A pre-history of the idea of Funds of Knowledge / Una pre-historia de la idea de Fondos de Conocimiento

Abstract

This essay traces the work of Luis Moll in the years before he moved to the University of Arizona, where he collaborated with the group of scholars there developing the concept of Funds of Knowledge. At the end of his PhD thesis, Luis argued that in order to assess children’s cognitive abilities it is necessary to go beyond standard experimental methods to include ethnographic observations of the participants’ daily routines and forms of life. He, along with Esteban Diaz, first applied this approach in their organization of classroom lessons which recruited home knowledge of Spanish into lessons designed to teach reading in English, revealing reading skills that had gone unrecognized using standard classroom procedures. This work was followed up by the design of writing activities based upon ethnographic observations that included students as ethnographers in their own communities, again revealing capacities that had previously been untapped by the standard curriculum. This work provided a natural fit with the work of his colleagues at the University of Arizona, where it continued under the banner of Funds of Knowledge.