CSSE Article 10:13

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Cultural Studies of Science Education ISSN 1871-1502 Cult Stud of Sci EducDOI 10.1007/s11422-013-9515-6

Mexican and Mexican-American children’sfunds of knowledge as interventions intodeficit thinking: opportunities for praxis inscience education

Miguel M. Licona

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Mexican and Mexican-American children’s fundsof knowledge as interventions into deficit thinking:opportunities for praxis in science education

Miguel M. Licona

Received: 21 May 2013 / Accepted: 21 May 2013� Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Abstract In this case study, I use an ethnographic-style approach to understand the funds

of knowledge of immigrant families living in colonias on both sides of the US/Mexico

border. I focus on how these ‘‘knowledges’’ and concomitant experiences impact the ways

we perceive and treat immigrant students who have all too often been viewed through

deficit lenses that relegate them to the lowest expectations and outcomes in the classroom. I

find that Mexican and Mexican-American families hold unusually sophisticated and rel-

evant ‘‘knowledges’’ to mitigate their everyday lives. In this paper, I will refer to citizens of

Mexico, whether they reside in Mexico or have crossed to the United States legally or

without documentation for purposes of work, as Mexican. People who have crossed the

border and are living in the US as legal residents or have gained citizenship are referred to

as Mexican-Americans. They live a hybrid identity that is varied and dynamic, an issue that

adds to the complexity of the content and contexts of this study. These families know and

use these ‘‘knowledges’’ on a daily basis, yet they are not recognized by teachers in the US

as a starting point to affirm and support immigrant children. Instead, immigrant children

are relegated to the non-gifted and lower track classes where science is taught from an

abstract and non-contextual and therefore less engaged basis. The approach I outline here,

based on insights from my case study, can greatly improve teachers’ abilities to prepare

their curricula for diversity in science education and science literacy as well as for broad

expectations for student success.

Keywords Deficit thinking � Funds of knowledge � Mexican-American students �Science literacy � Teacher education

Lead editors: Alejandro J. Gallard Martinez and Rene Antrop Gonzalez.

M. M. Licona (&)Department of Curriculum and Instruction, New Mexico State University, P.O. 30001,Las Cruces, NM 88003-8001, USAe-mail: [email protected]

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Cult Stud of Sci EducDOI 10.1007/s11422-013-9515-6

Author's personal copy

Is it possible to replace deficit thinking with a pedagogy of possibilities to affirm and motivate

children from families who work hard to overcome the everyday burdens placed on them by

low expectations and disadvantaged economic circumstances as well as social injustices born

from ignorance about their worlds? Through a university grant-funded initiative to support

pre- and in-service teachers, colleagues from across the university united to participate in the

Border Teacher Network (BTN) as a cross-disciplinary course that incorporated border

immersion experiences for pre- and in-service educators in order to enhance their knowledge

and skills when dealing with immigrant families in their particular disciplines. In my case

study, I observed everyday experts engaged in water purification, recycling, transplanting for

aesthetics and erosion control, building and educating their community about waterless

composting toilets, ethno-botanical practices including growing herbs to support community

health projects, supporting community action projects, and developing micro-enterprises that

keep women and their children from having to work the harsh jobs of distant and oppressive

maquiladoras, which are Free Trade corporate twin plants in Mexico.

This paper will provide examples of engaged scientific ‘‘knowledges’’ and expressed

scientific literacies that address ecology, physical science, botany, chemistry and earth

science as part of the everyday, which has the potential to transform ‘‘minoritized’’ stu-

dents’ educational trajectory by impacting teachers’ deficit-driven beliefs about children

who reside in the poverty-ridden communities of the US/Mexico border, many of whom

have recently immigrated to the US. Although recent militarization of the border has made

it more difficult to cross the border, many children remain in the US with only a single

parent or live with relatives since their parents have been deported or have been prevented

from re-entering the US.

The first decade of the new millennium has ushered in a more conservative, neoliberal

approach to what has become corporatized education that focuses on individual achievement

of standardized ‘‘knowledges.’’ Resources have supported wealthy school districts and

enrolled students. This has compounded the already negative impact on the immigrant stu-

dent population in US schools. The border between Mexico and the US has become

increasingly militarized and corporations, who once established maquiladoras in these very

same spaces, have migrated to seek cheaper labor as they globalize their effort to increase

their bottom lines. The practices by the US government have been fueled by a surge of

extreme conservative and neoliberal politicians, leaving a desolate field of lost dreams and

schools incapable of addressing the needs of its students. Of course, the continued reliance on

single-instrument testing has done little to support the diverse population of students now in

our schools. The historically oppressive pedagogies of limitations toward immigrant chil-

dren, in particular those along the US Mexico border have been well documented. The Third

International Mathematics and Science Study (National Center for Educational Statistics

2007) shows that 15 % of US fourth-graders performed at or above the advanced benchmark

in science while ten percent of US eighth-graders performed at or above the advanced

benchmark. There are four and nine countries that score above the US respectively in grades

four and eight. Yet, the western view of science persists with little value placed on diverse

epistemologies. This has significant implications for science literacy and pedagogy as the

population in the US has become increasingly pluralistic.

