Funds of Knowledge

Once you have an established rapport with families, they will be more comfortable sharing the realities of their daily lives or their funds of knowledge, with you. Funds of Knowledge are “the historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (Moll, et. al., 1992, p133). While Funds of Knowledge and culture are similar, González (2005) describes Funds of Knowledge as the process of everyday life. They are the outward manifestation of a family’s heritage and present-day culture(s).

Funds of Knowledge encompass what we do for work and the skills we need each day to carry out the tasks of our jobs, how we care for our children, what we eat and how we prepare it, how we clean and decorate our homes, how we make, spend, save, and give money, pop culture, what our hobbies are and how we do them, how to play or spectate sports, how we share information, what kinds of places we take children and how we expect children to behave across environments, how we use language to communicate with each other, and how we interact with one another.

Funds of Knowledge evolve over time. For example, a couple of hundred years ago, Māori people performed haka, a very expressive dance accompanied by chanting to welcome visitors or to hype their warriors before battle. In   present-day New Zealand, the All Blacks Rugby Team begins each of their matches by performing a haka (New Zealand Rugby, 2024). In 2024, Māori legislators in New Zealand engaged in a haka as a form of protest during a legislative session (Reuters, 2024). In each of these examples, the performance of haka remains a way to express pride in Māori heritage and identity and to convey strength to an opponent. If you were working with a Māori child whose family are rugby fans on language, social skills, or motor development goals, it would be culturally sustaining to plan home visit activities that supported the family in teaching their child to perform haka.

Attached is an example of how haka may be used in the Māori culture, in this case in the New Zealand Parliament to protest a proposal put forward, as discussed in the paragraph above.

As an EI provider, you would learn this kind of information about family funds of knowledge through authentic conversations about their Family Funds of Knowledge. In my experience, one of the most successful ways to find out about joyful Family Funds of Knowledge, like Haka, is to make conversation with caregivers about what kinds of activities they looked forward to doing with their child when they learned they or their partner was pregnant. You can also ask about what parts of their childhood they want their children to remember fondly once they are adults or what traditions are important to pass on to their children.

One Fund of Knowledge that I find helpful to ask about or observe is the family’s process of passing their ways of being down to their children. In the dominant American culture, we often engage in play with our children and use play as a vehicle to teach children how to cook or care for infants or even learn concepts like colors, sorting, and matching. There are even specific toys designed to teach these skills. In many cultures, parents, grandparents, and caregivers don’t play with children but rather keep them close throughout the day and incorporate the children into their daily routines. In these families, Funds of Knowledge related to cooking and infant care are passed onto children by actively engaging the children in real-life tasks. Pre-math skills like sorting are taught while folding laundry or grocery shopping.

How families transmit and use language also varies greatly from family to family. One of the prevailing methods of language transmission in dominant American culture homes is to read children books at bedtime. This reading practice comes from the high value that many dominant cultures Americans place on the written word and academic learning. At the beginning of my career, I was always introducing families to Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Sandra Boynton’s The Going to Bed Book because they were my favorite board books to read to my daughter. The books feature a singsong cadence, repetition, and rhyming. I would talk to parents about how texts like this were great ways to support children’s language development. Then, I would recommend that caregivers read the books nightly to children before bed. While sharing my family’s favorite books was a great intentional use of self, I missed so many opportunities to learn about which books parents loved when they were young or what kinds of books they would have liked to read to their children.

In some family homes, I wonder if I did some damage by recommending my favorite books rather than learning more about the Funds of Knowledge that guided bedtime and language transmission. Several years into my career, a mom told me that while she knew that her baby loved listening to us read Brown Bear during home visits, she didn’t want to read books at bedtime because she always sang Arrorró mi niño (Hush now, my child) to her son just like her mother sang to her. This conversation was one of many aha moments when I realized that I needed to spend more time learning about families before I made recommendations based on what I would do.

The focus on reading books rather than singing heritage songs or using oral storytelling comes up often in early childhood education because so many of us have read the research that posits that children who have difficulty learning to read often come from homes where they weren’t read to in their earliest years. While I would never discourage reading to children, what often is left out of those research articles is the benefit of singing and oral language. There are many cultural groups, including many Black Americans, that have rich Funds of Knowledge around singing and oral storytelling (This is another time with socio-historical context is important. It was illegal for enslaved people in many states to learn to read, so Black Americans developed oral traditions as a means to pass on knowledge). In fact, children exposed to oral storytelling benefitted from vocabulary expansion and language comprehension, improved auditory attention, story sequencing, and improved imaginations (Marsh & Luzaddar, 2002), all skills necessary for academic success.

In addition to using singing and storytelling to build oral language skills, there are multiple languages, including Spanish and Urdu (a language of Pakistan that is very like Hindi in India, whose linguistic structures guide native speakers in the Funds of Knowledge related to intergenerational communication and respect. In Urdu, for example, there are two different second-person pronouns that translate into “you” in American English. “آپ” (aap) is formal and used when speaking to an elder or in professional settings, and “تم” (tum) would be used to talk to a peer or someone very close to you. As children learn to talk in Urdu-speaking homes, the cultural values around formality and respect for elders are baked into the language structure, which impacts how children view their relationship with adults. This is a more formal, hierarchical relationship that the one in many (but not all) dominant American culture homes.