Insights into Teachers' Funds of Knowledge:

Comparing language arts teachers’ stances toward the same poems in everyday and school settingstexts

Abstract

Over more than a century of formal schooling in literature, generations of students have become acculturated to authoritative school-based discourses that devalue everyday literary practices. However, research indicates that when students draw on their everyday practices in the classroom, they engage in rich literary reading experiences. In the current study, we argue that school-based discourses may limit teachers just as they limit students, and that teachers’ literary funds of knowledge may be another potentially powerful resource for closing the distance between school and everyday reading. Drawing on social and literary metaphors of distance and closeness, we compared the discussions of the same teachers reading the same poems in personal (book club) and professional (lesson planning) settings. Analysis showed that teachers’ literary stances differed across conditions. For instance, in the book club condition, teachers were more than twice as likely to enact a close stance when reading—immersing themselves in the text-world and empathizing with characters. We recommend that researchers and teacher educators attend more closely to and make visible the constraints of school-based discourses and the value of everyday funds of knowledge—not just for students, but for teachers.