Overview of the terrain

This case study is based on ethnographic interviews captured during the filming of a

documentary as well as during a Border Teacher Awareness immersion trip. My colleagues

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and I were looking to understand the families who struggle everyday to earn a living, have

meaningful interactions, care for their children and survive in the harsh economy and

environment of the desert border. Over a two-year period, we documented the everyday

experiences of families who mitigate the impact of geography, politics, education, eco-

nomics and cultural indifference. The women in Mexico choose not to work in the low

paying and dangerous jobs at the maquiladora developed under the Free Trade Agreement.

These women create community centers where they sustain themselves caring for their

families in the unincorporated outlying colonias that are far from the center of the city and

lack sufficient infrastructure for proper living. They live with little or no utilities and

community services, yet they build their homes in the desert hills using discarded materials

from the US owned maquiladoras, such as cardboard, tires and wooden pallets. Often

times, family members from the south arrive to visit and help with the building of homes

and centers.

Globalization and free trade have drawn many people from the interior of Mexico and

even further south to congested colonias with limited resources, lack of police protection,

and isolation from that which had been known prior to moving here. Some have been

living in this region for a long time. These families have had to come together fused by

culture and necessity to mediate the social conditions they encounter in this arid and

inhospitable terrain that sits on the outskirts of two major cities that have many borders.

Using water recycled through grey water filtration systems, the women grow herbs and

plants used to make medicinal salves and syrups that are used to ease their pains and heal

their children. They import plants from home when friends or relatives come to visit.

Doctors, like schools, are not always available. Families have to be creative in the use of

resources. Water is at a premium and they filter and reuse it. Waterless composting toilets

are built for their own use and to sell to other communities with limited water and sewer

resources. Community centers are places where community members collaborate with

childcare while learning skills and sharing ideas to create sustainable communities in terms

of economy, the environment and culture. They make and sell products that do not compete

with neighboring centers or they learn skills to create micro enterprises to earn a living.

They are community activists who voice their concerns and seek support for their colonias

as they understand the inequalities they live under due to globalization, politics and the

undemocratic practices of the wealthy. Centers unite to share ideas and help build additions

and homes for the members so they can reduce costs and prevent exploitation by others.

Women are attracted to the centers because they feel isolated geographically, culturally,

linguistically and economically. They find comfort with people and programs that support

their needs. Many of them attend English as a Second Language (ESL) classes, citizenship

preparation and learning skills to become self-sufficient. This, of course, negates what Mitt

Romney recently said about the working and middle class who are lazy and wait for

government handouts that locks them into poverty and keeps them feeling as victims. This

type of intolerance perpetuates the stereotypes while diminishing the hopes and dreams

these families have to be contributing productive members of society. They also learn to

explore their talents and express themselves in creative and meaningful ways through the

use of art, carpentry, music, dance, healing arts, writing and spiritually. Many public

schools lack these areas of human endeavor as schools have moved toward the basics of

reading, writing and mathematics once again, yet these families endure the hardships and

insecurities about their lives and their children to reach for dreams that so many teachers

should know about.

The women openly speak to how they value education for their children and often

lament how their opportunities are cut short due to economic circumstances. However, the

Mexican and Mexican-American children’s funds

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women from Mexico hesitate to move to the otro lado (other side of the border), because

they fear the crossing as well as the limitations that will be placed on their children within

the schools north of the Rıo Bravo. They are aware of the deficit views and assimilation

strategies that serve to alienate children from immigrant families. Children can be de-

culturalized by the removal of their first language within the English only movement, a

common practice associated with colonization, leaving them unable to navigate the cur-

riculum or acquire the social capital necessary to navigate their lives beyond the school

context (Spring 2007). Many of the women living in the US community centers in Texas

and New Mexico are recent immigrants, but many were long-time residents and even

citizens of the US Several families were deported during our time there, even though the

children were citizens. One mother allowed us to interview her and she described how her

husband was taken to the US/Mexico border and forced to walk back to Mexico. The father

was coerced to sign a deportation paper that has great implications on his ability to return

to the US, even through the legal process. Their child is a US citizen.

Even though US schooling is free and Mexican-American students do not have to incur

the costs that their Mexican counterparts do, the social cost is heavy as they go into a

system that has different and lower expectations from a mostly White teaching force.

