Minnesota Educator Dispositions System (MnEDS)

Strand 1 TBTS: Assets

Assets: Thinking Behind the Strand

Leverages the funds of knowledge from students, families, colleagues, and communities to inform teaching and learning, build relationships, and honor various forms of knowledge and experience.

An assets-based approach to teaching is central to educational justice and equity. As teachers, we must face the biases and ingrained assumptions we may have of students, families, and their communities. Focusing on people’s strengths and assets can feel both empowering and vulnerable, particularly if it sheds light on our own shortcomings or miseducation about individuals and groups of people. By insisting on drawing on assets and strengths, we see our students more holistically, recognize their contributions to their own learning, and reimagine what is possible in our teaching and learning contexts.

Using an assets-based approach to teaching

The definition of an asset is something useful or valuable. Assets can also include contributions a person makes to an organization or a group. The term asset might also be used to describe a quality held by an individual or school or neighborhood. When we think about the assets of our students, families, and communities, these can be cultural, linguistic, interpersonal, intellectual, academic, physical, artistic, and economic attributes (among others).

Focused on assets, we can be more creative with instruction. We can facilitate learning environments that allow students to hone their assets and draw on their strengths in order to build confidence and expand perspectives and skills. An assets-based approach to teaching enables teachers to raise expectations of students because instruction and assessments build from the strengths and gifts students bring with them. An assets-based approach enables teachers to trust their students and relinquish control of learning, placing students in positions of power over their own education.

Types of assets

When we think about the assets of our students, families, and communities, these can be cultural, linguistic, interpersonal, intellectual, academic, physical, artistic, economic, ways of healing, types of knowledge, knowledge-sharing, spiritual, movement and transportation, health and nutrition, land care and sustenance, family structures, peace and reconciliation practices, navigating systems and situations, organizing and group dynamics, ethnomathematical processes, understanding of the natural world, among others.

One way to conceptualize assets is through a “funds of knowledge” approach, where teachers pay attention to the “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and wellbeing” (Moll et al., 1992, p. 134). Framed in this way, assets are the everyday knowledges, activities, experiences, values, and resources that affect the lives of students and their families.

Another helpful frame to map out types of assets is the concept of community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005). These assets are explained as types of capital that a community holds and that teachers can draw on such as the knowledges, abilities, and skills, and resources that our students bring into the classroom that may not be visible or valued in school contexts. Community cultural wealth and capital includes six types of capital: aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant (Yosso, 2005).

Community Cultural Wealth and Types of Capital

From Yosso, 2005

Recognizing deficit images and stories

From an educational standpoint, deficits encompass that which is lacking, missing, or absent. Sometimes teachers describe students, their families, or their communities by what is missing and/or not visible to them. The use of a deficit lens can obstruct a teacher’s ability to see the positive attributes and strengths a student brings to the classroom.

Seeking out assets and breaking ourselves of implicit biases can be easier said than done. Sometimes we lack awareness of the assumptions we carry about others and the ways these assumptions contribute to our framing of our students, their families, and

communities. We regularly see images and hear stories of personal weakness, poor parenting, weak financial planning, low literacy, disinterest, tendency towards violence, brokenness of spirit, and unwillingness or incapacity to be self-determined, intellectually inquisitive, or empathetic. These images are often conflated with parts of our identities: race, class, language, religion, gender roles, and sexual orientation. These deficit narratives play out in our teaching in numerous ways. For instance, they can inform split second decisions we make in the classroom such as assumptions about what a student might find interesting, how a student might respond to something, what students are capable of, and what they already know. Our unexamined assumptions can keep us from recognizing our own lack of knowledge, or the power and knowledge students bring to a discussion from their own lived experiences and perspectives. Deficit narratives can hold us back from being our best selves, prevent us from connecting with one another, and make us feel nervous, defensive, or overly protective. By recognizing what these deficit narratives are and the ways in which we replay them to ourselves, we are more likely to stop them and, instead, write new stories, replacing them with the assets and strengths of our students, their family members, and the communities that raised them.

Culture and assets

As an equity-oriented educator, it is important to think about the different ways culture impacts teaching and learning. Research concerning educational inequities has demonstrated the significance of a culturally relevant perspective to connect meaningfully to the lives of students. Culture must be regarded in fluid and nuanced ways to account for the multiple and complex identities students and their families have. Thinking about culture in rigid, static, and bounded ways does not acknowledge the dynamic lives students and families lead and can cement certain stereotypes in our thinking as teachers. Additionally, we should be mindful of how our culture interfaces with students and the learning environment.

An assets approach in the classroom requires us to engage in ongoing inquiry into the lives, experiences, knowledges, and interests of students and their families. Fostering a culturally relevant learning climate that leverages assets considers the following (adapted from King, 2016):

• issues of inclusion: the extent to which students’ identities and lived experiences are welcomed and understood in generative and substantive ways

• representation: the extent to which portrayals of identities and culture are represented accurately

• multiple ways of knowing: the extent to which the cultural knowledges of students and their families are actively elicited in respectful ways and validated, the expert-learner dichotomy is disrupted

• critical inquiry: the extent to which the learning environment invites students with teachers to engage in systematic analyses of power, oppression, and exploitation, to disrupt the status quo, to evaluate knowledge with humility, and to work towards producing reciprocal and transformative knowledge

• collective humanity: the extent to which the learning environment considers the generative significance of individual assets to a greater human collective and our responsibility to redress social inequities

Ongoing inquiry toward assets in the classroom

To better attune to the assets and funds of knowledge students, families, and communities offer, we must continually develop their ideas around culture through an ongoing process of openness to learning about difference and learning from their students (Ladson-Billings 2006). First, it is important for teachers to understand students’ lives’ in the different worlds they occupy, other than school. Getting to know our students, their family members, and the communities where they live opens our eyes to our students’ assets and strengths. This includes spending quality time with them, hanging out and doing our errands in our school’s neighborhood, attending community events where our students are involved, and using our classroom learning and assignments to allow students to explore, name, and map the powerful and positive attributes and networks they belong to. In this way, teachers can establish stronger relationships by identifying the various interests, values, and experiences that are important.

Second, we must recognize their own culture and how this may impact perceptions and interactions with diverse students. This might entail critically inquiring into the taken-forgranted assumptions, beliefs, attitudes, and practices that mediate understandings of self, society and the world. For example, examining the implications of whiteness as a way that organized privileged perspectives, knowledges, and injurious actions helps to displace dominant ideologies, disrupt systems of inequality and make room for different ways of knowing and being (DiAngelo, 2011).

Third, teachers should think about how schools are situated not merely in local terms, but also in global terms. Bridging local and global perspectives helps us to think broadly about the purposes of schooling and to be cognizant of education as not merely a local activity.

As we inquire further into issues of culture, recognize these inquiries help to build a robust repertoire of tools to inform your teaching and relationship building with students, families, and communities. Remember, these inquiries will only have impact if they are actively engaged and practiced.