McKay School of Education > News > McKay Professor Co-authors a Self-Study of Poverty PhDs
McKay Professor Co-authors a Self-Study of Poverty PhDs
Ramona Maile Cutri grew up keeping secrets about her home life—an environment in which she coped daily with poverty, heroin addictions, and mental illness. Today Cutri has earned a PhD and is a professor in the Department of Teacher Education in the McKay School. Recently Cutri conducted a self-study that she integrated with the experiences of Jill Manning and Marc Chun, fellow PhDs from poverty backgrounds. The experiences of all three and conclusions derived from them are explained in “Poverty PhDs: Funds of Knowledge, Poverty, and Professional Identity in Academia.”
In the paper, the experiences of the “Poverty PhDs” challenge the idea that children from poverty backgrounds “bring little to the classroom from their backgrounds that will help them succeed in school.” Rather, Cutri, Manning, and Chun demonstrate how specific skills and knowledge they attained from their backgrounds led to their success in higher education. “Funds of knowledge” is a concept that refers to the specific skills and assets that children develop from learning to survive in difficult situations.
For example, Cutri’s behavior and reputation as a helpful and willing worker developed from a “poverty mentality”—pleasing authority figures “so as to avoid trouble.” Chun funded his undergraduate studies by working as a student assistant to the chancellor of his college; eventually earning a prestigious letter of recommendation that supported his admission to Stanford for his graduate studies. Thus “it was his fundamental need for money and willingness to work that led him to those opportunities to associate with such people.”
The primary reason Manning decided not to drop out of her doctoral program after receiving a B on a test was the fear of losing the $6,000 she had invested in tuition. “Her decision to remain in the graduate program was initially facilitated by the fact that her first concern was not to waste her tuition money by dropping out,” the article explains. “Jill’s poverty background inadvertently facilitated her persistence in her graduate program.”
None of these three was “traditionally prepared” to succeed in competitive academic environments. But succeed they did, in part because of “select qualities, skills, and abilities” they developed from living in conditions of poverty. Cutri, Chun, and Manning identified four funds of knowledge they developed in poverty backgrounds that helped them succeed as doctoral students:
- A hard work ethic focused on monetary survival
- Self-motivation—independent of any external rewards—to do whatever is necessary to accomplish goals
- A sense of self-regulation regarding use of resources
- A critical analytic awareness of power relations/structures and how to navigate them
These skills, among others, enabled these three scholars—and others in similar situations—to utilize their backgrounds and personal histories as funds of knowledge to enable achievement. “We obviously didn’t have well connected parents or deep pockets,” they wrote, “but we did have will and grit.” While poverty is frequently portrayed as a condition to be “overcome” or “done away with,” Cutri and her fellow authors assert that their backgrounds are a fundamental aspect of their success. They view themselves as neither victims nor victors of the system—they recognize the role of poverty in their lives and accept it for what it’s worth. “We claim that each of us clings to select poverty mentalities and argue that some of these have enriched our achievements in academia,” they wrote. “We assert ourselves as Poverty PhDs whose skills and traits learned in poverty have directly contributed to our success and accomplishments.”
Cutri highlighted the fact that we do not wish a poverty background upon anyone. “We advocate instead for more equitable distribution of resources,” she said. But, children who are in poverty and the teachers who work with them should begin to acknowledge the funds of knowledge that they possess and how they can contribute to their success.
Cutri is currently serving as the president of the Utah Chapter of the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME)--a national organization that advocates for multicultural students. She has also been appointed to the AERA division K committee entitled, "Innovations in Research on Diversity in Teaching and Teacher Education Award".
28 September 2009