Stereotypes of the ‘‘lazy Mexican,’’ and the corresponding notion that they do not value

education based on their relatively low performances and perceived lack of follow through

to graduation, labels and impacts identities to the point that they seek to leave rather than

endure the school contexts. Sonia Nieto and Patty Bode (2012) inform us of the signifi-

cance of student identities within the context of schooling noting that

[s]tudents’ identities—that is, their sense of self based in part on their race, ethnicity,

social class, and language, among other characteristics—can also have an impact on

their academic success or failure, but it is not these characteristics per se that cause

success or failure. Rather, it is the school’s perception of students’ language, culture,

and class as inadequate and negative, and thus the devalued status of these charac-

teristics in the academic environment, that help explain school failure. (p. 258)

Ann Locke Davidson (1996) shows that the engagement of students of color ‘‘appears to

depend not only on historical, economic, and political realities, but also on day-to-day

factors and practices at the school and classroom levels’’ (p. 27). Jut Jhally (2002) shows

how the public perception is created for people of color through his interviews with

Edward Said. The video shares their view of American Orientalism where those who are

different are demonized through media and other public discourses and are attributed such

things as being less than Whites, violent, dishonest, untrustworthy and otherwise not

capable in. It seems there are enough scholars defining the oppressive nature of schooling

and this underscores the imperative calling to praxis for teachers to find new ways to

address the needs of all students, to re-educate themselves and unlearn deficit thinking, and

to have high expectations regardless of student diversity. Richard Valencia and Mary Black

(2002) define deficit thinking as ‘‘the idea that students, particularly of low-SES back-

ground and color, fail in school because they and their families have internal defects, or

deficits, that thwart the learning process’’ (p. 83). They believe it is important for us to

debunk the myth that we do not value education and that in order to create new spaces from

which to work, we must interrogate and remove those extant writings that are inaccurate

and untrue. Valencia and Black identify how parents value their children’s education, but it

may not look like what other parents do. While other parents might be directly involved in

the school and classroom, these parents work hard to get their children clothes, food and

transportation and provide directions for good behavior. These scholars have also identified

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other ways that Mexican American parents show they care about their children’s educa-

tions: politically, legislatively, and through individual activism (p. 94).

Joel Spring (2007) has presented a similar historical view of how Mexican immigrants

have been treated in the US ‘‘The class of languages and cultures has been accompanied by

economic exploitation, cultural intolerance, and racism. Educational policies have served the

interests of those wanting to take advantage of others’’ (p. 1). The impact from policies as

early as 1928 where Mexican children were released from school early to go to work in the

fields next to their parents has been lasting. Unequal implementation of compulsory education

laws set the stage for stereotypes that affect these children today. It is evident that decultu-

ralization is officially in effect when viewed from recent events, such as the removal of ethnic

studies in Arizona, but historically oppressive practices delineated by Spring still exist:

Segregation and isolation

Forced change of language

Curriculum content that reflects culture of dominant group

Textbooks that reflect culture of dominant group

Denial of cultural and religious expression by dominant group.

Use of teachers from dominant group (2007, p. 106).

Although there are many stories on both sides of the geographic border, suffice it to

share a few to illustrate the fertile ground that can be used to cultivate new understandings

of lived experiences and prior knowledge to bridge the gap toward teacher praxis based on

equity and social justice. The suggestions within can serve to inform general pedagogical

possibilities as the US continues to grow in diversity.

The stories that emerged in the contexts of my research share the knowledge and

understandings the families carry with them in the everyday. I draw attention to the science

knowledge that can be cultivated by culturally responsive teachers adept at using the funds

of knowledge (FoK) approach to bridge the curriculum to diverse children. These teachers

can advance equitable and socially just pedagogies that are meaningful to students while

producing what Roger Bybee (1997) calls for in science educational reform, multidi-

mensional scientific literacy for all. This type of ‘‘literacy consists of understanding the

essential conceptual structures of science and technology’’ (p. 85) and links well to chil-

dren who already have experiences and conceptual understandings such as those depicted

here. It is important that FoK teachers be able to recognize that ‘‘this level of literacy

includes the philosophical, historical and social dimensions of the disciplines’’ which

allows for individuals to develop ‘‘an understanding of and appreciation for science and

technology as cultural enterprises…and larger social problems and aspirations’’ (p. 84).

Carlos Velez-Ibanez and James Greenberg (1992) speak to honoring children by rec-

ognizing their FoK to interrupt oppressive practices in schools using a pedagogy based on

the deficiency model. They argue that ‘‘grasping the social relationships in which children

are ensconced and the broad features of learning generated in the home are key if we are to

understand the construction of cultural identity and the emergence of cultural personality

among US-Mexican children’’ (p. 313).

