Families' Funds of Knowledge: Re-Mediating Guided Reading in Culturally Relevant Ways

• In Event: 60.040 - Relationships Between Schools and Immigrant Families: Addressing Junctures and Disjunctures

Abstract

From a critical perspective, this case study documents the ways in which everyday stories enacted in homes and communities can be (re)positioned in the primary grades classroom to inform the reading of more traditional stories (books) and the revision of traditional yet ubiquitous curricular structures (such as guided reading). It specifically focuses on the situated representation of this phenomenon (Dyson & Genishi, 2005), on a learning event that was catapulted by a guided reading group interaction.

Over the course of one academic year, using ethnographic data collection tools (field notes, interviews, video recordings, and analysis of artifacts), the researcher sought to document the ways in which guided reading (a curricular structure that segregates children based on reading levels) was problematized and revisioned within the context of a 2nd grade dual language classroom in a large urban setting. The representative example selected, happens when a guided reading group read Level M book “Too Many Tamales” by Gary Soto, and most of its members did not have enough contextual knowledge to fully understand the story (Graves, Juel & Graves, 1998). They could decode, but did not know what masa, cornhusk, and tamales were. They could read the text, but not the context (Alvermann, Gillis, & Phelps, 2012).

Noticing the need for the children not only to read words, but worlds (Freire, 1970), the teacher re-mediated this learning opportunity (Gutiérrez, Martinez, & Morales, 2009), by doing away with levels as a way of convening guided reading groups and inviting children who were not yet decoding all words in that book fluently, but had contextual knowledge to deepen everyone’s understandings of the story, to pair up with those initially assigned to the Level M guided reading group. In doing so, the children not only challenged traditional power hierarchies in the classroom, but helped each other with decoding and comprehension strategies, affording them true peer-learning opportunities (Janks, 2010).

Additionally, the teacher invited two of the mothers who were regarded by their children to “not know anything” and who solely spoke Spanish to teach the class about tamales, make them, and be interviewed, thus expanding the children’s understandings and the curriculum, as well as of language, power, and identity (Cowhey, 2006; Rogovin, 1998; Author, 2013). She linked their visits to the Common Core State Standards, illustrating how family “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992) can bring procedural texts to life in culturally relevant ways.

This case study sheds lights onto the power and possibility of unsettling traditional curricular structures, such as guided reading, in culturally relevant and more equitable ways, by (re)positioning families centrally in the teaching and learning process and drawing on their “funds of knowledge” to enrich the curriculum. This study is significant as it illustrates the creation of zones of possibilities (Moll & Greenberg, 1990), which combines social contexts for teaching and learning in culturally relevant ways.

Author

• Mariana Souto-Manning, Teachers College, Columbia University