Abstract
The aim of this article is to contextualize the perspective of the Funds of Knowledge (FK), with particular attention to what we consider three substantial contributions made by Luis Moll. Namely: (1) the Vygotskian conceptualization of study groups involving researchers and teachers as a mediating social structure; (2) the importance of generating zones of proximal development understood as social processes of trust, collaboration and exchange; and (3) the understanding of FK as psychological tools, socially and culturally situated and distributed, which, when recognized and legitimized in educational contexts, serve to amplify, organize, sustain and regulate (mediate) learning processes. All of this is framed within the commitment and connection that Luis Moll consistently demonstrated between his thought, scholarship and life in relation to ‘
In a broad sense,
From its inception, the FK approach has served researchers and educators as a framework for theorizing the practices of households, communities and formal teaching and learning contexts, rather than as an effort to apply theory to school practice (González et al., 2005). It rests on an anthropological premise — also rooted in the Vygotskian tradition (Moll, 1997) — that people accumulate specific forms of knowledge and skills as a result of their participation in life contexts and activities, such as the workplace, as well as in various community practices, including religion, multilingual communication and other cultural artefacts appropriated across the life course. In this regard, the ethnographic exploration of students’ households not only makes it possible to contextualize school practice by connecting curriculum with students’ lived experiences (McIntyre et al., 2001) but also to foster exchanges, collaboration and trust between teachers and students, teachers and families, and more broadly between schools and local communities (Esteban-Guitart et al., 2023; González et al., 2011). In this sense, it is, therefore, not an approach aimed at enhancing parental or family involvement programs in schools but rather one that seeks to transform power relations among teachers, students and families towards more horizontal forms of collaboration and mutual understanding (Barton & Tan, 2009; Rodriguez, 2003; Whyte & Karabon, 2016).
A particularly central element of the FK approach lies in its conceptualization of culture as lived practices and the experiences associated with them. In this sense, the work originally developed at a historical moment when anthropology was moving away from the notion of culture as a unitary paradigm towards the need to understand communities from a more empirical, processual, in-depth and direct perspective (González, 1995; Rosaldo, 1989). This aspect will be very briefly outlined below.
Funds for survival: uses and abuses of ‘culture’
Knowledge and skills, in short, sociocultural practices and the lived experiences associated with them, constitute the common currency of culture. Culture is, figuratively speaking, both what sustains our survival and what may threaten it. Paradoxically, it is tied to the well-being and quality of life of individuals, families and communities, while at the same time, through its contradictions, undermining their life projects. This assertion is crucial to demystifying any simplistic conception of family, community or culture. Of course, difficult circumstances often shape people’s lives in contexts of political and economic inequality and exclusion. Positive as well as negative experiences leave their imprint on learners’ trajectories in distinctive ways (Cabiles, 2025; Poole & Huang, 2018).
One of us has recently analysed practices of violence, drug use and distribution and militarization along the US–Mexico border, which stem from networks of exploitation and conflict in response to global capitalist pressures and assimilationist and exclusionary political agendas (Vélez-Ibáñez, 2025). Such dynamics can easily generate what Zipin (2009) calls ‘dark Funds of Knowledge’. These often take the form of tacit, ‘invisible’ beliefs and ideas, deeply naturalized and embedded in everyday practices that reproduce — without conscious awareness — hegemonic, canonical and normative sociocultural discourses, codes, norms and practices rooted in exclusion, oppression and inequality (Esteban-Guitart, 2023). Yet, in our view, problems of school performance do not stem from presumed deficiencies in students, their families or their communities of origin and affiliation. Rather, without placing blame on teachers, we argue that they arise from the inability of schools, as deontic and power-laden institutions (Packer & Cole, 2019), to pedagogically harness the talents, resources and skills that all learners possess, regardless of their background or condition. Thus, following Moll and Diaz (1987), if ‘academic failure is socially organised, academic success can be socially arranged’ (p. 302).
On the other hand, from the FK perspective, culture is not reduced to myths, rituals and legends, as emphasized by symbolic anthropology, but rather to the reciprocal capacity underpinning our collective life within a particular group or subgroup. This is what Tomasello (2007) terms ‘shared intentionality’, or what Trevarthen (1998) described as ‘intersubjectivity’. Similarly, Bruner (2002) highlighted this in his narrative vision of cultural psychology: the human capacity to organize and communicate experience in dramatic form — through poetry and literature, law and medicine, and ultimately through the vicissitudes and contradictions of life in common.
