Student Voice, Agency and Participation in Curriculum: Funds of Knowledge

By Lew Zipin & Marie Brennan, Guest Editors

lew.zipin@vu.edu.au; marie.brennan@vu.edu.au

This issue of ReConnectEd is about student voice, agency and participation in curriculum development. Many of the articles use a ‘Funds of Knowledge’ and ‘Problems That Matter’ approach which integrate well with ideas of student voice, agency and participation.  

Voice: Such a curriculum approach acknowledges and listens to all students’ voices about their lived experience: it values the knowledge of the students and their communities. 

Agency: The curriculum approach is based on enabling the agency of all students to address issues of diverse and collective concern: the problems that matter in their community lifeworlds. 

Participation: The curriculum is practised through a process of shared participation and collaboration between students, educators and community people, around those matters of life significance. 

The articles in this issue also point to the systemic failure of education to acknowledge certain student voices and to include certain community knowledges in the curriculum. The dominant curriculum excludes richly diverse knowledges that exist within marginalised communities. 

How do diversely rich knowledges get marginalised? A key factor is how curriculum activity that prevails in classrooms encodes historical ‘relations of power’, notes Hispanic-American educator Luis Moll (2014), which ‘in all societies ... determine whose language and cultural experiences count and whose do not, which students are at the centre and which must therefore be peripheral’ (Moll 2014: 148-149). 

Let’s consider Australian historical relations of unequal power. 

Australian power relations: a (very abbreviated) history 

After Captain Cook’s ‘discovery’ of the island continent in 1770, the British government exported racial and class inequalities by: (a) deeming it ‘terra nullius’ (‘nobody’s land’) while colonising Indigenous peoples and their lands; and (b) establishing penal colonies on those lands to imprison under-class ‘outcasts’, mostly poor White, from UK isles. Racial inequalities underpinned 1901 formation of a nation named ‘Australia’, evident when the first Parliament legislated a White Australia policy to keep out migrants of colour. This policy receded from the 1960s, although not fully rescinded until the mid-1970s; and Australia is now among the most multicultural nations globally. Yet race-relational diversities remain unequally powerful across society, seen in classroom deafness to Black students’ knowledges; in school-to-prison pipelines of Black – and especially Indigenous – young people; and much more. 

Yet, from the mid/late 1800s, as the penal-colony era faded, economic class inequalities took a different turn from those in ‘Mother England’. White mining, agricultural and industrial workers challenged the steep UK class inequalities that landed their ancestors in prisons. In the early 1900s, White men won a guaranteed family wage, 8-hour day, old-age pensions and other policies of reasonably equitable wealth distribution. Within this ‘fair go’ social fabric (for White people, we emphasise), school academic achievement was not a key passport for access to jobs and living standards, even as successive generations, doing better than their parents, mobilised upward into working-middle class status. Indeed, 1970s-1980s education policies supported progressive curricular experiments. 

But then, from the late 1980s, the ‘fair go’ fabric tore decisively as global capitalism moved many industrial jobs to cheaper workforces overseas. As the ‘middle’ thinned, many young people sank downward towards futures less well-off than their parents, with room for few to aspire upward – a hard, competitive climb, for which schools became the competitive passport system. Education policies of Australian state and federal governments, infested by global ‘economic-rationalist’ trends, did not act to redress class and race inequities but to legitimate them, with logics of ‘earning good life-chances by merit of hard work and natural intelligence’ in schools. Curriculum in turn became selectively narrow, encoding (White) upper-class ways of knowing – what sociologists call cultural capital – as the test of ‘merit’. 

Market-competition: pressures to marginalise the  already-marginalised 

As students get captured into divisive competition, so do schools. By 2011, education policies included a narrow national curriculum; narrow standardised testing; and narrow measures of whole-school performance, posted on a national MySchool website for families to peruse when choosing where ‘best’ to send their kids. Schools are thus pushed to look ‘better’ than other schools on measures that narrowly select for cultural capital. Elite private schools draw most students who inherit cultural capital in upper-crust families. In contrast, ‘poor cousin’ public schools need students from marginalised groups to fill seats; and yet, they find themselves pressured to ‘improve performance’ in line with the narrow measures. 

