Searching for Community Cultural Wealth

This summer I am teaching "School and Society", the foundations class for students in the Elementary Teacher Ed Program at Penn. In class today I wanted to encourage the students to use the projects they will be doing – neighborhood studies – to search for the funds of knowledge (Moll, 1992) and community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) that their students (and the communities where they will work) possess. I was lucky enough to have Frances Rust agree to run the first part of class where she led students through an exploration of ethnographic methods, drawing on their own funds of knowledge concerning observation to help them develop a set of tools they will be able to draw on in order. I then led a short (and unfortunately teacher-dominated) discussion of Bourdieu (1986) and Yosso (2005) focusing on their visions of capital. Bourdieu's work is so powerful in its ability to illuminate some of the structures of society that work to maintain inequalities in society. Yosso complements this vision with the benefit of the hindsight of many years of researchers and educators applying Bourdieu's work. She points out the tendency for Bourdieu's work to lead to a deficit perspective concerning the capital of people outside of the dominant culture. Schools like KIPP are doing an amazing job preparing students for academic success, but they do so by teaching their students in ways that build the cultural capital that is valuable to the dominant culture. I think there are good reasons to question this approach. Mainly because this will do little to change the overall structure of inequality in society. It may provide students with an opportunity for exit from poverty, but in order to achieve this exit, those students must sacrifice some valuable and valid forms of cultural capital.

Yosso complicates the idea of cultural capital, breaking it into 6 components that make up community cultural wealth (adapted from Oliver and Shapiro, 1995). Some of these include Aspirational Capital, Linguistic Capital, Familial Capital, and Social Capital. Though Moll's “funds of knowledge” has in some cases come to represent all of the knowledge students bring with them into the classroom, here it fits under familial capital. My hope is that Yosso's categories of capital can serve as a framework for the exploration the students are undertaking in their neighborhood studies. Students have been asked to evaluate the neighborhood assets. In the past, this has tended to lead to a list of brick and mortar resources in the community: a community center here, a corner store there, and a church around the corner. In speaking with one of the groups, I think I came up with a decent means of conveying how we can think about some of these brick and mortar sites in the context of funds of knowledge and community cultural wealth: the sites are conduits for these forms of capital. A church is certainly a resource in a community, but what makes it a resource? How does it work to build and support the capital of the community? Perhaps the church supports social capital by providing a site for the development of community ties. Perhaps the church offers translation services or english as a second language classes for adults, supporting linguistic capital. Or perhaps the pastor of the church serves as an aspirational leader in the community. As these students get to know their neighborhoods I hope they begin to explore these questions and uncover what makes the assets in their community so valuable and how they can be brought into the classroom to support learning.

Bourdieu, P. (1986). The Forms of Capital. In J. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (pp. 241-258). New York: Greenwood.

Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132-141.

Oliver, M. & Shapiro, T. (1995) Black wealth/White wealth: a new perspective on racial inequality (New York, Routledge).

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69.