Rethinking the Resources of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Elementary Students in a Preservice Teacher Education Program

Abstract

Many teachers enter the profession with a deficit-perspective of their students and their communities, particularly those working with students from low-socioeconomic backgrounds and/or students who are emergent bilinguals. Yet the majority of the students in our schools today come from backgrounds that often have different sets of values and different ways of viewing the world. The result is that, too often, educators adopt a deficit perspective. The goal of this study was to disrupt deficit thinking by introducing preservice teachers to the notion that students arrive in our classrooms with existing funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). Through class activities and assignments, preservice teachers were introduced to the concept of funds of knowledge. This study examines the impact of introducing an asset-based perspective early in candidates’ preparation and asks what shifts occur in preservice teachers’ perspectives of their students and the resources those students bring when engaged in purposeful examination of their own and their prospective students’ cultural funds of knowledge.

Keywords

• Preservice teacher preparation
• preservice teacher
• funds of knowledge
• cultural competency
• culturally sustaining pedagogy