It may well be said that human culture, regardless of its multiple forms and nuances, its conflicts and contestations, is simultaneously a solution and, at times, a problem — a threat to life in common. It consists of strategies, knowledge and resources for navigating challenges and pursuing hopes. To use Lévi-Strauss’s (1949) classic expression, these are ‘systems of exchange’:
From its inception, then, the FK approach has resisted the generic, abstract, metaphorical and stereotypical notion of ‘culture’ as the essence of a given social group (González, 2004). Culture is strained, reproduced, created and re-created within the family and other contexts of life and socialization, understood as a unit structured by sociocultural practices — for instance, labor practices — and the experiences associated with them. This is why, from the very origins of the FK approach, attention was drawn to informal economic exchange systems in cross-border settings, such as the
In any case, no human culture can function without some means of addressing the predictable or unpredictable imbalances inherent in collective life. Culture provides the means to sustain and secure life projects (Esteban-Guitart & Gee, 2024). Its resources, practices and lived experiences push people forward in pursuing their desires and needs. In a Vygotskian sense, these are cultural artefacts — psychological tools — that extend, amplify and regulate our thoughts, feelings and actions. This, indeed, constitutes one of Luis Moll’s major contributions to the conceptualization and development of the FK approach (Moll, 1990, 1997, 2014, 2023).
What we intend to outline briefly in the following section is precisely Moll’s fundamental role in the subsequent phases of the approach — namely, its origins in the 1980s, its later development and its full internationalization throughout the twenty-first century (Esteban-Guitart, 2025).
The impact of Luis Moll in the first steps of the Funds of Knowledge approach (Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez and Norma González)
The Funds of Knowledge approach to collaborative work evolved over several stages throughout time and has continued to grow and develop across contexts and paradigms. We will trace some of the theoretical undergirding of the approach in order to deepen our understanding of how the flexibility of the approach has led to multiple avenues of research and implementation. The ‘origin story’ of the Funds of Knowledge approach can be traced within simultaneous expansions of anthropological theory and educational research and the convergence of these two strands. Funding opportunities furthered the work and enabled a more robust contour of how this approach could be implemented in schools.
From the anthropological view, insights were predicated on research in the early 1980s, led by Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez and James Greenberg, in Tucson, Arizona, among a randomly selected, stratified sample of Mexican-origin households conducted over two years of ethnographic, statistical and archival research. The Funds of Knowledge concept arose from the grounded observational methods employed by a team of researchers, including Norma González, from the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology of the University of Arizona. Among the 60 households studied, we found what we later termed ‘Funds of Knowledge’: the crucial labor, economic, social, linguistic, cultural practices and beliefs — ‘those bodies of knowledge of strategic importance to households’ (Vélez-Ibáñez & Greenberg, 1992, p. 314). The term arose from discussions between James Greenberg and Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez during discussion sessions regarding the exploration of the wealth of knowledge, practices and ideologies among the households and the manner in which these were shared among households (see Vélez-Ibáñez, 2024, for the details on this). Yet none of these compendia of knowledge and practice were recognized by social science or educational literature, nor by educational institutions. If anything, Mexican-origin households were either culturally so different that such values as academic achievement and success were missing or unrecognized, or were indicated as the sources of linguistic and cultural barriers to educational achievement.
What we found were clusters of households that were multicultural, mostly bilingual, changing and highly adaptive to the stresses and strains of limited incomes, multiple migrations, institutional neglect and economic disparities. From generations originating during the eighteenth-century Spanish/Mexican colonial period to those having crossed the border line the day before yesterday, Mexican-origin households were highly adaptive sources of stability, highly functional socially and culturally and the source of sound socialization practices that were child-centered and multigenerational.
It was within this exciting theoretical climate and the educational psychology side that Luis Moll entered and was instrumental in shaping the application of Funds of Knowledge to studies of literacy and education. Moll had been active at the University of California, San Diego, in conducting ethnographic observations of students and classrooms. Inspired by Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology, which emphasizes how cultural practices and resources mediate the development of thinking, Moll had begun to explore how these insights might be merged with anthropological approaches (Moll, 1990, 1992; Moll & Diaz, 1987). Upon his arrival at the University of Arizona in 1986, funding became available through the US Department of Education, and the ‘Community Literacy Project’ was instantiated. This project merged the three-part design of the San Diego studies: household observations, after-school study groups among researchers and teachers, and classroom observations, with the understandings of the ‘Funds of Knowledge’ approach. This fusion of theoretical insights was to be applied to helping teachers generate new forms of literacy instruction in their classrooms (González et al., 2005; Moll et al., 1992).
