Boxes, bags and videotape: enhancing home–school communication through knowledge exchange activities

Abstract

Effective two‐way communication between home and school has been frequently promoted by policy‐makers and educationalists in the UK and elsewhere. In practice, however, home–school communication can often resemble ‘one way traffic’ which makes little attempt to acknowledge the out‐of‐school lives of children and their families. This paper argues for a different approach which aims to recognise and exchange ‘funds of knowledge’ between teachers, parents and children. The paper describes in detail two home–school knowledge exchange activities—one in which the exchange of knowledge is from school‐to‐home and one in which it is from home‐to‐school. In the discussion, it is argued that activities like these can provide a genuine exchange of ‘funds of knowledge’ between home and school. At the same time, home–school knowledge exchange activities cannot be seen as the simple transmission of depersonalised knowledge from one party to another. Instead they need to be seen as complex communicative activities in which the participants actively represent their practices and interests, and interpret these representations in terms of their own particular purposes and agendas. Two processes of ‘personalisation’ and ‘curricularisation’ appear to be involved here, as are underlying issues of power and control, risk and threat.

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