Rethinking roma children cultural practices through the exploration of their funds of knowledge and identity

Abstract

There is a large number of studies that over the last few years have corroborated the appropriateness of the Funds of Knowledge (FoK) approach when working with families at risk of exclusion. From this perspective, one of the keys to improving the inclusion of students in such strata is the establishment of strategies that favor the links between the students' lives and the school. The purpose of this article is to present some of the results obtained from working with a group of Roma children within the framework of a socio-educational intervention program carried out in the city of Pontevedra (Galicia). In order to go deep into their life experiences, and thereby discover their own Funds of Knowledge and Identity, we have been inspired by the use of techniques such as extended autobiographical (Esteban-Guitart, 2012), which allowed us to reiterate the importance of their own agency and the establishment of family ties in the educational development of Roma children, as well as the discovery of certain cultural elements that could serve as tools for the design, by teachers, of didactic units and/or culturally congruent curricular content.