Emergent understandings in the everyday: science teachers as holdersof and barriers to opportunity

Unwittingly, teachers perpetuate the notion that science is difficult, that one has to be

smart, and that it is not for everyone. Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt feel that this is


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especially true when pre-service elementary teachers have had negative experiences in the

university as they take their core science courses (1997). They have endured a couple of

introductory courses in perhaps two science areas, unlike secondary science teachers who

major in a science content area. These are large lecture classes with the labs that often are

taught by graduate assistants where they do scripted traditional ‘‘experiments’’ that many

students do not fully understand. These teachers-to-be internalize the fears and negative

association with science as shown by Elaine Hampton and Miguel Licona (2006) and then

they are expected to teach science in the elementary school where this cycle is repeated

with poor content understanding, poorly developed science activities, such as building

volcanoes, and science fairs that push parents and students to their limits of tolerance.

Susan Kovalik and Karen Olsen (2010) present the notion that we are all born scientists,

making sense of our world form the very beginning using at least nineteen senses. This has

great implications for how we create learning spaces for our students, especially in science.

Students somehow lose their curiosity and science abilities during the formal instruction in

science because of how science is taught. Children come to our schools full of curiosity

and knowledge that must be cultivated. By incorporating their FoK, teachers can help

children make connections from their lived experiences to the school curriculum. This calls

for new ways of looking at what students bring to the classroom, how their understanding

can be affirmed to make connections between students and the science curriculum, and

how they are allowed to demonstrate scientific understanding.

Engage to excel: producing one million additional college graduates with degrees in

science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is a report presented to President

Obama by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST 2012),

which stresses the importance of engaging students at an early age into STEM areas so they

may consider majoring in them and they recommend retention strategies during the first

2 years of postsecondary education. What I have presented here can go a long way toward

including and providing a meaningful education for these students.

Emergent voices and visions from everyday contexts: a science educator meetseveryday scientists

Cuento de las lomas (story of the hills)

I am sitting on the doorstep outside of my second story bedroom that overlooks the

surrounding colonia at the foot of the northern-most Mexican mountains. The sun is at my

back and has begun to break the eastern horizon. Vibrant rays of light shine brightly on the

tip of the mountains in front of me. The mountains seem to grow upward as the light moves

down its slopes and eventually lights everything except the door at my back. I am kept in

the shadow and also a bit cold because the warmth of the morning sun will not get to me

until later that morning. At about this time, the family wakes. It is about 5:00 a.m. and the

routines begin as if the play button has been pressed from the pause of the evening

activities.

Yoli, a mother, wife and valued community leader is busy with her routine. She has

housecleaning chores to do, breakfast to cook, clothes to give her husband and two boys to

send off to school. She is doing the laundry in the open-air courtyard and I see that she uses

the washing machine rinse water to clean last night’s dishes. She moves with a determined

not-too-slow, but not-too-fast pace. She then discards the dishwater into a concrete planter

that is near the washing machine. Yoli walks back to the bedroom and irons her husband’s

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shirt and a pair of pants for her son. She then moves on and starts a pot of coffee and

swiftly takes the leftover food to the dog in the courtyard. This move is so smoothly done,

as if she waltzing her way to the next station.

As she moves to check the water she poured into the flowerbed, she adjusts the black

hose that just finished emptying into the same bed from the clothes washer. She glances up

at me as if she knows I have been observing her for some time and she matter-of-factly

identifies several of the herbs growing in the flowerbed. She never stops and moves right

over to the large gate to the yard that keeps this place safe overnight. Three vehicles are

fitted into the patio space that seems would only fit two. She opens the gates to welcome

the world in and announces that they are ready for a new day. She moves one car out into

the dirt street, and I notice the sun is now shining on the nearby mountain highlighting

giant white letters painted in lye La Biblia es la Verdad Leela (The Bible is the Truth Read

it). These letters can be seen from across the border in the United States for thirty miles or

so. To the right, I can see the large tailings from the Camino Real (the Royal Highway), a

large highway that facilitates commerce between the two largest border cities in the world,

Juarez, Mexico and El Paso on the US side. This small colonia does not benefit from this

road as there is no water control on this steep side of the mountain nor are there any exits

where drivers can get off and patronize the small shops and stores that pock mark this

shanty town.

The boys are off to school and the streets are active with many free-roaming dogs and

small children dressed in school uniforms. Adults accompany the very young children to

the bus stop. Many seem to be grandparents. At a nearby intersection, a bus waits with its

exhaust condensing and dripping water from the tail pipe in the cool morning. Yoli now

sweeps the patio area where the cars had been and throws water on the concrete driveway

to settle the dust and moves back into the house to take a shower. The smell of wet concrete

takes me back to my grandmother doing the same thing. The first wave of buses carrying

workers to the maquiladoras, which are assembly plants with ties to US companies, are

still leaving in the early twilight of morning. There is a sudden calm and then morning fully

breaks.

