In producing this blog, it is apparent that the concept of Community Cultural Wealth has enormous potential to transform our educational institutions for the better. Instead of a deficit-first model where students are effectively penalized for not being members of dominant groups, Community Cultural Wealth approaches allow for a focus on each students' strengths and cultural offerings first. This is not to say that education should not also work to improve students' weaknesses, indeed creating "well rounded people" has long been an aim of educational institutions, however the framework offered by Community Cultural Wealth allows educators to treat weaker areas as areas of "personal inexperience" rather than intrinsic "personal or cultural deficiencies."
When searching for articles, research, and multimedia for this blog, I found that research was readily available building off of Tara Yosso's original 2005 work on Community Cultural Wealth. While this was true of research, it was less so for organizations explicitly utilizing a Community Cultural Wealth approach. While some organizations, such as College Access Now, imply such a framework by the nature of their work, the framework itself has not yet been widely adopted (potentially due to its original publication date being less than ten years ago, with continuing research still ongoing).
I also found that organizations that have adopted a Community Cultural Wealth framework for their work were by-and-large independent of mainstream educational institutions. Nonprofits and independent educator associations have started to explicitly utilize this framework in their work, virtually no schools or colleges use it on an institution-wide level. This is clearly the next step in using this framework to make our educational institutions, rather than just outside of them, to make schools and colleges more culturally welcoming environments. While this may start on a programatic level in some (i.e. a single major program or area of focus within an institution), it is imperative that the approach be adopted institution-wide in order to be fully effective. This is particularly true of even non-academic areas such as admissions and placement, which still tend to focus on very "traditional" indicators of academic performance.
When searching for articles, research, and multimedia for this blog, I found that research was readily available building off of Tara Yosso's original 2005 work on Community Cultural Wealth. While this was true of research, it was less so for organizations explicitly utilizing a Community Cultural Wealth approach. While some organizations, such as College Access Now, imply such a framework by the nature of their work, the framework itself has not yet been widely adopted (potentially due to its original publication date being less than ten years ago, with continuing research still ongoing).
I also found that organizations that have adopted a Community Cultural Wealth framework for their work were by-and-large independent of mainstream educational institutions. Nonprofits and independent educator associations have started to explicitly utilize this framework in their work, virtually no schools or colleges use it on an institution-wide level. This is clearly the next step in using this framework to make our educational institutions, rather than just outside of them, to make schools and colleges more culturally welcoming environments. While this may start on a programatic level in some (i.e. a single major program or area of focus within an institution), it is imperative that the approach be adopted institution-wide in order to be fully effective. This is particularly true of even non-academic areas such as admissions and placement, which still tend to focus on very "traditional" indicators of academic performance.