As instructive as this approach had been, it relied on anthropological researchers visiting the households and then conveying information to teachers. It quickly became apparent that the critical link between household and school must involve the teachers themselves as researchers of their own students’ households. From this foundation, the idea of helping teachers develop ‘ethnographic eyes’ to perceive the Funds of Knowledge of households, communities and students became intuitive.
The collaborative endeavour between disciplinary approaches was personified and embedded in personal relationships that sought, above all, to impact the schooling experiences of all students. Relationships between the university-based researchers, the teacher-researchers and the households were critical. Teachers like Cathy Amanti were the foundational structure upon which ‘Funds of Knowledge’ found its strength. Above all, ‘Funds of Knowledge’ is relational and expansive. Luis Moll was instrumental in fomenting these relationships, since he embodied the nurturing of relationships and the recognition of the inherent dignity and worth of communities and each individual.
As we try to understand the arc of Luis Moll’s contributions to sociocultural underpinnings of the construction of knowledge, it is important to note that Luis himself modelled the idea of ‘the joint construction’ of knowledge, since much of his work was collaborative. He worked ‘
In this collaborative endeavour, we all became learners. As anthropologists and university-based researchers, we learned of the very real constraints of working within mandated institutional limits. Together, we formed study groups to examine how household forms of learning could be introduced into school settings. As teachers and community members increased their participation, they brought their own pedagogical Funds of Knowledge to bear on how to more intentionally incorporate sociocultural learning within an institution that exists under the gaze of administrative accountability. With the benefit of 30 years of hindsight, the most important contribution of this approach may well be the genuine dialogue that was fostered within relationships of reciprocity and ‘
The recontextualizations of the original Funds of Knowledge approach and the reconfigured methodologies that have followed (Funds of Knowledge Alliance, see: https://fundsofknowledge.org/) have enlarged theoretical premises to extend educational promise to all students. The expansions of the Funds of Knowledge approach have interrogated institutionally codified approaches to teaching and complicated their connectivity to the lived experiences of learners, even as they maintain a deep respect for communities and recognize the reciprocity and responsibility inherent in these encounters.
The impact of Luis Moll on the internationalization of the Funds of Knowledge approach (Moisés Esteban-Guitart)
I believe it was the British poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) who once wrote: ‘To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet’. In a Bakhtinian sense, it is impossible to trace a person’s biographical construction without referring to the ensemble of borrowed voices through which they engage in an endless, although often silent or implicit, dialogue. Our self, ultimately, is nothing more than a colony of others: what Wertsch (1991) termed the ‘voices of the mind’ and Hermans (2001) called the ‘dialogical self’. The ‘faces we meet’ literally constitute our own ‘face’, for without them we would simply not exist. Particularly significant are those voices that become arguments, turning points or compasses: our social Funds of Identity. For me, without question, Luis Moll has been one of these voices. And not only his voice, which never exists in isolation, but also the web of singularities that colored my life experience with Luis, his family, friends and colleagues in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona.
Circles connect and join. I first met Luis Moll in 2010 thanks to the generous mediation of this journal’s editor, Amelia Álvarez, who connected us following a fruitful stay by Miguel del Río, the journal’s managing editor, at the University of Arizona a few years earlier. This Special Issue includes a recovered interview attesting to that exchange.
I remember the impact at that time in 2010 when Arizona had just enacted the Immigration Law known as ‘Senate Bill 1070’. This, among other measures, authorized local police to determine a person’s immigration status on the mere basis of ‘reasonable suspicion’ of irregular presence. This measure compounded other racist and exclusionary policies, such as the limited recognition of Spanish in schools, attacks on bilingual education and the prohibition of Chicano studies in Tucson public schools by Governor Jan Brewer in May 2010 (law HB2281). The echoes of these measures persist nowadays in the Trump era.