Two workers on a nearby roof greet Yoli’s husband, el profesor (the teacher), as he

moves outside the gate his wife opened only 20 minutes prior. He leaves dressed in his suit

and takes the car that Yoli pulled out of the driveway. She emerges once again to the patio

area to hang out clothes to dry. It is now evident that the clothesline is where the car had

been parked.

As I sit on the stoop of the second floor of the house, I notice how this family and many

of the neighbors have building materials piled up in fenced or gated spaces around their

homes. Almost all homes have a gate that they lock during the night hours. One yard is

filled with hundreds of cinder blocks; another has fuel-wood stacked against the house and

another has tires and wooden pallets piled as high as any wall around. A man, who lives

where the fuel wood is, starts a fire in an old thirty-gallon hot water heater in order to get

the water ready for warm showers. He modifies the discarded heater so that it has a

compartment for wood above the boiler and very creatively connects it through the adobe

wall of his house.

It is now almost 8:00 a.m. and Yoli announces to me that she must go to the community

center to begin working to build an addition that would soon become a daycare center. We

walk over and she begins taking large rocks that are scattered near the entrance to the

community center and piles them into a wheelbarrow. She is a woman of small stature, yet

she wheels these rocks just as swiftly as she did her other chores back on her courtyard.

Down the hill she goes with the heavy load to the low point in the road and dumps them


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into the arroyo. There is much work to be done at the center. She has to make food for all

who participate in the building as well as plan and operate the women’s center activities.

By now, she has men doing the heavy building while women gather to help her with the

day’s events. These women come from the nearby houses to have a place to share their

quotidian life and learn skills and crafts in order to supplement their income. Some chil-

dren and teenagers remain at the center since they cannot afford to attend the government

or private schools that serve this community. Many of the women do not have husbands or

they are away working in the US for extended periods of time.

The women gather and share cooking tasks and talk about the white beans they brought

from their homeland in Durango when they returned for the funeral of a brother who was

murdered recently. They talk about family, history and the old ways of their parents. Many

of this community are blood relatives. There is a strong sense of family, homeland,

language, laughter and expectations to better their lives for their children. They struggle to

make ends meet, but would rather unify into a community center than work the maqui-

ladoras for $40 a week and be gone 50 hours during the week. They would rather find

alternative ways to make money and stay connected with friends and family than be

separated by factory jobs. At this center, the women make medicines, handicrafts, learn to

read, learn English, and other skills.

At the community center, adults work to build an addition using homemade tools for

bending iron used to reinforce the concrete. Upon examination, the men, who never went

past 6th grade, are using the Pythagorean theorem to construct ninety-degree angles for the

corners of the building. They are eager to show their building strategies.

The sun has crossed the sky and the early evening is beginning to look like the early

morning, only the sun rays are shining on another horizon and the colors are more violet

than yellow. People at the center begin their walk back to their homes, and buenas noches

and hasta manana are heard. I gather my belongings with my colleagues, and we make our

way to the van that will soon take us away to another world, but we look across the desert

panorama and dirt roads with small groups of people walking, dogs running and children

making sounds as the view captures the village of adobe homes between our current

location and the US side of the border.

Cuento de las casas (story of the houses)

I arrived to a sprawling small town/colonia by a dirt road. It is easy to smell burning trash

in a barrel placed at the margin of a property. People wave hello and some neighbors stare

as we arrive at the end of the road on the edge of a plateau that abruptly ends, another

border between where people live and the open desert continues. The houses are far apart

and their properties are demarcated with many deshechos (materials discarded by others).

Boundaries are marked with tires, bed frames, spring mattresses and many other materials

including wire fencing. Two small houses sit on the desert hill, and the women are waiting

for us to get out of the vehicle. Children and dogs approach, and we make our

introductions.

Alicia has a knife that she is drying and tells us that we are just in time for some chicken

soup. As we wander through the front area of the house, I see a couple of large fast-

growing shade trees. These trees are not allowed in the city as they are blamed for causing

allergies, but that is back home in the US On top of a fifty-gallon drum a handmade cement

washboard sits, it is built into a sink. Clothes can be washed by rubbing on the ribs along

the bottom, but this time it was used for washing the chicken and some dishes. It is

outdoors, sitting with the drain so that the tree can get the water. A small hatchet has blood

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on it and sits ready to be washed. The dog seems to know where it is cool as it sits in the

well of the tree where the water has drained.

