Surfacing Deep Challenges for Social-Educational Justice: Putting Funds,Wealth,and Capital Frameworks into Dialogue

Abstract

This paper critically explores theoretical, conceptual, and methodological dimensions of three social-justice oriented educational approaches: Bourdieuian Analysis of Capital (BAC), Funds of Knowledge (FK), and Community Cultural Wealth (CCW). We surface convergences and divergences across these three frameworks, seeking to clarify them conceptually, draw out implications for educational praxis, illuminate importantly difficult tensions in-and-across them, and (re)imagine future directions for utilizing these frameworks to address intersecting structural inequalities in the pursuit of strengthened social-educational justice. We argue that putting BAC, FK, and CCW into mutual interrogation can deepen understanding of these inequalities and ways to approach them in education praxis.

Keywords

funds of knowledge Bourdieuian forms of capital community cultural wealth social-educational justice

Introduction: Capital, Funds, Wealth

Community Cultural Wealth (CCW); Funds of Knowledge (FK); Bourdieuian Analysis of Capital (BAC): three frameworks that feature “economically” resonant namings and have recently come into “conversation” within social-educational justice literatures—a conversation purposefully staged in this special issue. As defined by key scholars, and taken up in the work of critical educationists, these frameworks carry convergent but also divergent significances for contributing to the complex and challenging project of pursuing social-educational justice. In this concluding paper of the special issue, our purpose is to surface convergences and divergences across these three frameworks, seeking to clarify them conceptually, draw out implications for educational praxis, illuminate important tensions in-and-across them, and (re)imagine future directions for utilizing these frameworks in pursuit of strengthened social-educational justice.

We build this “surfacing” process around a focal tension that, we argue, all social-educational justice projects must negotiate. On the one hand, recognizing cultural assets that are meaningful in the lives of nondominant communities is a substantive matter of social-educational justice, calling for robust curricular and pedagogic valorization, and use of those assets. We would call this “fair-world justice.” On the other hand, deep social-structural power inequalities encode systemic features of schooling and select for cultural attributes of students from dominant structural positions, calling for accessibility to these codes of power for students from nondominant groups. We would call this “expedient justice.” Our interrogations across BAC, FK, and CCW frameworks suggest that there is not a particular way to combine these distinctive “calls” for action toward social justice, nor any clear-cut resolution of their tensions. However, there can be deepened comprehension of their complexities and potential strategies for situated grappling with them, to which BAC, FK, and CCW each contribute particular insights and strengths.

The rich cultural inheritances of Students of Color and other nondominant groups are often overlooked, excluded, and silenced by systemic features of schooling that deselect them, subjecting minoritized students to inequitable schooling experiences. As Ladson-Billings (2006) argues, societies have amassed a historic, economic, sociopolitical, and moral debt toward Students of Color, and their communities, that seem insurmountable. Addressing multiple and intersecting structural inequalities, in relation to education, is essential for the pursuit of social-educational justice. We argue that putting BAC, FK, and CCW into mutual interrogation helps to deepen understanding of these inequalities and possible ways to approach them in education praxis. In her development of CCW theory, Yosso (2005), underscores this need to attend to intersecting inequalities in her frustration with the lack of meaningful and consistent attention BAC gives to racializing logics. However, in (re)claiming the analytical significance of racializing logics, we also do not want to lose the explanatory strength of BAC for analyzing the unjust power-reproducing effects of capital-selection in education institutions. As argued by Rios-Aguilar et al. (2011), without meaningfully attending to power dynamics of capital-selection, we risk treating community “funds”/“wealths” as illusory “shadow capitals” (Cipollone & Stich, 2017). Yet, can educational practices support students to gain access to culturally powerful capital without committing cultural genocide? To open our inquiry, we draw on Lisa Delpit as a key articulator of this acute tension and its dilemmas.

A Focal Tension for Pursuing Justice: Can Education Both Redistribute Cultural Codes of Selective Power and Valorize Diverse Peoples’ Cultural Assets?

In her renowned 1988 essay, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children” (from which we quote below), Delpit evokes dilemmas around either teaching, or not teaching, cultural codes of power to “other people’s children” who do not inherit them in families or communities:

To provide schooling for everyone’s children that reflects liberal, middle-class values, and aspirations is to ensure . . . that power, the culture of power, remains in the hands of those who already have it . . . [since] some children come to school with more accoutrements of the culture of power already in place—“cultural capital,” as some critical theorists refer to it. (p. 285)

Of course long histories of unjust power asymmetry have institutionalized cultural tools of certain class, “race,” and other structural positions as “capital” in school curricula, pedagogies, and assessments. Delpit thus puts urgency on “political work both inside and outside of the educational system . . . [for schools] to open their doors to a variety of styles and codes” (p. 292). Yet so long as styles and codes of “the culture of power” remain entrenched in selecting for who performs “well” or “poorly” in systemic schooling, she sees expedient urgency that “in the meantime, we must take responsibility to teach, to provide for students who do not already possess them, the additional codes of power” (p. 293; original emphasis).

To teach the codes requires making explicit what usually is left implicit: “If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier” (p. 282). Yet gaining capacity to perform those codes requires more than explication. Catching on to subtle habits of cultural expression takes practice whereby students access “the codes . . . within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors” (p. 296): that is, in classroom activities involving authentic cultural contextualization. Yet dilemmas surface, here, around dangers and pain of cultural assimilation. Delpit recognizes risks of what “may indeed be a form of cultural genocide” (p. 286). However, her approach entails crucial safeguards, foremost of which is to teach the power-codes in comparison-and-contrast with—and accord pride of place to—home-community cultural styles and codes. To illustrate, Delpit chronicles how a primary-years teacher of rural Native-Alaskan children, whose practices she observed, teaches literacy in both “Village English” and “Formal English.” When focusing on Village-cultural literacies, “savoring the words,” the teacher “tells the students,” “That’s the way we say things. Doesn’t it feel good? Isn’t it the absolute best way of getting that idea across?” (p. 293). By contrast, when introducing Formal English, she says (p. 293):

We listen to the way people talk, not to judge them, but to tell what part of the river they come from. These other people are not like that. They think everybody needs to talk like them . . . [and] have a hard time hearing what people say if they don’t . . . We have to feel a little sorry for them because they have only one way to talk. We’re going to learn two ways to say things.

