How Knowledge Counts: Talking Family Knowledge and Lived Experience into Being as Resource for Academic Action

In this vignette, Vanessa and her teacher, along with other students in this fourth grade classroom, accepted as ‘ordinary’ an interaction in which Vanessa linked work with and knowledge from a family member’s lived experience with the academic work of science. Through this interaction, Vanessa, a student from a linguistically diverse family and school-defined as having a ‘learning disability,’ proposed to the group a potential action, an inquiry practice, in which scientists

might engage-asking questions. She also drew on family knowledge and her own academic and literate work in acquiring that knowledge-interviewing and writing an oral history-as evidence to support her proposal, thereby linking her own actions with the actions of scientists.