Mendoza describes place-based knowledge as "place-based funds" or resources (2018, para. 15). These resources are significant to all students, but especially students of ethnic minorities and Indigenous students. Some place-based resources could be human such as Indigenous elders; linguistic like storytelling; textual being print, visual, digital, or ecological; and technological being electronics as well as instruments or tools (Mendoza, 2018, para. 15). As such, place-based resources embody multiple modalities of literacy and recognizes the breadth of literacy and how students
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understand their world. Indigenous oral ways of knowing and oral literacy, in general, is often overlooked, however, play a significant role in literacy development. "Developing students' oral language is essential because it provides the foundation for literacy learning" (Tompkins & Rodgers, 2020, 39). Recognizing both western and Indigenous ways of knowing is present in place-based pedagogy as a meaningful and authentic way to develop these foundations of literacy. For example, in a K-3 classroom, students might be asked to talk about their homes orally and what their parents or siblings say about their cultures or students might inquire into the local community interviewing elders, foodbank volunteers, and looking at posters. In this way, students can not only access their human, linguistic, and place-based resources but have them feel validated as part of their literacy education in a community-focused unit.