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Building Houses, Building Lives

This article uses a narrative format to describe situations in which immigrant families from a Southeast Asian hill tribe, the Mienh, adapt to technological and cultural change within a California elementary school which sponsors a family literacy, school-community garden, and house building project. Much has been written about the ways in which immigrant families and personnel at their schools struggle to communicate. My thesis is that even in the case of immigrants experiencing huge cultural and techno-logical change, from an oral subsistence culture to an urban technological society, adjustments can be creative and empowering, if schools incorporate community "funds of knowledge" into their instruc-tional plan. Real projects such as storytelling, gardening, and house building provide rich contexts for intercultural dialogues which enable teachers and Mienh parents to build a Mienh-American house,a symbolic construct in which both traditional and modern technologies are combined.