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The types of knowledge is a conceptualization developed by James A. Banks to help theorists, researchers, and practitioners better understand the values and assumptions that undergird knowledge claims and to identify the types of knowledge that students should be taught in the school, college, and university curriculum. Banks maintains that knowledge reflects the values, perspectives, and social context of the individuals and groups that create it. He believes that students should learn all types of knowledge as well as how to construct knowledge themselves and how to identify the assumptions and values that underlie the knowledge they create. Positionality is a central concept in Banks's knowledge construction typology. This concept emerged out of feminist scholarship and describes how important aspects of identity such as gender, race, social class, age, religion, and sexual orientation influence the knowledge that scholars construct.

Banks identifies and describes five types of knowledge (see Figure 1):

  • personal/cultural knowledge,
  • popular knowledge,
  • mainstream academic knowledge,
  • transformative academic knowledge, and
  • pedagogical knowledge.

This conception of knowledge is an ideal-type typology in the Weberian sense. The German sociologist Max Weber pioneered the idea of using typologies to classify social phenomena. His typology of three forms of authority—traditional, rational–legal, and charismatic—is an example. The five categories of the Banks knowledge typology, like the categories in Weber's typology, approximate but do not describe reality in its total complexity. The categories are useful conceptual tools for thinking about knowledge and planning multicultural teaching and learning. Although the categories can be conceptually distinguished, in reality they overlap and are interrelated in a dynamic way.

Figure 1 How the Five Types of Knowledge Are Interrelated

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Source: Copyright © 2009 by James A. Banks.

The Types of Knowledge

Personal and Cultural Knowledge

The concepts, explanations, and interpretations that students derive from personal experiences in their homes, families, and community cultures constitute personal and cultural knowledge. The assumptions, perspectives, and insights that students derive from their experiences in their homes and community cultures are used as screens to view and interpret the knowledge and experiences they encounter in school and in other institutions and public sites within the larger society, such as museums and the media.

Research and theory by Signithia Fordham and John U. Ogbu indicate that low-income African American students often experience academic difficulties in school because of the ways that cultural knowledge within their community conflicts with pedagogical knowledge and with school norms and expectations. Fordham and Ogbu also state that the culture of many low-income African American students is oppositional to school culture. These students believe that if they master the knowledge taught in the schools, they will violate fictive kinship norms and run the risk of “acting White.” Fordham states that African American students who become high academic achievers resolve the conflict caused by the interaction of their personal cultural knowledge with the knowledge and norms within the schools by becoming “raceless” or by “ad hocing a culture.”

Personal and cultural knowledge is problematic when it conflicts with scientific ways of validating knowledge, is oppositional to the culture of the school, or challenges the main tenets and assumptions of mainstream academic knowledge. Research by scholars such as Frances Aboud indicates that much of the knowledge about out-groups that students learn from their home and community cultures consists of misconceptions, stereotypes, and inaccurate information. Many students around the world are socialized within communities that are segregated along racial, ethnic, and social-class lines. These youths have few opportunities to learn firsthand about the cultures of people from different racial, ethnic, cultural, religious, and social-class groups.

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