In Search of Bedrock: Organizing for Success With Diverse Needs Children in the Classroom

Children who come to our schools without the appropriate linguistic, cognitive, and social skills deemed necessary for academic success are considered at risk for failure by many educators. Often, the educational focus centers around students' perceived deficits, cultural or otherwise. This deficit perspective ignores both the cognitive and linguistic schema already in place in these children that form the basis for academic learning in schools. Diverse-needs students can succeed in the regular-education classroom if teachers look beyond the labels assigned to such children, and instead seek to understand the varying ways in which children use language and include these ways of knowing as integral patterns of interaction. This article examines instructional practices organized around the funds of knowledge that children bring to the classroom, and how these instructional practices transformed the literacy development of a 3rd-grade Latino student with special needs in a bilingual classroom.