Tapping Students' Cultural Funds of Knowledge to Address the Achievement Gap

Students whose language, ethnicity, and race are not represented in a school's dominant culture experience varying degrees of success in reading achievement, resulting in persistent gaps in reading achievement. Culturally responsive instruction can help to close that gap. This teaching strategy capitalizes on the knowledge and literacy strategies students learn in their homes and communities, the ways that students reason about and make sense of their world, and the language and communicative patterns of students. In this article, the authors provide a discussion of cultural modeling as one example of how to design culturally responsive instruction. Cultural modeling is a way of designing instruction to make explicit connections between content and literacy goals and the knowledge and experiences students share with family, community, and peers.