In a funds of knowledge project, we worked with students and teachers through an experimental class in a school in an area of inner-city suburbs near to an Australian capital-city centre. We’ll call the wider area Fringe City, and the school Fringe City College. Fringe City had long been multi-culturally diverse, but some suburbs were rapidly gentrifying, marginalising less-advantaged groups into poorer suburbs.  

Although the wider Fringe City area was gentrifying before (and during) our project at Fringe City College, the school had not been a ‘winner’, relative to nearby schools, in drawing students from: (a) White new-gentry families; and (b) Asian families who had migrated to Australia a few generations back. These two categories carried stronger cultural capital than others in the Fringe City area. While there were such students at Fringe City College, more seats were filled from poor White families, and from recently-migrated Black African families. Despite a student majority from marginalised social positions, Fringe City College (like other ‘poor cousin’ schools in the area) adopted a curriculum strategy that privileges the few over the many. Based on student performance statistics from later primary-school years, they filtered a small set of students, deemed to carry ‘high-achiever’ potential (i.e. cultural capital), into a Middle Years (7-9) academically ‘accelerated’ program. 

As we see it, Fringe City College leadership got caught in a market-competitive sense of need to advertise a curricular program that leads to ‘advanced’ Senior Years (11-12) subjects, and onward to university and ‘better life-chances’. We might say that, in ways not thought through in social-justice terms, school leadership aimed to draw in more ‘high’ cultural capital students, replacing marginal students, thus strengthening the school’s policy-driven performance measures. 

When ‘poor cousin’ schools compete to win by privileging an ‘achieving’ few, marginalised students get the tacit (and sometimes spoken) messages that they are not ‘winners’ whom the school wants to fill seats. Those judged ‘non-achievers’ absorb such messages in hurtful ways that alienate them from curriculum effort. (For testimonies from such students, see Zipin, 2009 Zipin, Brennan & Sellar, 2021; Zipin, Brennan & Trevorrow, 2021.) Indeed, their classroom teachers become the hurtful messengers when, as Moll and colleagues say (1992: 134): 

[C]lassrooms seem encapsulated ... from the social worlds and resources of the community.... [T]eachers rarely draw on the resources of the ‘funds of knowledge’ of the child’s world outside the context of the classroom. 

We must not blame school teachers and leaders, but systems which capture them in accountability to forces of governance power ‘above’ that prioritise school performance. We understand how this works against prioritising ethical care for knowledge needs and capacities of marginalised students and their communities. We nonetheless argue that ethical momentum must build among educators to expand beyond narrow curricular limits. Teachers must hear rich knowledges that marginalised students carry from diverse lifeworlds – and put those knowledge ‘funds’ to use as learning assets.  

The funds of knowledge approach emerged in the 1990s, in high-poverty Mexican-American areas of the U.S. southwest. Moll and academic colleagues, with school teachers, researched in students’ family and other life spaces for funds of knowledge that local-community residents develop and share, in networks, as useful for life survival and thriving. The teachers and academics then designed curriculum units to connect funds of knowledge into school curriculum subject areas. 

Our experimental class, facilitated by Lew with a Fringe City College teacher, sought to show a way forward by what Moll (2014: 137) explains as a ‘funds of knowledge’ curriculum approach. 

The funds of knowledge approach ... represents a challenge to the stifling prescriptivism of the status quo, not only in valuing the knowledge of the students most marginalized by the education system but also in assuming that teachers can conceptualize a rigorous curriculum that honors [sic] students and families as co-participants in the practice of education. 

Our paper that follows explains the experimental class and how we would expand it to a more robust engagement with problems that matter in students’ local communities.  

References 

Moll L (2014) L.S. Vygotsky and Education, Taylor & Francis Group. 

Moll L, Amanti C, Neffe D, & Gonzalez N (1992) Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms, Theory into Practice, 32(2): 132-141. 

Zipin L (2009) Dark Funds of Knowledge, Deep Funds of Pedagogy: Exploring Boundaries Between Lifeworlds and Schools, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 30: 317-331. 

Zipin L, Brennan M, & Sellar S (2021) Young People Pursuing Futures: Making Identity Labors Curricular, Mind, Culture, & Activity, 28(2): 152-168. 

Zipin L, Brennan M, & Trevorrow D (2021) Aggravating Students’ Structural Vulnerabilities: Cruel Miseries of Selection for ‘Success’ in Schools with Power-Marginalised Intake, Journal of Applied Youth Studies, 4: 401-420.