Disciplinary Literacy
As you gain confidence that students have a good grasp of basic, foundational literacy skills, and as you begin to see them develop more intermediate and advanced literacy skills, you can move forward with tailoring their literacy instruction with an eye toward disciplinary literacy. Even though students will need you to continue modeling the use of academic vocabulary and monitoring their comprehension, they will also be ready to attack complex texts with a disciplinary lens even as they practice building their skills.
For our purposes, a discipline is a unique expertise, which schools often split into subject-matter divisions such as mathematics, science, ELA, physical education, world languages, fine arts, and so on. Disciplinary literacy focuses on the literacy strategies tailored to a particular academic subject area. This book, as previously noted, focuses on the expertise of ELA teachers who see the value of integrating specific literacy-building strategies into their classrooms to support readers and writers working at various skill entry points as they work toward mastering course-content goals. Who better to lead the way with disciplinary thinking connected to ELA topics than the experts—our ELA teachers? After all, when English teachers read, write, and speak, they do so with certain goals and objectives in mind, such as determining universal themes, the meaning of symbols, and an author’s purpose, to name a few.
thinking BREAK
What would happen if you were to gather teachers from every discipline in a school and track the way they each address a reading, writing, and speaking task? Predict how different content-area teachers would approach and work through literacy tasks. What similarities and differences would you observe among these varied content areas?
There are certain stylistic and conceptual norms professionals attend to in each discipline. A scientist, a historian, a businessperson, or any other professional is going to address literacy tasks with norms and behaviors befitting his or her expertise and profession. That makes total sense; after all, each expert or professional has unique insider knowledge. Insiders have more background knowledge, subject-related vocabulary knowledge, and subject-related purpose than others without such dispositions. On the other hand, disciplinary outsiders lack sufficient background knowledge and vocabulary to navigate a disciplinary text successfully. Literacy expert Doug Buehl (2017) suggests that our job as educators is to teach students how to think like we do—as disciplinary insiders. So, where an English insider might focus on themes and symbolism, a science insider, for example, approaches reading tasks with specific goals and objectives, such as locating causes and effects, finding meaningful data, analyzing experimental conclusions, and drawing connections to scientific concepts.
Text comprehension in all disciplines generally follows a similar nine-step process, illustrated in figure I.2, but the ins and outs of application, connection, and extension reside within the specific lens of the disciplinary expert and must be modeled accordingly. Years ago, when training our peer tutors on how to help struggling readers navigate disciplinary texts, Katherine Gillies crafted this poster as a guide to moving toward text comprehension.
Given the difference between disciplinary insiders and outsiders, it makes little sense that they teach students to read and write with the same general strategies and moves. After all, if we know that each school content area has its own thinking style, it makes sense that we support students to consume and produce texts with the same unique thinking style required of each content. Even students who have a solid foundation of general strategies may struggle with the specific demands of disciplinary texts. Instead of using generic strategies in every class and across the school, providing students with a varied strategy toolbox to meet disciplinary demands will better equip them as disciplinary insiders to read like scientists, historians, and so on (Gabriel & Wenz, 2017).
Over time, we’ve made positive strides toward building disciplinary literacy strategies that support learning in more directed, focused, and attentive ways. We’ve learned that we should apply more specific strategies to different disciplines in ways that help support learning. When we speak of this shift to disciplinary literacy and training students to be insiders, what we intend to do is teach students to think differently in each classroom they encounter during their day. This is the goal of disciplinary literacy and why we often ask teachers who wonder how to teach a text, “How would you, as an expert, address the task?” As they think through their own processes, a strategy or a focus often emerges that is unique to their discipline, which allows us to help teachers recognize the value of thinking about their discipline in relation to literacy.
About This Book
Our goal for this book is to support collaborative partnerships in schools to address ELA teachers’ literacy concerns and better equip them with methods that enhance what they are already doing in their ELA classrooms. We aim to strengthen ELA teams’ use of literacy strategies to help all their students develop skills as readers and writers. Collaboration around these strategies will create new insights into heightening students’ abilities to approach more complex texts with confidence and advancing their abilities to think more critically.
Source: © 2019 Katherine Gillies. Adapted with permission.
Figure I.2: Reading-comprehension process poster.
Visit go.SolutionTree.com/literacy for a free reproducible version of this figure.
Scope
We designed this book to help literacy leaders collaborate and build literacy capacities in the middle school and high school environment. We talk more specifically about what makes a literacy leader in the next section, but what’s important to know here is that anyone in your building taking on the mantle for driving literacy advancement in the classroom is a literacy leader. In elementary school, teachers work hard to teach students to read. In middle school and high school, the goal is to teach students to read to learn. There’s a big difference between the two approaches. Moreover, as ELA teachers, we want reading and writing tasks to promote students’ abilities to not only learn from reading but also think critically about the reading and writing they do.
As we work to approach these challenges, readers of this book must recognize that each school is unique, and each student is unique—there is no one-size-fits-all pathway to literacy development. Within this book, there is a continuum of supports related to the varying needs of each school and each classroom. Sometimes we might require short-term, immediate literacy triage; sometimes long-term, sustained collaborative development; or sometimes both triage and sustained literacy-based professional development. We recognize that strong, consistently applied literacy strategies can and will help all readers develop their potential. We invite you to adapt the strategies we offer in this book to your unique needs. Many of the same literacy strategies for less complex literacy tasks still apply to more complex tasks—the only difference is the difficulty level. The skills that students need to apply remain the same and, with consistent application, become ingrained habits of the mind. As ELA teams collaborate on their work, staying committed to literacy-based strategies will help all students advance.
Common Language
For the purposes of this book, we recognize that we need to have a common understanding of literacy and a common language around literacy development—let’s not get confused by education jargon. For instance, we use the word text to mean a reading, an article, a chart, a diagram, a cartoon, a source of media, and so on. There are many texts we ask students to read, and please know they can be in many formats. In addition,