This approach makes codes of both home- and power-culture accessible to students who learn to code-switch across each, and to recognize what contexts call for which. Along with this, and importantly, the teacher uses age-appropriate messages to fend off assimilation into power-cultural codes by: (a) affirming rich cultural use-values in students’ local lifeworlds as learning assets in school as much as home; and (b) suggesting why learning to perform power-codes is an expedient but, by itself, terribly limited education, lacking the inclusivity that would exist in a fair world: that is, a social world without power inequalities. Says Delpit: “[E]ven while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent” (p. 296).

We here want to register our own, and Delpit’s, uneasiness in navigating between expedient access to, and risk of assimilation into, the systemic “legitimacy” of selective power-codes that go against justice principles of diversely rich inclusion. In trying for a strategic both/and, Delpit (p. 292) states her leaning along this tensely fine line:

I prefer to be honest with my students. Tell them that their language and cultural style is unique and wonderful but that there is a political power game that is also being played, and if they want to be in on that game there are certain games that they too must play.

We do not take the “if” in this statement in an off-handed way. As a matter of justice, it is vital that situated communities, with collective agency, determine if—and if so, how—they might “want to be in on that game.” (This is all the more so in the agency-invigorating context of Black Lives Matter mobilizations that challenge domination by White and upper-class norms). Yet we also do not make light of how agency among nondominant groups, and among teachers working with them in schools, encounters systemic devices of sorting-and-selecting across multiple institutions—not just schools—where access and normative “success” are crucial for life-chance surviving, let alone thriving. This is “the power game” for which Delpit calls educators to take responsibility to redistribute access to its codes (see also Rios-Aguilar et al., 2011).

The stressful challenges of teaching cultural power-codes while resisting assimilation lead Young et al. (2014) to raise concerns about “the terrible consequences of code-switching that Delpit herself aptly terms ‘painful ambivalence’. . . and offer code-meshing as a way out” (p. 154). Young (2009) argues that the reasoning behind code-switching “stems from a legacy of racism . . . that permitted people to support legal segregation” (p. 55). While “certain that colleagues who support code-switching would not support language discrimination,” Young et al. (2014) argue that it “could lead some to . . . [support] acquiescence to mainstream prejudice” (p. 154) by inducing Students of Color “to view their language, culture, and identity as antithetical to the U.S. mainstream” (p. 9). Rather than sustain a “double consciousness” (Du Bois, 1993), the code-meshing that Young et al. (2014) propose as a way out—similar to García and Wei’s (2013) concept of translanguaging—promotes the “power of language rather than codes of power” (p. 156). Key to their argument is the observation that, while there is indeed prejudice encoded in what schools standardize as “mainstream,” meshings of so-called “standard” language usages with home-community usages always-already exist and actively influence each other. Young et al. thus argue for a pedagogic shift from teaching students to “switch,” to supporting them to: (a) reflect on how their linguistic and cultural experiences already mesh in both “standard” and minoritized forms of communicative participation; (b) learn from examples of people already engaged in code-meshing (e.g., Zadie Smith, Kendrick Lamar, Key & Peele, Luis Rodriguez, Gloria Anzaldua, Toni Morrison, etc.); and (c) be imaginative and agentic as they fuse, mesh, and blend the “standard” with what they bring from home.

We share the impulse, in the code-meshing argument, to change cultural power-imbalances in education praxis that impose code-switching pedagogies upon nondominant students. Yet we are wary to call the meshing approach “a way out” of the tension that Delpit surfaces. Young et al.’s reference to “mainstream prejudice” indicates recognition that norms of upper-class male Whiteness (among other structural power-positions) encode into what is “mainstream,” suggesting that they do not truly see meshings with/within “mainstream” as “a way out” of assimilative risk. Nor does Delpit claim a definite “way out” beyond valorizing nondominant peoples’ cultural usages through both rich curriculum inclusion and pedagogic messages that attempt to fend off what Young et al. worry will lead to “acquiescence to mainstream prejudice.” Indeed, if the “game” of power-code selection is as sedimented into schooling as Delpit perceives, then we argue it would be impossible for very many schools to provide minoritized groups with access to the dominant codes (for reasons explored in the next section; see also Zipin, 2015; Zipin & Brennan, 2021).

We argue that deeply sedimented structures of racialized, classed, gendered, and other power inequalities cannot be resolved either by “switching” or “meshing” (or other situated strategies). As this paper proceeds, we surface convergent and divergent approaches, across BAC, FK, and CCW frameworks, for wrestling with profound power obstacles to social-educational justice. These three frameworks have all been used in multiple ways, with diverse populations, to pursue social-educational justice. In the process, each offers partial purchases—conceptual, methodological, and praxical—on “balancing acts” toward justice. In ensuing sections, we: (a) explicate each framework’s origins, strengths, gaps, and how they have been applied conceptually and practically to education; and (b) explore convergences, divergences, and tensions that arise when using these frameworks, separately and together, in pursuit of justice. We turn now to the BAC framework, which suggests that the very logic of “capital” operates to block diverse and unequally powerful groups from effective access to codes that select for, and secure, the power of some over others.

Bourdieuian Analysis of Capital: The Selective Logic of Power

In the previous section we quoted Delpit’s reference to “cultural capital” in discussing how schools encode preferential selection for the academic success of “children [who] come to school with more accoutrements of the culture of power already in place.” The concept “cultural capital” derives from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who coined the term, and established its explanatory power, in critical analyses of how mainstream educational (and other) institutions are complicit in reproducing social-structural power inequalities (see Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977, among texts too numerous to cite). Bourdieu’s analyses of how selection for “capital” operates are consistent with a Marxian logic of capital, yet: (a) extend that logic to wider “fields” than those of economic accumulation; and (b) expand the “forms of capital” (1986) that carry “market-value” in/across different fields. In this section, we synopsize a general logic of capital, then turn to Bourdieu’s expansions and their analytic application to educational institutions.

