Abstract
The Avatar Project was a two-week English project in which Chinese high school students in an internationalised school in Shanghai China explored the topic of cultural and individual identity. The project synthesised prospective education with the Funds of Identity approach, both of which have particular relevance within an internationalised teaching context. During the project, students created three identity texts: a written reflection, a word cloud and an avatar which were later used as data for this article. This article presents findings from the project and critically evaluates the effectiveness of avatars and word clouds as strategies for detecting students’ funds of identity. A multimodal approach to data collection and analysis was adopted in order to ensure that the interpretation of students’ work remained situated within their lived experience. The project revealed the existence of social, practical, institutional and cultural funds of identity. However, it also detected more problematic forms of funds of identity related to political and philosophical beliefs which I label ideological and existential funds of identity. While avatars and word clouds were effective in drawing out students’ out-of-school identities, the written reflections were ultimately more useful in revealing students’ funds of identity and also ensuring that any interpretations remained within the participants’ horizon of intended meaning. The project also brought about significant transformation in the way I viewed my students.
Highlights
There is a growing consensus that education in the twenty-first century requires a new set of competencies and modes of learning that are better suited to a mobile-centric society in the digital age (Patiño & Guitart, 2014; Subero, Vujasinović, & Esteban-Guitart, 2016)
One approach that resonates with the notion of prospective education is the Funds of Identity approach which is based on the simple premise that people have and accumulate their household’s funds of knowledge, and life experiences that help to them to define themselves (Subero et al, 2016)
The strategies employed to detect students’ funds of identity have application to other teaching settings in which teachers and students are from different cultures. Can digital strategies such as avatars and word clouds give teachers an opportunity to know their students as individuals and work through their own deficit thinking, but by bringing new technology and digital literacies into the classroom, teachers lay the foundations for building more prospective forms of education
Summary
There is a growing consensus that education in the twenty-first century requires a new set of competencies and modes of learning that are better suited to a mobile-centric society in the digital age (Patiño & Guitart, 2014; Subero, Vujasinović, & Esteban-Guitart, 2016). Funds of Identity is suited to the prospective classroom as identity can be used as a lens through which to absorb and create new information and identities (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014) and to bring about transformative educational practices in order to make teachers more sensitive to the lived reality of their learners (Jovés, Siqués, & Esteban-Guitart, 2015). In continuation of the Funds of Knowledge project, ethnographic research into and subsequent use of students’ funds of identity is designed to enable teachers to design social justice programmes for immigrant students, something that is becoming increasingly imperative in a globalised world in which non-dominant cultures, identities and epistemologies are marginalised within the main stream classroom (Subero et al, 2016)
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