Teaching is heralded as a noble profession and a difficult one too. In order to effectively teach their students, teachers must be able to evaluate their needs and their interests to better facilitate learning. In the article Funds of Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms, teachers and anthropologists come together to do find out how they can better serve their students. This team of researchers and teachers come together to bring the knowledge available in the students’ homes from experiences, cultural practices, parental occupations, and more into the classroom and incorporate it into their lessons. In Tucson, Arizona, anthropologist teamed up with several teachers who worked at schools in …show more content…
The researchers defined it as follows, “these historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being.” (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). They looked specifically at how the households’ funds of knowledge are utilized in dealing with different circumstances, especially economic and social (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). The researchers looked at how the members of the households foster the creation of social networks within their social environments and how these “facilitate the development and exchange of resources, including knowledge, skills, and labor” that help the growth of the household (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). While researching, the teachers and anthropologists noted two important factors within the social networks study: 1) they are “flexible, adaptive, and active”, including people in and outside the home and 2) they all include the ideal of reciprocity (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). The social networks change constantly depending on availability of the resources and who is currently participating in the exchanges, and the exchanges are not one sided, meaning each person is getting something in return (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, …show more content…
Many of the ideologies they learned about members of the working-class, Mexican communities were: the parents are lazy, children are largely unsupervised, and the communities are not intellectual in nature (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). While conducting the interviews in the households, most, if not all, of these biases were proven wrong. The teachers and anthropologists found that the majority of parents are extremely strict with the upbringing of their children because of their cultural beliefs on how to raise children. Children are responsible for a lot in the homes including chores, helping take care of siblings, in some cases they are the translator between their families and the outside, English speaking world, and more (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992). The children in these communities are not just passive observers but active members in the social