Can Educational Research be Useful? Can it be Reciprocal? What about Empowering?

Prompt: In The Struggle and the Tools, Ellen Cushman argues that it’s possible (and necessary) for researchers and participants (not “subjects”) to “make knowledge together”, by joining liberatory teaching with praxis research. Meanwhile, in the article “Funds of knowledge“, Luis Moll and his collaborators show how teachers can dramatically improve the quality of their instruction by becoming researchers and engaging in rich dialog with the families of their students. Do these researchers have it right? Is it possible for teachers and researchers (and those who wear both hats) to do research and empower those they’re researching? What are the barriers that might exist between knowledge-making at the university and the improvement of the educations and lives of often underserved and/or working-class young people in schools? What barriers and opportunities are there for you, tutors & mentors in ED140 at UC Berkeley, as you embark on your fieldwork?

In "Funds of Knowledge," we see that "the teacher [Cathy] had a special status with the family that could help establish the trust necessary for the exchange of information" (136). She already had a "natural entree into the home, and had an implicit connection with Carlos's parents" (136). This is a very important point. If the goal is to have teachers as researchers because teachers are the ones that are meant to learn from the families in order to develop relevant curricula, then this point sheds light on the importance AND plausibility of such a method. Teachers can certainly engage in dialogue with the families of their students, empower them through this dialogue, and "make knowledge together" with the families. For example, one of the first things that Cathy and Deborah noticed was that Carlos' mother was quick to open up to both researchers and talk about her family, her children, her life, the differences between Mexico and the U.S., etc. Fortunately this opening up had a practical and mutually beneficial result: "as she [Cathy] gathered new information about the family, their history and activities, she started making connections to instructional activities she wanted to develop" (136).

One example of such instructional activities is the candy unit that Cathy and her team developed. This unit combined Carlos' entrepeneurial interests in Mexican candy with another community mother's knowledge of making Mexican candies. But the unit delved even deeper into students' interests. For example, the students were asked to compare Mexican and U.S.-made candy, a notion that many of these students were familiar with, considering many of them lived in both worlds. Including the selling of candy into the unit tapped into Carlos' interest and probably allowed him to share his skills with many of his classmates. Allowing Mrs. Rodriguez to come into the classroom, to show the children how to make candy and to talk to them about food production and consumption and even about nutrition, created a sense of unity between the classroom and the household. It probably also empowered Mrs. Rodriguez to think that she was contributing greatly to her child's classroom.

In this one example we see the way teachers as researchers can improve the educational quality of their students. Through their research, they gain the information and tools necessary to make classroom teaching relevant to the experiences, the discourses, and the literacies of their students. Students and community members become empowered by seeing that they are active agents of the educational process. Now the question becomes: how can this be carried out in a non-research project context? Is it really plausible to expect teachers to do research trips into the homes of 30 or more students in order to discover their funds of knowledge?