From its inception, the Funds of Knowledge (FK) approach had responded directly to such threats, as did Luis Moll and his colleagues, including Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, even at the cost of legal constraints on ongoing research. In this context, Luis’s response was consistently firm and supportive and showed solidarity towards individuals, families and groups devalued by these political circumstances. As this article argues, ‘
Within this climate of trust and complicity, the notion of ‘Funds of Identity’ (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014a, 2014b) emerged as a bridge between the FK tradition and my then-current research on identity construction using multi-method autobiographical approaches in cross-border and diverse settings such as Chiapas (Mexico) and Catalonia (Spain). Other colleagues who became friends also participated in this dialogue and mutual influence, among them Fernando González Rey, whom I met at the 2011 ISCAR conference in Rome through Luis Moll. González Rey’s theory of subjectivity, which I first encountered via Luis, inspired our work. Indeed, the commitment to ‘building bridges’ (González & Moll, 2002), and intrinsic to Luis, is key to understanding his sensitivity and support for extending FK into new contexts and realities.
In this sense, as argued elsewhere (Esteban-Guitart, 2025), Moll’s later work (2014, 2019) is particularly noteworthy for its translocal and international orientation of the FK approach, revisiting studies conducted in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Uganda and Catalonia (Spain). I recall our conversations about the preface he wrote for the book we published years later on the first applications of FK in the Catalan context, in Spain (Esteban-Guitart & Vila, 2013), where Luis expressed enthusiasm for developments of FK in Argentina, Chile, New Zealand and England.
This endeavour culminated in 2018 with the creation of the International Funds of Knowledge Alliance (https://fundsofknowledge.org/), whose mission is to promote inclusion and social justice through the analysis and advancement of educational practices and projects. Today, it includes more than 100 scholars worldwide. Literature reviews, edited volumes and Special Issues attest to the approach’s implementation, diffusion and impact across diverse territories and circumstances (Da Silva Iddings et al., 2025; Denton & Borrego, 2021; Esteban-Guitart, 2021, 2024; Hogg, 2011; Hogg & Volman, 2020; Liu et al., 2025; Llopart & Esteban-Guitart, 2017, 2018; Ramos & Kiyama, 2021; Rios-Aguilar & Neri, 2023; Ruscoe et al., 2025; Waddington & Esteban-Guitart, 2024). Without Luis’s dedication, sensitivity and commitment to ‘
Five core tenets
The richness and diversity of uses of the approach, as illustrated in this section of the Special Issue, align with what we regard as five key tenets that have emerged as central throughout its development. In this respect (see Table 1), various researchers have examined the common or defining elements of the Funds of Knowledge approach. Building on this work, as well as on the contributions presented in this section, we highlight and illustrate five of these tenets below.
What are the core tenets of the Funds of Knowledge approach?
Firstly, it is essential to create, foster and sustain safe spaces that promote caring, reciprocal and trusting social relationships among researchers and teachers, teachers and students and teachers and families. Relationships of accompaniment and care must be placed at the center of educational practice. This, in turn, requires efforts to understand empirically the lives, interests, needs and reference communities of students. Education is, at its core, a pedagogical relationship that should be grounded in mutual knowledge and recognition. Accordingly, at the heart of the Funds of Knowledge (FK) approach lies the enhancement of human relationships, with teachers taking on a key role as learners of their students, their families and their communities, ‘teachers as social scientists’ (Moll & González, 1997, p. 89). This principle can be encapsulated in what Moll (2014) called ‘
This orientation is illustrated in the contribution by Linda Hogg and Monique Volman in this Special Issue, which highlights collaboration between researchers and teachers in the Netherlands and New Zealand. In both cases, teachers effectively became researchers of their own practice, making explicit their professional Funds of Knowledge. Likewise, the article by Cristina Zhang-Yu, Giorgina Garbarino Álvarez, Karen Andrea Jaramillo and José Luis Lalueza documents long-term reflexive work between researchers and early-childhood teachers in Barcelona, showing how study groups functioned as formative and mediating spaces where participants became aware of oppressive structures shaping family life, ethnocentrism in parenting, the need for less ‘folkloric’ views of culture, dominant forms of family–school relations and their own teaching conceptions and practices. Such critical reflection, ‘
Secondly, it is necessary to recognize the complexity of communities, identities and cultures. As shown at the same time in the text by Zhang-Yu and colleagues, superficial uses of the approach risk reducing cultural practices to stereotypes. FK, families and cultural processes are not a priori truths, stereotypes or given evidence; they require empirically situated critical understanding due to their multiple, hybrid, dynamic and contradictory nature. Yet this complexity is underpinned by an explicit assumption that avoids deficit discourses about students and families. Despite differences, communities, identities and cultures are valuable and should be affirmed, recognized and legitimized within schools. Of course, we are speaking from a humanist conception that presupposes the intellectual character of students and their families and the linguistic and epistemic repertoires they hold. FK are thus broad, dynamic and plural strategic cultural resources encompassing networks of exchange for accessing resources and supporting individual and collective development and survival, bilingual and multilingual competencies, home-maintenance skills, spiritual and religious practices and beliefs, work-related skills from formal and informal contexts, oral traditions and more.
