ABSTRACT
Over the years, many critical voices have surrounded formal education and its pedagogical practices (Hubbard, Mehan and Stein 2006; Resnick 1987; Sarason 1993; Tyack and Cuban 1997). One of the major criticisms posed is that formal education rarely manages to harness those experiences and agency that learners bring to school from other contexts, such as from their homes, playgrounds, after-school clubs, libraries, science centres and museums. Formal education is argued to fail in exploiting the cultural resources, i.e. funds of knowledge (Gonzáles, Moll and Amanti 2005) of learners and the communities they are part of – their expertise, knowledge, and artefacts. This has encouraged school learning to stay disconnected from learners’ other worlds.