We walk into Alicia’s houses and see that it is cool inside. I notice that the structure is

made of wooden pallets stuffed with mud that has grass of some sort added to it for

stability. The two women neighbors tell me that each is helping the other to build her house

and that they are in the process of insulating the walls and plastering them with their hands.

They stuff and smooth the mud into the pallets in between the slats. They have strategically

placed small windows high above, near the ceiling and one low near the floor. They tell me

that this creates convection to help circulate fresh air and vents the house from smoke when

cooking and heating occur. I see pictures on the wall that show relatives, some religious

artifacts and a recent quinceanera, which is a coming of age ceremony for 15 year-old

girls. The house is more like an efficiency apartment that has the kitchen, bedroom and

living area just one big room with furniture demarcating the different living spaces. In one

corner, next to the only bed for mother and daughter, is a small homemade desk with

school books and some writing utensils and a school uniform hung over the chair. The two

women take us to Oralia’s house and we are treated to chicken soup. As we sit eating, I ask

questions about the cement sink, how they deal with water and sewage and how they had

come to build their own homes in this location. Their stories reveal knowledge from elders

and experiences growing up where it was a necessity to learn building skills, how to care

for and use water and other resources and to lean on one another to help with chores and

child rearing. They are used to communal living. They talk about going to the women’s

center and learning how to install the waterless toilets and how they became involved in

community action to get utilities. They share an understanding of insulation properties of

materials and show they are quite aware of the actual positioning of the house in terms of

the path the sun takes during the day so they can maximize heating and cooling throughout

the year. Oralia describes how they move the outdoor sink to different trees to as they use

water from washing clothes and dishes. This also grows the trees that provide shade. I

notice a large agave plant that did not look native, and they say they brought it to help

remind them of their home village, but it also serves to prevent erosion in the ravine

alongside their homes.

Cuento del otro lado (story from the other side)

This particular women’s center is situated in a small town/colonia that straddles New

Mexico and Texas near the Mexican border. The women built it about a dozen years ago.

They used rammed earth and tires for the construction of the walls. They build the roof so

that water could be collected into rain barrels and garden space was created in several areas

around the construction. They created spaces for community events, workshops, carpentry,

sewing, art, music, dance, healing, and spirituality. Many of the women are proud to say

they learned a craft or skill that now makes them a living. Others use this space to get away

from the isolation often found in US communities. Now that the number of border patrol

agents has increased, and the sheriffs are more involved to assist with immigration issues,

the women come to this center tired and weary of the potential harassment from

authorities.

I speak with Yolanda who happens to have her young daughter with her. They are both

working in the sewing room. Yolanda talks as she cuts and sews making conference bags

out of old denim pieces. She uses small pieces of material to decorate her bag and the even

smaller pieces are set aside to decorate greeting cards that are sold in their gift shop. She

tells me that this is a safe place for her and her daughter, but times are getting tougher and


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she fears for her extended family as they could be separated if some should have to return

to Mexico. Her biggest fear is for her children who are doing well in school, and she does

not want to interrupt the progress they have made. They know English, and she is learning

it here at the center. She is eager to take the classes offered at the center to learn more

about immigration rights and wants to help those in her family who have not obtained

residency to legally stay in the US We talk about the workshops for English Language

Learners, the crafts and self-expression activities for center participants and realize this is a

life line for so many as it mimics some of the necessary and traditional aspects of their

culture. I have been here many times as a visitor as well as a board member, and I excuse

myself to walk through the center where other women are working on artwork and car-

pentry. The door is closed to the massage therapy room, but I can hear music and soft talk

as I walk by. I walk outside to the courtyard and see that they are maintaining an organic

garden and some tomatoes are ripe. The rain barrels are full and I see volunteers and

employees moving about doing their daily routines. As I leave, I look back at the center

and can see the large pine tree the women left standing when they built the center. They

built around it and often gather around the grandmother tree during ceremonies and fund-

raising events.

Preliminary conclusions: funds of knowledge and asset-framed knowledge

Aside from visiting these centers to film a documentary over a 2 year period, I also accom-

panied participants of the BTN from a university about fifty miles to the north in the US. We

each stayed with a family during the last night as part of the border immersion experience

central to the BTN initiative. The other participants showed up at the center, and we began

talking about our experiences since we parted ways prior to dinner the previous day. All of us

were busy documenting what we had done and seen into our journals. We reflected and tried to

make meaning of our experiences as we compared our incoming conceptions with reality and

the life we had left behind, even if for so brief a time.