The Capitalizing Logic: Exploiting Use-Values to Accumulate Selective Exchange-Value

To say that something holds exchange-value (or capital-value) does not mean it lacks use-value. Indeed, to accumulate exchange-value requires exploiting—capitalizing on—use-valued qualities of things brought to market. For example, people attend higher education (HE) for useful aspects of education: to learn new things, socialize, and better understand their worlds. However, in a world structured by a logic of competition to accumulate capital—that is, exchange value in markets—some HE degrees gain marketable power, relative to others, for attaining economic and social-status rewards. As HE sectors get crowded, institutions in the best positions to capitalize powerfully from the historic status of their degrees will market their status and stratify the HE sector—a logic that affects those who compete for entry into “status” institutions. Consider the recent admissions scandal in which certain parents used both their economic capital, and the capital of their celebrity, to bribe officials and inflate SAT scores to secure opportunities for their children to capitalize further by attaining degrees from “top universities” (Medina et al., 2019). A key point is that, while education may remain valued for uses, competition within a logic of accumulating exchange-value exploits those uses to reproduce advantage of the few over the many.

This leads to another key point: commodities exploited for their use-values are not secure repositories for future exchange-value unless only small-numbered groups of people can sustain powerful access to them. For example, Kolluri and Tierney (2018) explain that while policies aimed at providing increased access to HE improve enrollment rates of nondominant populations, privileged populations respond in ways that maintain their powers of position: for example, private tutoring, private K-12 schooling, SAT courses,¹ activating their social networks, etc. As a result, stratification actually worsens between dominant and nondominant populations, wherein Black and Latinx students are now less likely to attend elite universities (Posselt et al., 2012). Therefore, while nondominant students have increased access to HE (mostly enrolling in community colleges), their degrees hold declining future exchange-value relative to those of more privileged peers who graduate from elite universities. As a result, an education that may provide meaningful use-values does not bestow significant capital/exchange-value unless it confers powerfully accumulated status that can be further invested to accumulate yet more capitalizing power. This leads to a third key point: accumulated power to capitalize entails a “zero-sum” logic; the power wanes if many possess what is seen to hold it. Certain “rare” commodities must be fetishized—gold-standardized—as if “naturally” holding special qualities that all people should value as of “most-high” use yet only few can attain. To sustain its power to function as repositories of capital, elite HE degrees must be (a) kept scarce—difficult to acquire for most people; yet (b) powerfully held among restricted classes of capital “owners.”

Education Markets: Reproduction Through Selection for Cultural Capital

Bourdieu extended the Marxian concept of economic capital to further species, or “forms” (1986), of cultural, social, and symbolic capital. In parallel, he expanded the range of institutional domains, or fields, that constitute “markets” where these species operate. Yet Bourdieu retained a Marxian logic that restricting powerful accumulation of capital to the few is the key dynamic by which fields reproduce social-structural inequality. Bourdieu saw the various species of capital as convertible to each other, but holding varied degrees of prominence, relative to each other, in different fields. In certain fields, cultural capital holds the strongest currency. This includes “restricted fields of cultural production” (Bourdieu, 1985)—such as arts production, or academic scholarship—in which participants produce less for mass-market consumption than for fellow producers who share high-value regard for certain cultural products.

However, educational institutions (including “mainstream” schools and colleges) constitute a mass market, inhabited by students from diverse local and structural “communities” that give value to various cultural uses—of which “mainstream” institutions only invest some as holding “high” value: that is, exchange-value as cultural capital. Bourdieu’s analytical insight was that, by arbitrarily fetishizing literacies, knowledge, dispositions, and other qualities of the cultures of power-elite groups—as gold-standards for “highest-quality” school performance—education systems select for, and so reproduce, the social-structural power of those groups, as against minoritized groups:

The educational system . . . maintains the preexisting order, that is, the gap between pupils endowed with unequal amounts of cultural capital. Most precisely, by a series of selection operations, the system separates the holders of inherited cultural capital from those who lack it. (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 20)

Selection operations infuse schooling’s formal “message systems” (Bernstein, 1977)—curriculum, pedagogy, assessment—and informal “hidden curricular” messages (Anyon, 1980; Jackson, 1968). All of these communicate not just overt but, more significantly, coded messages, which students “read,” at tacitly embodied levels, about the existence of “rules of the game” for “winning” performance and whether they “have what it takes.” This coded dynamic is key to how schooling sorts-and-selects across diverse students.

Bourdieu (1986) specifies three modes of cultural capital: objectified, institutionalized, and embodied. The first two are tangible (e.g., a Dali painting; a Harvard degree). However, the third consists of dispositions for perceiving and responding to situations—for example, facial expression when critiqued by a teacher, and other interactional styles associated with particular social-structural positions—tacitly embodied through immersion in practices and relations of social habitats, constituting what Bourdieu calls habitus. Most telling are dispositions internalized early in life, pre-verbally, constituting primary habitus (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Institutional selection operations that privilege, as “golden” learner qualities, the dispositions cultured in power-elite families sustain their functionality as cultural capital, while marginalizing other people’s dispositions. In assuming the valued qualities as “innate,” schooling tends not to explain them to those who do not inherit them culturally. Says Bourdieu (1997, p. 494): “By doing away with giving explicitly to everyone what it implicitly demands of everyone, the education system demands of everyone alike that they have what it does not give.”

Bourdieu’s conceptual framing does not itself offer tools for actively redressing the capital-selective injustice that Bourdieuian tools analyze. However, Delpit works Bourdieuian insights into a practicable strategy: that is, explicitly teach the codes to minoritized “other peoples” “children,” even though the very logic of selection for what is accorded “rare and special” rather than inclusive value means redistributing access to power-codes can never do fair justice to diversely minoritized students’ cultural assets. We have already discussed how Delpit balances such expedient access with fair-world use and valorization of “other people’s” cultural riches in classroom curriculum and pedagogy. We here note that many who advocate the Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework criticize Bourdieuian analysis of “capital” as applying primarily to class inequalities, leaving racialized norms of Whiteness unaddressed, thereby implicitly still privileging them. However, Delpit’s discussions of how schooling unfairly selects for codes of “the culture of power”—her key term; she invokes “cultural capital” only once in her 1988 essay—does illustrate and analyze racialized as much as social class marginalization (and their intersections). Still, CCW contributes further insights into how racialized education discriminations intersect with, but are not reducible to, classed and gendered discriminations. We take up these insights in our later section on the CCW framework. Before doing so, we turn in the next section to the Funds of Knowledge (FK) framework which, in contrast to both BAC and CCW, we see as strongest in putting use-valuing theory-into-practice (praxis), but without a robust approach for addressing problems of systemic power in education.

