This session interweaves participant discussion, culturally responsive pedagogical theory, and a story of second-grade emergent bilinguals who wrote family knowledge into the curriculum, literally creating their own scaffolds for high-level achievement. Utilizing their funds of knowledge increased engagement, output, and independence, shifted learner mindsets, and ultimately provided an important counter-narrative to school-wide deficit discourse which stated that these students couldn’t handle the rigor of Common Core, nor the independence of the writer's workshop model.