In this vein, the work of Cecilia Rios-Aguilar, Brianna Wright and Davis Vo introduces the notion of ‘Funds of Labor Identity’ to express how professional and occupational domains (skills and knowledge embedded in work histories and trajectories) contribute to students’ identity formation, social relations and worldviews. This dimension is key to understanding the interplay between macro processes (socio-political context, economic system, power relations, status and hierarchy) and micro processes (identity construction) and to enriching conceptions of learning as life project(s) involving self-recognition, recognition by others and institutional recognition (Esteban-Guitart & Gee, 2024). Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez underscores another FK crucial to identity construction, that of language (‘language is life’), showing its relation to imposition and resistance and to bilingual education. Ruth Sáez and Aura González likewise focus on language, in this case written, in their account of a pedagogical project in a Kaqchikel Maya community in Guatemala (‘Proyecto Alianzas de Lectura Puerto Rico-Guatemala’). Literacy, like any cultural artefact and psychological tool, gains its meaning and relevance in deeply rooted practices that enable reader development, significant text production and culturally congruent curriculum design.
Thirdly, teachers, the key agents in the approach, require adequate social, cultural and material conditions to enact culturally responsive and congruent community-based practices (Iglesias et al., 2025). They need time, space and support networks to engage with families and communities and to improve and transform schools with the ultimate goal of expanding learning opportunities for all. ‘Study groups’, consistently regarded by Moll (2014) as a key mediating element, a ‘community of practice’ for learning and critical inquiry (Esteban-Guitart et al., 2018), were conceived precisely as contexts for understanding families and fostering educational transformation. Without school leadership and educational administrations supporting these actions, the continuity such work requires is impossible.
Additionally, the ‘study groups’ framework, as an interdisciplinary space for reflection and educational co-design, is illustrated in the study by Macarena Lamas-Aicón, Joaquín Arriagada, Romina Di Cola, Giacomo Rosso, Javier Contreras and Danitza Flores at the Universidad Austral de Chile. Their work makes explicit various structural obstacles linked to the principle of social, cultural and material conditions: lack of time, inadequate planning spaces, hegemonic forms of schooling, such as institutional resistance to group work, that hinder the implementation of FK. This highlights the need for alignment and continuity across different levels of educational responsibility and action: from classroom teachers to staff and leadership teams and from local to national and supranational policies that enable and support such work.
Fourthly, although the original FK approach was ‘located’ in the family context of the home, it is necessary to acknowledge other life and activity contexts as generators of skills and knowledge. For example, Moje et al. (2004) considered the home, community and peer group as social settings where Funds of Knowledge and associated literacy practices are created and shared. In this issue, Julie Waddington, Paula Boned, Daniela Searle and David Subero emphasize ‘community Funds of Knowledge and identity’ understood as ‘commons’ (natural spaces, artistic heritage, oral tradition or archaeological sites) capable of generating collective belonging and linking school curricula and practices to the local environment. The article by Liz Chesworth and Helen Hedges likewise broadens the boundaries of FK beyond the family, taking children’s interests in various life spheres as starting points for contextualizing the early-childhood curriculum.
Finally, and no less important, is recognizing, honoring and fostering the agency of teachers, students and families under complex and difficult circumstances, what Lew Zipin terms ‘dark Funds of Knowledge in dark-age times’. In Australia, Zipin has led initiatives in which teachers negotiate and co-design curriculum units with students, who become researchers of their own lifeworlds. This ‘Problems that Matter’ approach establishes alliances among students, families and other community agents to co-construct knowledge on issues of real significance. It resonates with Waddington and colleagues’ proposal on community Funds of Knowledge and identity.
