Representing Family: Community Funds of Knowledge, Bilingualism, and Multimodality

Abstract

In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators' efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents' stories of life in India into picture books to serve as cultural resources in their school community. In retelling their grandparents' stories, students drew on a multiplicity of ancestral,globalized, and Western discourses in their textual and pictorial illustrations. The authors examine what happens when the funds of knowledge that students bring to school contradict normative, Western understandings of what is appropriate for children and how school might appropriately respond to varying community perceptions of good and evil.

Second Language Learners Making Video in Three Contexts

“…Our previous research with child L2 learners in Canada produced inventories of outside-school multilingual literacy practices in communities in metropolitan Vancouver (Dagenais, 2008;Dagenais & Moore, 2008;Smythe & Toohey, 2009a, 2009bMarshall & Toohey, 2010). Children in these communities were highly engaged in a variety of sometimes multilingual literate activities outside school, as well as interested and involved in digital technologies (e.g., video games, Internet social networking); we also noted their blending of media (including print) in these activities.…”

“…However, it is unclear to us how much pedagogical follow-up occurred across sites beyond showing the videos to children in the other sites (which we observed in only a couple of cases). As we have indicated elsewhere (Marshall & Toohey, 2010), we had a sense that the videos were seen as a "special project" that was not necessarily integrated with other learning activities or the school curriculum. Poyntz (2006) makes the argument that when educators approach youth-produced text as self-expression, but self-expression grounded in particular social and political formations, and when they engage in dialogue about these matters with their students, opportunities abound for young people to develop a sense of agency and reflexivity.…”

Los fondos de conocimiento y su influencia en las relaciones intergeneracionales

“…En la actualidad no existen estudios que investiguen en profundidad la influencia que pueden desarrollar los Fondos de Conocimiento en las relaciones intergeneracionales, si bien es cierto que en algunas pesquisas llevadas a cabo sobre la implementación de este enfoque en las aulas (Marshall y Toohey, 2010), se tiene en cuenta la participación de los mayores, éstas, no analizan en profundidad el diálogo entre generaciones, lo cual desde nuestro punto de vista, y considerando el contexto en el que trabajamos, resultaría de gran interés de cara a la optimización de las relaciones intergeneracionales y el aprovechamiento de la riqueza experiencial que pueden aportar las personas mayores con respecto a la escolarización de sus nietos/as. La introducción de este enfoque en los programas intergeneracionales o de educación familiar puede contribuir tanto a la mejora de las relaciones entre personas mayores e infancia, como incidir en otros aspectos que tienen que ver con la motivación, identificando la figura de los mayores del núcleo familiar como agentes educativos que juegan un papel importante en el cuidado y desarrollo de la infancia.…”

Using Ecological Asset Mapping to Investigate Pre-Service Teachers’ Cultural Assets

“…When possible, we compared the maps and the reflections for each participant to explore process as well as content in ecological asset mapping. In further support of this approach, Marshall and Toohey (2010) discuss the importance of using multi-modal texts and analyses to explore the dynamic and inter-related representations of self. We feel that our analyses of the maps and written reflections provided this type of exploration.…”