My colleague, Hevaha, and I presented a workshop at the Manaiakalani Teacher Only Day. We discussed the importance of harnessing the wealth of knowledge and the cultural capital that students bring with them.
Introduced by French thinker Pierre Bourdieu in the 1970s, cultural capital refers to the social and cultural knowledge that can help a student make progress. In education, cultural capital should be woven through the whole curriculum, giving context and reference points to topics that allow students to build schema.
