In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators’ efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents’ stories of life in India into picture books to serve as cultural resources in their school community. In retelling their grandparents’ stories, students drew on a multiplicity of ancestral, globalized, and Western discourses in their textual and pictorial illustrations. The authors examine what happens when the funds of knowledge that students bring to school contradict normative, Western understandings of what is appropriate for children and how school might appropriately respond to varying community perceptions of good and evil.

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Elizabeth Marshall is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses in children’s and young adult literature. Her work, which focuses on representations of girlhood in popular cultural texts, has appeared in journals such as Discourse: The Cultural Politics of Education, Rethinking Schools, Gender and Education, Children’s Literature in Education, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Reading Research Quarterly, The Lion and the Unicorn, and College English.

Kelleen Toohey is a professor and associate dean in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. Her research centers on the learning of English as an additional language, and she is the author of Learning English at School: Identity, Social Relations and Classroom Practice (2000). Her work has been published in journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Curriculum Inquiry, and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. In 2002 she received the TESOL Heinle and Heinle Distinguished Research Award. She coedited Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning (with Bonny Norton, 2004) and collaborated on a book on teacher research, Collaborative Research in Multilingual Classrooms (2009).