Connecting Funds of Knowledge to Funds of Identity through a Bilingual Multimodal Project-Based Approach

This study analyzed how bilingual multimodal projects that children and families from Mexican immigrant backgrounds created together facilitated expressions of their funds of knowledge and funds of identity as part of classroom instruction. Twenty-two students and their families participated creating biliteracy family projects that integrated their lives, experiential knowledge and bilingualism into classroom learning in their first-grade bilingual classroom in a U.S. school. Drawing from a sociocultural theoretical lens informed by funds of knowledge, funds of identity and multimodal social semiotics perspectives, children’s projects depicted their transnational experiences and their close family networks of support as important funds of knowledge in their lives. Findings illustrate how children internalized these experiences as funds of identity, which included their self-expressions and identity constructions that asserted 1) their Mexican heritage and cultural simultaneity, 2) their roles to maintain family ties and contribute to the family’s well-being, and 3) their future selves and aspirations. A culturally sustaining project-based approach toward inviting and integrating children’s funds of knowledge and funds of identity can afford pedagogical advances that also foster family collaboration and challenge deficit ideologies by illuminating the depth and richness of children’s experiences, and how these are incorporated to construct their identities.