I use the FoK framework of Norma Gonzalez, Luis Moll and Cathy Amanti (2005) to

engage and examine experiences these families had and the knowledge they constructed

and used to navigate their daily lives so we, as teachers, can have starting points in a social

justice curriculum. Teachers, as ethnographers, view the everyday construction of

knowledge through the interaction of culture, language and action. This represents a

powerful way to view communities in terms of the resources they possess and use them for

classroom teaching. It can produce a counter narrative that moves us away from deficit

thinking to teaching and learning that is linked to students’ lives (Gonzalez, Moll and

Amanti 2005). These scholars use the funds of knowledge approach to alter the perceptions

of working class or poor communities by identifying their strengths and resources that can

be integral pedagogical components. To accomplish this goal, they have developed this

research-based approach

…that is based on understanding households (and classrooms) qualitatively. We use

a combination of ethnographic observations, open-ended interviewing strategies, life

histories, and case studies that, when combined analytically, can portray accurately

the complex functions of households within their sociohistorical contexts…This

approach is particularly important in dealing with students whose households are

usually viewed as being ‘‘poor,’’ not only economically but in terms of the quality of

experiences for the child. (p. 71)

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By examining the activities described above, it is obvious that the recycling of water,

multiple uses for water, and using generational knowledge, that they understand deep

ecological factors that guide the use of resources. This could easily be tied to environ-

mental science dealing with consumerism issues related to sustainable human practices

when studying renewable and non-renewable resources. Their own filtration systems could

be the focus of labs in several science content areas such as biology and earth science.

Students could become teachers of sorts while exploring and expanding these concepts. It

is up to the classroom teacher to bridge what students already know with the content and

processes they are expecting their students to know. Jacqueline and Martin Brooks (1999)

emphasize that formative assessment will guide both the student and the teacher. This

implies a dialogic engagement with students to tap into what they bring to the classroom in

terms of existing knowledge and skills that will serve to construct meaningful under-

standing with the school curriculum.

Their knowledge of herbs, as remedies to the maladies related to the harsh conditions

and lack of medical services, is used to self-heal as well as to sell to other community

members which helps bring in much needed money. Participants at this community center

share knowledge and bring herbs from their homelands to be grown in these arid gardens

sustained by the water of efficient ecological purifiers. This drives the gardening practices

at their homes and at the community center for each have a dozen different herbs and

plants that will serve to make medicinal unguents and syrups used to treat common

ailments that are prevalent. This would be a perfect point to affirm students’ prior

knowledge and engage them during botany studies or soil science. Again, the teacher must

be open to and knowledgeable of teaching strategies that will allow for the integration of

this prior knowledge.

They buy and trade from neighboring women’s centers and have installed waterless

composting toilets. They use the compost for the growth of non-ingestible plants that provide

beauty and shade. Members of each family understand not to throw paper products or urine

into the toilets. Once a person is finished using the toilet, they throw a cup of sand mixed with

lye onto the excrement. This prevents odors and causes decomposition into compost. The sink

and shower water is filtered through a concrete channel that is about eighteen inches wide by

twenty-four inches deep and forty inches long. This is filled with rocks, charcoal, soil, sand

and wetlands type plants which absorb the toxins and purify water well enough to water their

herbs, trees and shrubs. This knowledge can be used to continue with microbiology, soil and

decomposition, as well as the carbon and water cycles.

Alicia and Oralia built their own homes and helped build the centers showing funds of

knowledge that teachers can use to motivate and teach their children by honoring what they

bring to the classroom by developing strategies that will cause the children to interact with

their parents to examine the knowledge used at home and at these centers. Perhaps

homework can be viewed as opportunities to find intergenerational knowledge that will

affirm the diversity within our classrooms. These women have a keen understanding of

concepts central to physical science and thermal dynamics, solar knowledge, and biology.

Yolanda’s story shows she is creative, able to measure, grow vegetables and under-

stands water issues, too. The rain barrel water can be distilled into drinking water at the

center and can serve to water the gardens. As children play and watch their mothers learn

English, Reike, tile working, carpentry, and health care, they are picking up on the funds of

knowledge that teachers can use to show them they have useful knowledge in many areas,

not the least of which are science and math.

Consider that the FoK approach requires teachers to become ethnographers, which calls

on them to do home visits where they can get to know the families and get evidence of the


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funds of knowledge by interacting with the families, observing their homes, analyzing the

materials and resources they accumulate, observing the relics, pictures and artifacts they

collect and participating in cultural experiences and rituals that may give insight into

potentially useful connections from home to school that might be made. Many of the

working class parents in our valley work in agriculture where they care for animals, raise

crops, operate and maintain large equipment, care for roads and the mechanization of crop

processing. They are experts in their fields and often have another area of expertise that

they may have had before immigrating to this country, only they did not know the language

or could not get through the obstacles to keep doing what they used to do. Perhaps they,

too, encountered the deficit model I speak of in this paper.

