with deep roots in Tucson, those who are new immigrants intending to stay, and those who cross the border frequently because of work and family ties. In this community, some members are fully bilingual and bicultural, and some operate primarily in one culture and language. (In Tucson, as elsewhere, many persons of Hispanic background speak only English.) Hispanic students account for 37 percent of Tucson Unified School District's enrollment. Native Americans comprise more than 3 percent of the enrollment in Tucson schools and a larger percentage in nearby outlying districts. The Native Americans in FKT are Yaqui and Tohono O'Odham, and many speak Spanish (either in addition to or instead of their tribal languages). About 6 percent of TUSD's students are African American. Including them in the project enables researchers and teachers to see beyond cultural variables that are flagged by language differences.
Participants. Certified elementary teachers who volunteered for the project have been the main participants. Individual teachers have opted to make the work part of their graduate studies, but most treat it as an outside research project. They are paid an hourly rate for the time they spend in training, interviewing, and developing curriculum. The faculty of one Tucson school chose to make FKT part of its Title I schoolwide project. In this group, teachers participate as part of their ordinary professional duties. However, a small cadre are still involved as paid researchers, and they receive extended training and assume more responsibility for project leadership at the school.
Training. FKT staff, who are teacher educators and applied research anthropologists, teach participants ethnographic data collection methods and concepts, using lectures, readings, role playing, guided practice, interview transcript analysis, interview debriefing, and study groups. The focus of training is the ethnographic interview, during which teachers gather information about families' histories, work-related knowledge and skills, core values, and ideas about education and child-rearing. Teachers choose the families of a few of their students--perhaps one to three. They learn how to invite parents to participate as cultural informants, alerting them to the topics of most interest and the purpose of the activity. With the anthropologists' help, teachers develop interview protocols that suggest both what to look for and what to ask. The structure of the protocols permits the parents to direct the flow of information, while providing teachers with probes that clarify and extend communication. Researchers coach teachers on how to develop (and earn) the confidence and trust of the parents in this novel experience--neither social nor ritual, not precisely formal or informal--and how to elicit information and understand its cultural dimensions. Keeping complete and useful records of such meetings is one important skill covered in training.
After the interviews, anthropologists and teachers review the interview results, analyzing themes and information that bear on schooling. At this stage, teachers learn to discriminate between valuable cultural information and facts that are culturally incidental (though perhaps important in other ways). For example, in economically disadvantaged families, the parents' talents and labor history may be essentially unrelated to present employment--if there is present employment. By asking "What do you know how to do?" or "What kinds of things do family members ask you to help with?" --instead of "What job do you have?"--an interviewer can identify the labor resources available to a student, as models of skill, work habits, and responsible community membership. Training in the methods of ethnography helps teachers become more perceptive learners about students' lives. Training in the concepts of ethnography helps teachers understand, identify, and sort information about families in ways that more brightly illuminate the possibilities for effective teaching.
Participants and anthropologists alike report that teachers have a decided advantage over professional ethnographers in at least one aspect of interviewing. Although they are skilled interviewers and observers, anthropologists report that their status as strangers often makes it difficult to establish the confidence necessary to support open communication with families. Parents are ultimately uncertain about the nature of purely scholarly interest in the interview topics. However, parents easily come to see teachers in these circumstances as natural allies, and communications soon grow open and warm. Having asked certain questions, teachers gain insight about parents that engenders real respect for them, and, in the same process, they develop a mutual bond that affects many dimensions of relations among parents, children, and teachers and between the school and its community. Even when teachers' questions seem more personal than formal custom would usually permit, parents usually answer freely because they understand that the teachers share the goal of promoting the students' success. During training, FKT teachers become proficient in some of the anthropologists' methods of learning about people. These methods enable them to improve their understanding of the way the actual cultural content of the lives of their own students may be used as resources for teaching--and this, they report, serves them better than learning collections of cultural artifacts and events that may be ascribed with uncertain validity to a particular group.
Curriculum and instruction. While teachers collect and analyze data, researchers observe their classroom practices and review curriculum materials. Together, they compare the ways children learn at home and in the community with the opportunities provided at school. Their critical analysis of routine teaching showed that, for many lessons, content was seldom illustrated in practical ways, and the structure engaged the students passively. This contrasted sharply with the character of learning in the community, which at its best was highly engaging and contextualized.
Becoming more perceptive and analytic observers enabled teachers to detect aspects of children's everyday learning experience that could be adapted for use in school. Teachers and researchers collaborated on plans for lessons that encouraged students to apply what they already know to posing and meeting new academic challenges. In periodic gatherings, study groups composed of cohorts of teachers working on the FKT project shared new information about communities' funds of knowledge and developed new lessons that wove together the strands of learning in students' lives. For example, one teacher discovered that a student who visited Mexico often was in the habit of bringing back a popular candy to sell to his friends, who could not buy it in Tucson. Further discussions with students revealed their surprising familiarity with many dimensions of international trade and small business management--knowledge that had not previously been evident in math lessons. The teacher developed an extended interdisciplinary unit on candy making and selling that served as a vehicle for engaging instruction. Other teachers in her FKT study group then discovered similar funds of knowledge among their students, which they tapped in a variety of ways for math, language arts, and problem solving. Parents and other family members acted as outside experts in these lessons, helping the teachers with planning and, often, with teaching. Another teacher discovered during an interview that one parent who made his living as a gardener was a gifted musician. This parent wrote an original musical score based on a classic children's story for his child's class to perform for the school. Through the music, he demonstrated the defining elements of several musical styles, including country, rap, rock, and reggae.
Through initial training in ethnographic methods and concepts and follow-up applications to curriculum and instruction, teachers acquire new tools for professional learning and an organizational structure--the study group--for devising new ways to apply what they learn to their teaching.
Funding. Initial support for Funds of Knowledge for Teaching was provided by the Kellogg Foundation, with a grant that covered the costs of development, training, and documentation. The school that adopted FKT as part of its school improvement plan schedules release time for teacher training and family interviews.
[Latino Teacher Project]