Funds of Knowledge: Putting Minoritized Use-Values into Curricular Praxis

The concept “funds of knowledge” (FK) was named by anthropologists Velez-Ibañez and Greenberg (1992) to discuss findings of their 1980s ethnographic research—in economically vulnerable Mexican-American regions of the U.S. southwest—into “bodies of knowledge of strategic importance to households” (p. 92) that emerged and evolved among community networks. In the early 1990s, Luis Moll and associates at the University of Arizona, developed a methodology in which academics and teachers first co-research FK ethnographically in household and community sites, and then build rich FK from their findings into the design of school curriculum units (Moll et al., 1992). In thus making family and community FK curricular, Moll, a foremost figure in FK theory, research, and praxis, informed the FK approach with conceptual underpinnings from the cultural-historical and educational thought of Russian social psychologist L.S. Vygotsky.

FK’s Vygotskyan Conceptual Underpinnings: The Use-Valuing of Knowledge

Moll (2014), in his book L.S. Vygotsky and Education (p. 121), quotes Vygotsky (1997/1926, p. 345) on the importance of connecting curricular activity in schools to social-cultural knowledge in students’ lifeworlds beyond school:

Ultimately only life educates, and the deeper that life burrows into the school, the more dynamic and the more robust will be the educational process …. Education is just as meaningless outside the . . . [life]world as is a fire without oxygen, or as breathing in a vacuum.…. [E]ducational work, therefore, must be inevitably connected with . . . social and life work.

In relation to curriculum trends of current times—emphasizing disciplinary knowledge from colleges and universities, re-contextualized into school subjects—Vygotsky’s statement is provocative. In saying that “[u]ltimately only life educates,” he does not mean that disciplinary knowledge lacks value for school learning. Rather, disciplinary knowledge gains and gives value, in school learning, only if vitalized by learners’ more expansive social lives. Vygotsky, says Moll (p. 34), argued for curriculum to comprise a dynamic “relationship . . . between what he called ‘spontaneous’ and ‘scientific’ concepts.” Spontaneous concepts emerge in everyday sense-making engagements with natural and social worlds, mediated by language and other culturally familiar tools. Scientific (disciplinary) concepts bring “organized system[s] of knowledge . . . [that] can more easily be reflected upon and deliberately manipulated” (p. 35). As Moll (p. 35) states Vygotsky’s view of their dialectical interaction:

Everyday concepts provide the “conceptual fabric” for the development of schooled concepts, and the everyday concepts are also transformed through their connection with the more systematic concepts. Scientific concepts grow into the . . . domain of personal experience, thus acquiring meaning and significance. However, scientific concepts bring . . . conscious awareness and control.

In this framing, both life-based and discipline-based knowledge are valued for curriculum. Disciplinary knowledges offer generalized uses for learning, including systematic focus that raises awareness and reflection; more controllable thought process; and greater explanatory power. Life-based “funds of knowledge”—defined by Moll et al. (1992) as “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills” (p. 133) constituting “household and other community resources” (p. 132)—offer more specifically located meanings, uses, and values that matter in people’s daily lives. The FK approach gives pride-of-place to locally use-valued cultural assets as “the conceptual fabric” within which disciplinary knowledge weaves its use-value powers. As Moll (2014) explains (p. 155), “The premise is that the most important resources for educational development are found and abound in our children, families, and local communities.” FK curriculum is thus committed to “transform[ing] students’ diversities into pedagogical assets” (Moll & Gonzalez, 1997, p. 89). Naming cultural diversities as assets highlights the inclusive, fair-world justice impulse—wherein the agency of currently-minoritized families and communities is empowered equally and fairly to work with school staff and university academics in developing curriculum and pedagogy for their children. Says Moll (2014, p. 137):

The funds of knowledge approach, then, represents a challenge to the stifling prescriptivism of the status quo, not only in valuing the knowledge of the students most marginalized by the education system but also in assuming that teachers can conceptualize a rigorous curriculum that honors students and families as co-participants in the practices of education.

In designing the asset-value of nondominant peoples’ local cultural resources and household practices into concrete units of student curriculum activity, FK challenges narrowly standardized curriculum not just “in theory,” but through theory-in-practice (praxis).

FK Pursues Social-Educational Justice in Praxis

As already noted, BAC offers tools for analytic critique of the selective workings of cultural “capital” in schools, but not for school activity that mobilizes “other people’s” use-valued cultural knowledge and dispositions. As we will soon discuss, CCW theorizes toward such activity; however, it does not present a significant track record of curriculum projects. In contrast, the FK approach emerged, and continues to evolve, through projects of curricular and pedagogic activity that test, push, and extend FK concepts, methodologies, and social-justice potentials. (We lack textual space to elaborate on the multitude of projects that constitute a spreading FK praxis movement, with track records of student engagement and achievement. We refer readers to major book collections and literature reviews: González et al., 2005; Hogg, 2011; Rodriguez, 2013, among others.)

FK methodology is also significant in bringing theory and research into educational praxis. To tap rich veins of cultural assets for curriculum units, projects research for FK by ethnographic and/or other means (see González et al., 2005; Esteban-Guitart, this issue). In doing so, FK research often builds collaborative relations across students, families, other community members, teachers, and academics. This sometimes leads to curriculum units in which parents and other community members join in classroom pedagogy, teaching their FK, and connecting it to school curriculum subjects. FK projects also can lead to students and family/community members collaborating as researcher agents, not just researched subjects. As well, teachers and academics typically research together, then search the data jointly for rich FK in study groups that constitute a “mediating structure,” says Moll (2014), whereby “teachers become cultural protagonists . . . in establishing contact with families’ social practices and funds of knowledge as part and parcel of their pedagogy” (pp. 117–118; emphasis in original).

In short, the FK approach stands out for fertilizing numerous concrete projects that bring social-justice impulses of culturally inclusive use-value into praxis. Yet FK’s conceptual frame does not directly address problems of power-code selection: a gap that dilutes FK’s strengths.

