Essential Question: What are my cultural strengths that are transferable to education and new contexts?

Assessment: Students will write talking points to their Cultural Wealth Powerpoint (term 1) about the connection of cultural wealth to educational contexts.

Common Core W6: Use technology, including the Internet, to produce, publish, and update individual or shared writing products in response to ongoing feedback, including new arguments or information.

Instructional Procedures:

  1. The idea of cultural wealth is something that is sometimes viewed as theoretical but what we want is to help students see their cultural wealth as something that can help them in education and in new contexts not just in theory.
  2. A quick review of the cultural wealth powerpoint would be a good starting point but then, ask students to brainstorm how each of the attributes can help them be better students. For example: Linguistic capital can help students learn another language. The research is pretty clear that once you learn a second language, it is easier to learn a third and so on. Familial capital is helpful in terms of having a support system available when things get tough in school. Aspirational capital can many times help students get back up when things are stressful because they are doing it for the hopes and dreams of their family members. Etc.
  3. Once students have explored ways that cultural wealth helps them in educational contexts, discuss ways that it might help in work situations, social situations, community situations, etc.
  4. Doing this will be difficult. But the hope is that students view their culture as an asset in multiple situations rather than focusing on deficits.
  5. Once students feel comfortable with the material in a classroom context have students add talking points to their powerpoint in a way to help younger students understand.

Teacher Note: It might be helpful for the teacher to read the following articles even though they focus on Latino Cultural Wealth. The articles can be found on the People of the Pacific Web-site.

A) Ramirez, A.D.(2012). Latino Cultural Knowledge. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education

B)Yosso, T. (2005) Whose Culture has Capital: A Critical Race Theory Discussion on Community Capital. Race, Ethnicity, and Education.