Suggestions for a pedagogy of possibilities

Nora Hyland and Susan Noffke (2005) are preparing pre-service teachers in ways that

support the pedagogies implied in this study. They are using curricular models to address

diversity in teacher education that emphasize the study of historically marginalized groups.

They focus on the cultural and intellectual knowledge of nonmainstream groups as well as

on teaching strategies that address diverse learning styles. Bill Bigelow (2006) has sug-

gested curriculum ideas to prepare teachers of conscience to help fashion alternative

responses for the needs of our students along the border. He concurs that the issues related

to our border are not going away soon and ‘‘so long as the models of development that

predominate in Mexico mostly benefit the rich on both sides of the border, the south-to-

north migration is here to stay’’ (p. 2).

I have taught science methods courses in our teacher preparation courses and have

followed school site-based instruction for our pre-service teachers supporting what Hyland

and Noffke (2005) have written about and include a focus on action research as a tool for

restructuring the curriculum. When teaching the science methods, I rely heavily on

Learning & assessing science process skills by Richard Rezba, Constance Sprague, Jac-

queline McDonnough, and Juanita Matkins (2007). This text gives our teacher candidates a

fully supportive perspective to teach from the process skills rather than from a content

perspective. They learn to acquire or rethink content as they work from the comfort of the

more familiar science process skills. Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt (1997) show why

undergraduates leave the sciences. They suggest that many of the shortcomings in science

preparation for elementary teachers can be attributed to the experience of pre-service

students in their college and university science courses. Often, the ones who leave are the

ones who become elementary teachers. The university has a responsibility to teach

undergraduate courses with the same qualities to support non-majors and realize that the

vicious cycle that relegates science literacy to only the few must be broken. Large lecture

type courses with encyclopedic content should give rise to creative, smaller and more

meaningful engagement with students. Perhaps the low ratio of professors to students and

the engagement with the research that is common in the upper classes for majors could be

included in their pedagogical repertoire for the general core science courses.

If teachers are expected to support inquiry-based teaching and learning, it is incumbent

on the them to understand what is meant by an inquiry-based approach and knowing the

advantages documented for inquiry by research as stated in by the National Research

Council (2000). Of course, the responsibility to create professional development for

existing teachers cannot only be a point for rethinking the use of in-service and profes-

sional development, but also how we, at the university, prepare teachers. As stated by the

M. M. Licona

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NRC (2000), teaching and learning through inquiry may be new not only to teachers, but

also to administrators, students and parents (p. 144). It requires a ‘‘significant change in the

attitude and behavior on the part of all groups’’ (p. 144). This is a challenge in itself, but

once the inquiry process is grasped, then the students can be viewed with renewed opti-

mism and valued along with high expectations, dealing a blow to the sometimes subtle,

sometimes not-so-subtle oppressive practices fueled by deficit thinking.

Of course, there are culturally relevant components based on the research of this paper

that I offer, but this is not to say that this is the only way, but one for students, and

immigrant students in particular, to feel and to be valued so they can make connections

from their everyday knowledge to the school science curriculum and not have to work from

deficit-driven misunderstandings of what they do not know and of their wrongly perceived

limitations in potential. There is research that is emerging that speaks to teacher prepa-

ration, such as Hyland and Noffke’s (2005) work with pre-service teachers who teach and

learn in their preparation program in the actual public schools where they may soon have a

job. There is also cultural and anthropological research that will help pave the way to

institutionalize pedagogies of possibility for all. Kris Guitierrez and Barbara Rogoff (2003)

are working to remove obstacles for the culturally different by interrupting deficit thinking

and suggesting research-based ideas to inform practice. Their efforts deal with cultural

ways of learning to guide pedagogy, one more attempt to bring fair and socially just

classrooms to our pluralistic society. Joe Kincheloe (2008) reminds us that all courses,

from elementary school through college, must include competing forms of knowledge. We

must ‘‘name the forces that produce human suffering and exploitation’’ (p. 11) as we

prepare teachers so they can empower their students to become ‘‘democratic citizens who

have the confidence and the savvy to improve their own lives and to make their com-

munities more vibrant places…[and be] viewed as experts in their interest areas, and

inspired with the impassioned spirit to use education to do good things in the world’’ (p. 8).

References

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communities, and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Guitierrez, K. D., & Rogoff, B. (2003). Cultural ways of learning: Individual traits or repertoire of practice.

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Author Biography

Miguel M. Licona is a Professor in the Curriculum and Instruction Department at New Mexico StateUniversity. His research interests include transformative pedagogies in education using a criticalmulticultural perspective. His recent publications deal with distance education and the teaching ofmulticultural and science education courses.

M. M. Licona

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