Strengths . . . But Gaps in Relation to Schooling’s Power Dynamics

FK gives us strong tools to design and implement culturally relevant pedagogical practices in K-12, but it has not given us strategies to dismantle and/or compensate for selective operations in schools that minoritize Students of Color and other nondominant communities. Mainstream educational practices, structures, and systems (e.g., testing, accountability, funding, provision of services, student discipline codes, and more) are built on logics that inhibit open and integrated opportunities to nurture authentic relationships with nondominant students and parents (Anyon, 2011). Educational policies and practices are built too formidably around a sort-and-select logic that conveys to students who do not embody privileged “capital” that they stand “in deficit” in social and academic landscapes (Domina et al., 2017). Nor are university disciplinary and education specialists free of the partialities of their social-structural positioning when choosing knowledge for academic syllabi. As well, “knowledge does not move into curriculum directly from universities but is mediated by government actors . . . who operate in a policy-making field pervaded by power-plays of vested interests” (Zipin & Brennan, 2019, p. 56). Moll (2014) gestures to such problems of power-selection in noting (p. 148) “the reality that social dynamics in all societies, whether mini or macro, are mediated through relations of power, with the associated constraints and affordances.” Rios-Aguilar et al. (2011)—with Moll as a co-author—observe that, for the most part, FK projects and literature have not substantively dealt with such power dynamics and how they weaken potentials to mobilize FK against unjust power-selection and toward social-educational justice. Here, FK can reduce to illusory “shadow capitals” that promise “richer education” but fail to negotiate access and advancement along further-education and life-chance pathways (Cipollone & Stich, 2017).

Questions arise about whether, and how, FK can address constraints of institutional power-selection. Within structures of socio-economic opportunity, can integrating FK into curriculum lead to stronger life-chance prospects for nondominant students? What range of knowledge and capacities do students from nondominant groups need for negotiating power-selective realities of academic and life-chance trajectories? Rios-Aguilar et al. (2011) have raised consciousness to these questions, opening debate that has much further to go toward “answers” (See also Kiyama & Rios-Aguilar, 2017; Zipin, 2015; Zipin & Brennan, 2021).

In the next section, turning to the Community Cultural Wealth framework, we explore how FK’s asset-based approach, and BAC’s analytic critique of power-selection, both might gain from CCW’s attention to: (a) how multiple axes of power inequality intersect in schooling; and (b) mobilizing nondominant communities to use their “funds”/“wealths” proactively to navigate, resist, and transform unjustly oppressive education systems.

Community Cultural Wealth: Actively Addressing Power’s Intersections

Community Cultural Wealth (CCW), emerging from the Critical Race Theory tradition, is a counter-narrative approach to deficit assumptions, narratives, and treatments of diverse minoritized groups. CCW reveals accumulated resources that Communities of Color utilize, as assets, to navigate, and interrupt oppressive institutions. CCW originates in the work of Solórzano and Villalpando (1998) who explored “resistant cultural capital” that Students of Color mobilize to succeed in higher education despite the many obstacles they encounter. In later work (2005), they proposed a model of “cultural wealth,” developed in response to college preparation literature, that, “despite Bourdieu’s (1986) explicit intention to apply cultural capital to class-based analyses, borrow [his] framework to explain the experiences and needs of students of color” (p. 17). Villapando and Solorzano argued that BAC by itself is too limited for studying trajectories of Students of Color, as it cannot adequately comprehend multiple dynamics of culture-and-power, especially racialized dynamics in which Students of Color develop unique “wealths,” including non-traditional forms of “capital”: that is, navigational, social, economic, experiential, educational, and aspirational. The cultural wealth model responds to these perceived shortcomings by,

examining the home and community for cultural activities that are compatible with school achievement; . . . [designing] intervention programs of mutual accommodation in which the school, the students, and their families fashion their behavior toward a common goal of academic achievement . . . [and] identifying and analyzing how individuals and groups use different and often unrecognized forms of capital in response to educational subordination. (p. 17)

In essence, Villalpando and Solórzano (2005) sought to redefine “capital” in studying how cultural resources emerged into use, among Students and Communities of Color, as empowering assets, raising the question: “[A]re there forms of cultural capital that students of color bring to the . . . table that [Bourdieuian] cultural capital theory does not recognize or cannot see?” (p. 17).

Extending from this question, Yosso (2005), in conceiving a “Community Cultural Wealth” framework, identified six forms of wealths as “capitals” within Communities of Color: aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant. As collective community assets, these cultural wealths represent an array of knowledge, skills, abilities, and networks embodied and used within nondominant communities to survive and resist macro- and micro-forms of oppression. Since Yosso, CCW scholars have named further forms of wealths as “capitals”: for example, “spiritual capital” (Perez Huber, 2009), and “informational capital” (Liou et al., 2016). Yosso (2005) theorizes these capitals as “not mutually exclusive or static, but . . . dynamic processes that build on one another as part of community cultural wealth” (p. 77). She thus moves away from analyzing capitals as separately distinct forms of “income” that hold greater or lesser power relative to other people and communities, toward treating them as empowering wealths that comprise “the total extent of an individual’s accumulated assets and resources” (p. 77). Thus, students mobilizing navigational capital to negotiate, for example, community college challenges draw upon family-based aspirations, advice (consejos) of adults and peers who have attended community college, linguistic experiences in brokering across various institutions, previous experiences navigating under-resourced counseling services, etc.: that is, a rich mix of multiple inherited and emergently developing “capitals.”

Naming these varied forms of cultural wealth as “capitals” aimed directly to challenge unexamined implications of White normativity that Yosso perceived in Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital.” Like Villalpando and Solórzano (2005), Yosso sought to (re)frame our analytical lens to value as assets, rather than negate as deficits, the accumulated resources Communities of Color mobilize to navigate and resist subordination. Citing Anzaldúa (1990), Yosso explains: “In our mestizaje theories we create new categories for those of us left out of or pushed out of existing ones” (p. 77). Linking concepts of “wealth” and “capital” carried the intent to challenge the power-selectivity of “capital” as analyzed by Bourdieu (and Marx). CCW’s redefined usage of “capital” thus carries a proactive impulse: to “empower People of Color to utilize resources already abundant in their communities, . . . listen to the experiences of those ‘faces at the bottom of society’s well’, . . . [and] restructure US social institutions around those knowledges, skills, abilities, and networks” (p. 82). Here, we note that we do see problems with the use of the term “capital” to signify cultural wealths conceptualized as gaining ground on inclusion and equality across diversities, rather than building the power of some in relation to the marginalization of others. The usage of the term “capital” can generate conceptual problems that make it challenging to grasp the acute tensions of pursuing both “fair world” and “expedient” social-educational justice. We address this matter more fully in our “Moving Forward” section below.

