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Making curriculum links with homes and communities

7a Overview of Reflective Links

These links should include contexts for learning that are informed by children’s home and community experiences. Formal teaching contexts will use home and community content (local case studies for history and geography, stories based on the children’s cultural backgrounds, maths activities using home materials); informal contexts are more likely to include home and community literacy practices, media and learning methods. Where these are present, the teaching contexts are likely to constitute ‘third spaces’ where school and home ‘funds of knowledge’ can be integrated and maximized. See 7d: Case Study (iii) Using texts from the community culture. Characteristics of these contexts will be:

  • more equal teacher-learner relationships, where teachers use the whole of their “pedagogical content knowledge” (Cazden 2001 p.54) to support children’s meaning making
  • adult use of home and community language where appropriate to show that these are authentic vehicles for meaning making and to complement and expand traditional teaching
  • replacement of some traditional Initiation, Response, Evaluation/Feedback teaching sequences with child-initiated learning sequences (Cazden 2001 Chapter 3)
  • increased use of hands on and problem solving activities
  • increased speaking and listening with peers in conversational contexts
  • better assessment evidence across a wider range of contexts

Types of strategies that will facilitate the making of ‘third spaces’ in which home and school curricula and pedagogies can each play their parts include:

  • Transferring objects between home and school : home objects taken to school, or school objects sent home, create contexts for talk and learning belonging to both home and school
  • Representing home and community in the classroom: using school based reconstructions of home and community literacy practices to teach the school curriculum contributes to a continuous curriculum across all contexts
  • Moving out to the community and bringing the community in: making outside visits and bringing outsiders in, indicates the school’s willingness to weaken the boundaries between traditional and non traditional curricula

See 3a: Key Issues in Language and Learning; 7c: Case Study (ii) Reconstructing a community scenario; 7d Case Study (iii) Using texts from the community culture

See also Working With the Wider Workforce – Pam Craig, Museums & Galleries and Theatre Groups in Schools and Theatre Visits

Student teachers might: note where ‘third spaces’ occur in a teaching sequence; identify appropriate medium term planning and National Curriculum requirements for making links; suggest ‘third space’ strategies for short term planning within other forms of provision; carefully consider any management issues for initiatives which depart from the school’s usual practice.

See 3c: Key Issues in Management

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Contents

  1. Introduction and Rationale
    1. Introduction
    2. Rationale
  2. Core Principles about Language and Learning
  3. Key Issues
    1. Key Issues in Language and Learning
    2. Key Issues in Assessment and Evaluation
    3. Key Issues in Management
  4. Suiting Links to Purposes
  5. Links to Inform Parents and the Community
    1. Overview of Informing Links
    2. What Student Teachers might do to Inform Parents
  6. Links to Support Parents
    1. Overview of Supporting Links
    2. What Student Teachers might do to Support Parents
    3. Case Study (i): Supporting parental awareness of curriculum and methodology
    4. Developing parents’ own abilities through Family Learning courses
  7. Links to Make the Curriculum Reflective of Home and Community
    1. Overview of Reflective Links
    2. What Student Teachers might do to Make the Curriculum Reflective of Home and Community
    3. Case Study (ii): Reconstructing a community scenario
    4. Case Study (iii): Using texts from the community culture
  8. References
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