The article by Gabriela Míguez Salina and Miguel Anxo Santos Rego further traces the political dimension of Luis Moll’s work on FK through socially engaged participatory action research, confronting educational policy injustices and structural inequalities in schools. Finally, Luis-Genaro Garcia and Judy Marquez Kiyama of the University of Arizona link processes of agency and resistance to visual narratives that activate creativity (‘Funds of Creative Knowledge’). Creative resistance takes shape in performative, visual or artistic productions that respond to oppressive structures, stereotypes or inequalities affecting particular groups or communities.
Taken together, the articles in this section and in the Special Issue as a whole contribute to and enrich the legacy of Luis Moll and FK by deepening some of its most fundamental elements and introducing others that have emerged throughout the development of the approach. We close by highlighting what we regard as some of the most distinctive elements that Moll introduced and developed within the FK framework.
Some final observations
It is doubtless that the current international political context, marked by the rise of far-right movements in Europe and the United States and by the resurgence of authoritarianism with policies suppressing linguistic, gender, social and cultural diversity, makes humanist approaches more necessary than ever. These approaches place people, their families and their communities at the center, especially those historically and currently excluded from such a crucial sphere of collective life as schooling. It is not trivial to recall that the fundamental question from which the notion of Funds of Knowledge (FK) arose was how minoritized families and communities in cross-border contexts, under harsh racist and assimilationist policies, manage to endure and move forward (Vélez-Ibáñez, 1995, 2017, 2020). The answer is well known and anticipated above in relation to the notion of ‘culture’ as a repertoire of practices, resources, experiences and life projects (González, 1995; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). People share, develop and appropriate survival strategies in the form of relationships, resources, knowledge and skills. These strategies, in line with the notion of ‘Funds of Identity’ (Esteban-Guitart, 2016; Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014; Hogg & Volman, 2020), are also sense-making resources for projecting individuals and groups into the future and for constructing personal and collective biographies.
The impact of our colleague and friend Luis Moll was profound and visible, not only in academic and professional domains but also in personal and existential ones, as this Special Issue attests. Here we have sought to honor his key influence on the development of the FK approach. In particular, three contributions emerge from the analysis presented above.
Firstly, Moll’s Vygotskian orientation, his analyses of household literacy practices and his ethnographic study of school dynamics and their transformation in bilingual contexts, which he termed ‘ethnographic pedagogy’ (Moll & Diaz, 1985), found fertile ground in the notion of FK. The creation of ‘after-school study groups’ as spaces for critical inquiry between teachers and researchers constitutes a cornerstone of this work, conceived as a mediating social structure for learning from home visits and translating this into improved school teaching and learning processes (Moll, 1992; Moll & Diaz, 1987).
Secondly, the concept of the ‘zone of proximal development’ was incorporated as a theoretical lens for understanding both the social mediation processes occurring in study groups and children’s learning processes in school and family contexts. These collaborative spaces generate myriad forms of learning — appropriations of psychological and cultural tools such as writing — assessed not merely by presumed autonomous competence after guided practice but by learners’ ability to participate collaboratively in new cultural activities (Moll & Greenberg, 1990). For Moll (1990), the zone of proximal development is not a property of the learner or of instruction and should not be reduced to an aspiration for individual performance (e.g., on a test). Rather, it is a process embedded in cooperative activity within specific social environments. Hence, his rejection of reducing literacy learning to discrete skills instead of recognizing the social organization of literacy as a psychological tool and cultural artefact that comes alive in meaningful situations ‘through the mediation of others’ (Moll, 2001, p. 111).
Which leads us to a third contribution. Funds of Knowledge are ultimately conceived as cultural artefacts and psychological tools that amplify, organize, sustain and regulate learning processes. They are by nature socially distributed resources that transcend individual behavior; thus, the unit of analysis and intervention is the learner-in-social-activity-with-others rather than cognitive development per se (Moll et al., 1993).
Taken together, these appear to us as some of Moll’s most significant contributions to the FK approach in particular and to the social and educational sciences more broadly. They rest at the very heart of Luis’s life and work: the collective, engaged, socially mediated nature of human psychological conduct and experience. This translates into the ceaseless building of bonds — ’building bridges’ (González & Moll, 2002) — between schools, families and communities towards ideals of justice, equality and social cohesion. We are convinced that Luis would be pleased to know that ‘