Learning from CCW’s Robust Challenge to Power Across Intersectional Axes

Grounded in tenets of Critical Race Theory, CCW recognizes “the ways in which our struggles for social justice are limited by discourses that omit and thereby silence the multiple experiences of People of Color” (Yosso, 2005, p. 73). While highlighting the structural durability of racism in U.S. social relations, CCW stands against racism and other forms of subordination, analyzing inequalities along multiple and intersecting axes of power-relation. With more vigor than what BAC and FK frames offer, CCW mobilizes what Duncan-Andrade (2009) calls “critical hope” that is also “audacious hope” in its “solidarity with urban communities” and its resistance to “the dominant ideology of defense, entitlement, and preservation of privileged bodies at the expense of the policing, disposal, and dispossession of marginalized ‘others’” (p. 190). Here, we note the wealths of community critical insight about unjust policing, and other apparatuses of Black-Life dispossession, that powerfully gather diverse groups in hopeful solidarities of audacious pro-action. CCW reminds us that any both/and approach to social-educational justice must support students not only to navigate, but also to resist, racist and other systemically oppressive logics and devices. The ultimate goal is an end to power-differentials in social relations, such that “code-switching” is no longer needed and “code-meshings” are intersectionally inclusive, empowering the agency of all groups to mobilize the use-values of their diverse cultural assets with equivalent agency.

If collaborative with FK projects of concrete praxis, CCW’s passionate refusal to accept arbitrary power could serve as a needed push to recognize and challenge, as well as navigate, power-selective devices of education institutions. While FK passionately rejects deficit thinking, it has been less analytical and praxical in relation to power dynamics. CCW’s emphasis on multiple and intersecting power axes also provides important insights for BAC. Bourdieuian tilt toward class-relational analyses of the selective operations of “capital” does not adequately translate to critical analysis of—let alone pro-action against—other axes of power relation. CCW can keep BAC scholars mindful that reproduction of educational injustice is not simply reducible to logics of economic class-relational “capitalizing.” Racialized, gendered, and other power axes are as formidable in their effects; and while these axes all intersect, they are not entirely reducible to each other in histories or logics by which they operate to (re)produce oppression.

Learning from CCW’s Commitment to Mobilizing Community Wealth

As Black Lives Matter mobilizations make increasingly apparent, Communities of Color have, through long histories of navigating discriminatory and oppressive systems, come to know much more—compared to those who embody Whiteness as “normal”—about how power works to minoritize along multiple axes (Acevedo-Gil & Solorzano, this issue). While they may not inherit the means to accumulate codes of elite power, Communities of Color, and other nondominant communities embody intuitive, visceral, practical, and often critically conscious understanding of how power-codes work against their lives mattering. CCW empowers nondominant communities to mobilize their intersectional wealths of lived experience and knowledge toward (re)imagining realities and transforming oppressive institutions. Here, CCW exposes a further insufficiency in the BAC framework: a lack of conceptual tools for recognizing and supporting the agency of nondominant communities not only in expedient navigations of power-coded “markets” such as schools, but also to mobilize cultural assets to resist and transform oppressive institutions in struggle for fair-world social relations that honor nondominant people’s use-values. FK, which shares a use/asset-value orientation with CCW, could benefit if its projects were further animated by CCW’s proactive community-mobilizing impetus. While FK projects link community-based “funds” (or “wealths”) into school-based curriculum and pedagogy, they tend not to: (a) recruit and engage communities as collectives in pro-action to make their FK count in schools; or (b) mobilize schools as spaces for reimagining social possibilities in their surrounding communities (see Moll, 2010; Rodriguez, 2013; Zipin, 2020, who each call for FK projects to create more robust two-way mobilizations across schools and communities).

Moving Forward: A Dynamic and Complex Pursuit of Social-Educational Justice

A key purpose of this paper has been to explore if/how strengths offered by each of the three frameworks could combine. In BAC we find conceptual tools both to analyze, and to take seriously, selective logics of educational “power games.” BAC helps us to avoid wish-fulfilling notions that all people, regardless of structural positions in power relations, embody capital that can “win the game.” In the FK approach, we find concepts and research/design methods to build use-valued cultural assets of nondominant communities concretely into curricular and pedagogic praxis. We find CCW to strengthen critical analysis of multiple intersectional, non-conflatable axes of power inequality and to support the proactive agency and mobilization of nondominant communities against racism and other forms of oppression. Our identifications of these respective strengths derive from reciprocal interrogation of the strengths and gaps that exist across the three frames. Yet within each frame, the “gaps” we explored come with reasons and justifications. Debates across the frames are by no means easy to settle. In what follows, we offer our provisional “settlings” of some key strength-and-gap issues raised in our interrogations across the frameworks.

Conceptual Problems in Contrary Uses of the Term “Capital”

Similar to McDonough and Abrica (this issue), we are wary of CCW’s conceptual conflation of terms “wealth” and “capital.” We find that it blurs the distinction between: (a) dominant cultural attributes that are invested with selective exchange-value in mainstream education “markets”; and (b) cultural attributes that hold use-value as assets in the life-worlds of diversely minoritized communities—which justly inclusive (fair-world) education would put to use rather than marginalize as “deficits.” Applying the term “capital” to the latter loses the logic of the concept “capital” and thus its analytical/explanatory use to diagnose how schooling works selectively to (re)produce power inequalities. If a key aim of CCW’s concept of “community wealths” is to empower the agency of diverse nondominant groups to contest those power inequalities, then we suggest CCW should not confound “wealths” with a term—“capital”—that, conceptually, helps us to analyze unjust power dynamics of mainstream education. We argue that the term “wealths,” like “funds,” offers strength to conceptualize inclusive empowerment of diverse communities, while preserving “capital” as a term for critiquing educational selection based on exclusive cultural inheritances.

