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Funds of Knowledge for the 21st century
This event brought together scholars and practitioners to exchange perspectives on working with young people’s local ‘funds of knowledge’ and imagine pedagogies that harness diversity and create richer opportunities. The symposium invited newer and more established scholars, students and practitioners to develop a set of proposals on the future of the FoK approach.
The event aimed to launch an international network of researchers and practitioners, inspiring future collaborations.
Output One: Funds of Knowledge ToolKit for Educational and Community Settings
The ToolKit that you can download at the link below was published online in autumn 2021, as an output of the “Funds of Knowledge for the 21st Century: Towards Pedagogical Justice in Diverse Societies” symposium at Liverpool Hope University that was held earlier that year.
Participants at the conference have contributed to this ToolKit, which was designed by graphic designer, Andy Donovan, to showcase tangible examples of the funds of knowledge approach. Funds of knowledge strategies seek to validate and celebrate the many ways of knowing (from the embodied and personal to the communal and cultural) that are too often overlooked or diminished. The hope is that tools presented here will be a spark for practitioners in different realms to encourage adopting, adapting, or creating similar tools.
At the start of the ToolKit (pages 4 to 5), you will also see an illustration by Katie Chappell. Katie produced this drawing live during the symposium that this ToolKit is based on. Katie illustrated in real-time providing visual representations of the talks that she heard on the day.
This artwork captures the emphasis that funds of knowledge approaches place on diverse knowledges, multimodality, and redistribution of agency in learning, and that you will see featured in the following contributions.
We hope that you enjoy the ToolKit, may find some aspects of it useful, and that it might contribute to a continuing conversation about funds of knowledge approaches in educational and community settings.
Download the Funds of Knowledge Toolkit (PDF)
Output Two: Blog post for The Sociological Review Foundation, discussing the Funds of Knowledge conference and its significance.
Please read our blog post about the March 2021 Funds of Knowledge conference at Liverpool Hope University. We reflect on how speakers at the event understand ‘funds of knowledge’, and some of the challenges that they think funds of knowledge approaches might address in educational and community settings across the globe. Such challenges range from responding to diverse knowledges, incorporating multimodality, and how to redistribute agency in learning settings.