WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
Participants will explore perspectives and activities presented by two culturally relevant educators who purposefully invite students’ background knowledge as the content and context for learning.
PRESENTATION ABSTRACT
You will be guided in an activity LaVelda explores in her own classroom. This will serve as a prompt for further dialogue. Funds of knowledge are that sense of cultural knowing as a lens for understanding what children bring to school with them representative of their membership in a community as well as their uniqueness. How can we, as teachers, create connections to their learning and school learning rather than creating obstacles and incongruencies?
Recent articles by Deschenie (2007), Moayeri and Smith (2010) and Thompson (2009) address this dual perspective as causing a disconnect between school literacy and home literacy. The workshop will explore this issue from the perspective of two culturally relevant educators as presenters whose goal is to use students’ background knowledge as the content and context for teaching. Christensen (2000) explains:
As teachers, we have daily opportunities to affirm that our students’ lives and language are unique and important. We do that in the selections of literature we read, in the history we choose to teach, and we do it by giving legitimacy to our student’s lives as a content worthy of study (p. 103).
....Welcome to the dialogue....