We argue further that, contrary to some CCW literature, Bourdieu did not see communities whose cultural heritages do not hold power-codes as “in deficit.” Rather, he saw education systems as deficient in standardizing unjustly arbitrary cultural selection. However, McDonough and Abrica (this issue) recognize that some “Bourdieuians” do seem to suggest the main thrust of school “justice” is to redistribute dominant cultural capital. They agree—as did Bourdieu—that this enacts the symbolic violence of implying “deficits,” as if nondominant families are blamable for lacking capital that unjust power sustains as the “gold standard” their children need for educational success. Much misconstruing of Bourdieu’s critique of capital’s operations, they argue, results from analytic focus on the concept of “capital” alone, separated from Bourdieu’s concepts of “field,” “habitus,” and “practice.”

Troubling “Capital” as the Term for Exploitative Power

Yet we find CCW, and not BAC, to conceptualize how nondominant peoples, along multiple axes of power-relation, endure unjust social-educational exclusion of their diverse cultural assets (Anzaldúa, 1990), which carry potentials for a different kind of “empowerment”: to mobilize their change-seeking agency in collective struggles for (re)imagined realities that transform oppressive institutions. CCW is far more power-sensitive than BAC to how logics of “race” and other power-relational selections in schools intersect with, but are not reducible to, logics of class-positional selection. After all, when White working-class people achieve upward mobility through education, accumulating cultural capital that their children inherit at home, this inheritance most-often brings selection for success in school, reproducing the parents’ rise in class-positioned power. Yet, when People of Color achieve upward mobility and their children inherit cultural capital at home, these children are often subjected to racialized discriminations in school that block success and can lead to atrophy of their cultural capital.

Therefore, while we find that CCW jeopardizes the conceptual-analytical strength of the term “capital,” we also find that it exposes the need for intersectional analysis of how power operates in education to (re)produce oppression. We respect that CCW’s impetus for challenging narrow applications of the term “capital” is to empower “naming one’s own reality” (Delgado, 1990) and challenge unreflective conflations of “capital” with Whiteness that can inflict further symbolic violence upon Communities of Color. We thus agree with CCW scholars that, “as we decenter whiteness and recenter the research lens on People of Color, we can validate often-overlooked forms of cultural knowledge forged in a legacy of resilience and resistance to racism and other forms of subordination” (Yosso & García, 2007, p. 154). We find that CCW pushes harder and more effectively than BAC toward a social-educational justice that challenges burdens of code-switching along multiple axes of power-relation. Nondominant populations, in aspiring to end domination, mobilize agency to challenge and change institutions that reproduce the power of some groups over others. From a proactive fair-world impulse that the BAC frame lacks, CCW helps us to conceptualize curricular and pedagogic ways to support students in expediently navigating, but not assimilating to, power-codes of oppressive institutions.

Putting Justice into Praxis: (Re)Contextualizing Change

The previous two subsections interrogated BAC and CCW strengths-and-gaps at a conceptual level in exploring how each framework contributes to addressing the difficult balance in both navigating unjust structural power and mobilizing agency to challenge such power. This subsection re-engages with FK to address the question of how, in concrete praxis, to take on this difficult “balancing act.” Enacting praxical change in actual education settings—which comprise both contextually situated, and broadly instituted, constraints and affordances—is by no means straightforward. There is need for future research to examine how micro-meets-macro contexts variously constrain-and-afford curricular and pedagogic possibilities to center use-valued cultural assets while navigating-and-challenging selective power dynamics (see Esteban-Guitart, this issue; Neri, 2017; Neri et al., 2019; Rodriguez, 2013).

FK projects of concrete curricular/pedagogic application surface praxical challenges for social-educational justice, from which new concepts emerge. As examples, concepts of “invisible funds of identity” (Esteban-Guitart, this issue) and “dark funds of knowledge” (Zipin, 2009) arose in concrete projects in (respectively) Spain and Australia. These concepts respond to challenging kinds of FK that came to attention in the projects, addressing important questions of whether/how, in situated contexts, to build such FK into curriculum and pedagogy. How should curricular and pedagogic units work with student knowledge about difficult effects of racism, poverty, sexism, and more that they encounter in their lifeworlds? How do teachers, engage painful, often traumatically severe life experiences while protecting students’ well-being and effectively navigating institutional, local, and legal constraints? Where educators have legal obligations to report cases of abuse, neglect, and other extreme life situations, how might they handle moral responsibilities to protect families from undue intrusions of “welfare systems?” How might teachers, school leaders, and academic researchers create school-community interactions that facilitate student/community healing and agency? How might pre- and in-service teacher-education best prepare educators to do this work? As roles and expectations for educators extend beyond subject mastery to serving multiple needs and wearing various hats of responsibility, educational praxis must (re)contextualize curricular and pedagogic work to develop more robust connection to the needs and aspirations of nondominant communities and the power-relational dynamics and damages of their lifeworld settings.

In all these regards, our interrogations across FK and CCW suggest that these two asset-oriented frameworks can strengthen each other in reciprocal ways. FK provides Vygotskyan concepts, and rich methodologies, for building community funds/wealths into curriculum units in-and-across school subject areas. CCW provides conceptual tools that could more forthrightly identify and challenge power-selective codings in school subject-knowledge, and so connect funds of knowledge to more valuable uses of school subject-knowledge. CCW can also support FK work by mobilizing nondominant groups, in the locales of what should be their schools, into proactive support for curriculum and pedagogy that honors their community funds/wealths. Here, we note Acevedo-Gil and Solorzano’s (this issue) new modeling of ways to mobilize community wealths to instigate interruptive “peaks” that challenge institutional racism in schools. This is an important future direction for CCW to reinvigorate the education praxis impulse originally in Villalpando and Solórzano’s (2005) conception of “cultural wealth.” Villalpando and Solorzano’s aim to support designs of mutually accommodating intervention programs across students, families, and schools has thus far mainly been limited to supporting Students of Color to navigate racist dynamics in formal education settings, without addressing curricular-pedagogic praxis to the extent that FK has. There are examples of rich CCW praxis in clubs and organizations (e.g., Young Black Scholars Program, Cambodian Student Club, College Assistance Migrant Program; see Jayakumar et al., 2013; Tang et al., 2013). However, these CCW efforts in out-of-school settings mainly address issues of enrollment, access, identity construction, and sense of belonging, and less so curricular and pedagogic praxis. In sum, joining CCW pro-action impulses to FK praxis methodologies could combine respective strengths, mobilizing local community members to push local schools harder toward curriculum and pedagogy that makes robust use of their meaningfully valued “funds/wealths.”

Table 1, below, briefly summarizes strengths, gaps, and our suggestions toward ways forward, as discussed in this section.

Table 1.

Strengths, Gaps, and Ways Forward for FK, CCW, and BAC.

Economic metaphor	Strengths	Gaps	Ways forward
Funds of knowledge	Praxical strength	Weak analysis and address to how social-structural power relations operate in schools	Mobilizing FK to contest capital-selection and negotiate redistribution of the codes of capital-selection
	Curricular and pedagogical strength	Lack of politicization	Address intersectional issues of poverty, racism, etc.
	Teachers (and sometimes students) as ethnographers	Overemphasis on celebratory FK when there is rich knowledge in the difficult lived experiences of nondominant communities	Attending to institutional constraints and affordances
	Transform deficit assumptions	(Re)contextualizing for various forms of diversity	Mobilizing community<–>schools
	Use-value for collective living and sharing of resources	Community mobilization	Mobilizing community<–>schools
Community cultural Wealth	Strong critique of power along intersectional axes	By using term “capital,” CCW loses its explanatory power (see discussion below)	Use the term “wealths” rather than “capital” to signify the rich assets of diverse marginalized communities
	Center race and racism while extending the logic of this focus to all power asymmetries	Weak on projects of practical application in schools and classrooms– Curriculum/pedagogy– Institutional constraints	Praxis/challenging power in practice/address contextual constraints
	Reveal diverse assets/transform deficit assumptions		Utilize CCW to impact learning and achievement/transform curriculum and pedagogy
	Community mobilization/pro-action
Bourdieuian analysis of capital	Conceptual tools for critical analysis of the reproduction of inequality	Lacks intersectional approach (i.e., race, gender, immigration status, etc.)	Clarify in what ways BAC conceptual tools do/don’t apply to intersectionality with racialized and other power asymmetries
	Clarifies the selection and accumulation logics of capital and how these encode in school message systems	Lacks conceptual tools for a proactive approach to pursuing justice	Extend BAC methodologically, not just to expose but, in praxis, to contest capital-selection
		Agency of nondominant communities is not given attention	Extend BAC politically into building fair-world pro-action—across teachers, students, and nondominant communities—for justly inclusive curriculum and pedagogy
		(Mis)use (by some Bourdeiuians of the concept capital in ways that conflate upper-class capital with upper-class whiteness	Integrated application of Bourdieu’s conceptual tools (i.e., forms of capital, habitus, and field)

In “Conclusion”

This special issue of Urban Education features three significant frameworks for pursuit of social-educational justice; and this final paper has staged a “power-sensitive conversation” (Haraway, 1988) across those frames. Less visibly, we-the-authors engaged in power-sensitive conversation throughout our writing process. We began with what we agreed is an important “both/and” question for pursuing justice: How might it be possible to both: (a) honor diverse communities’ use-valued cultural assets through meaningful inclusion in education practice—an impulse of “fair-world justice”; and (b) navigate educational devices of power-selection that deprive many nondominant students of paths to meet life-sustaining needs—an impulse of “expedient justice?” We shared a sense that the “how” of this question grapples with social and educational features too structurally deep and systemically sedimented to reach any all-encompassing “(re)solution”; and yet, efforts to gain stronger conceptual, methodological, and praxical traction are nonetheless imperative for pursuing social-educational justice.

We then turned to Delpit’s (1988) famous essay, exploring how she highlights the acuteness of this “both/and” tension. In the process we explored how our own standpoints in terms of raced, classed, gendered, and other power relations affect us divergently as well as convergently in relation to Delpit’s and Young et al.’s strategies for approaching the tension. Through sometimes intense conversations, we came to a reinforced sense that there is no singular “best way” to balance expedient and fair-world justice impulses, which must be addressed in situated ways that involve peoples’ collective agency to strategize the balance. From there, we proceeded to explore convergences and divergences across FK, CCW, and BAC frameworks, putting them into reciprocal interrogation, to surface how each offers conceptual tools and insights to address respective gaps and combine strengths in robust pursuit of social-educational justice.

In concluding this paper’s contribution to continually needed power-sensitive conversation, we here dare to “sum up” the complex tension we have identified and grappled with throughout the paper. On the one hand, structural power-inequalities run deep, and formidably, across educational and other social institutions. They therefore compel an “expedient justice” that struggles for strategic ways to navigate power inequalities in educational praxis. Yet such navigational expediency does not contest and displace power inequalities, and it also puts “other peoples’” valued cultural diversities at risk of assimilation. Such insufficiencies spur the impulse for robustly inclusive education that pushes toward “fair-world” social relations. In terms of power, the expedient impulse responds to what has the “upper hand” as the “strong force.” However, the fair-world impulse is galvanized by ever-restless ethical energies to face persistent injustices more forthrightly. Such energies compel us to chase a “justice” that is fully just. However endless the pursuit of “full justice” seems, we who pursue it as educators continue, where/as we can, in projects to build collectivity-across-diversities, fuelled by ethically dynamic energies that gather strength to challenge and change unjust power dynamics.

We hope this paper’s efforts stimulate and encourage education practitioners and researchers to work together with students and communities in (re)creating the praxis of social-educational justice, ¡Siempre Pa’alante!

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Rebecca Colina Neri

Notes

Author Biographies

Rebecca Colina Neri is Assistant Professor of Learning Sciences in the Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology in the School of Education at Indiana University. Email: rcneri@iu.edu.

Lew Zipin is Extra-ordinary Professor at Stellenbosch University, South Africa; Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the University of South Australia; and Honorary Fellow at Victoria University, Melbourne. Email: Lew.Zipin@vu.edu.au.

Cecilia Rios-Aguilar is Professor of Education in the Higher Education & Organizational Change division at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Email: rios-aguilar@gseis.ucla.edu.

Adrian H. Huerta is Assistant Professor in the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California. Email: ahhuerta@usc.edu.

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