Disciplinary Literacy

     Up until the 1990’s, the emphasis on literacy was simply teaching students just how to read in terms of vocabulary and phonetics.  This strategy lead to having generations that failed to meet the economies needs of high literacy workers.  In the Shanahans’ article, Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content- Area Literacy,” they discuss the large effort on pushing reading in elementary school, but researchers and educators soon realized it didn’t automatically lead to consequent growth in literacy later on, say in high school.  The students’ strong early reading skills did not lead to more complex skills for specialized literacy (math, science, history, etc.).  The Shanahans propose teaching literacy as a progressive method throughout a student’s entire education.  They model their proposal though a pyramid model that is divided into three horizontal sections.  The bottom section of their pyramid is basic literacy, which they describe as “literacy skills, such as decoding and knowledge of high-frequency words that underlie virtually all reading tasks;” the second tier is intermediate literacy, which they define as literacy skills common to many tasks, including generic comprehension strategies, common word meanings, and basic fluency.”  And finally, their top of the pyramid is disciplinary literacy, which they describe as “literacy skills specialized to history, science, mathematics, literature, or other subject matter” (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008).  The Shanahans collected data on how content experts/professionals in specific field read their respective disciplinary text and what strategies they use.  They found that experts from different fields read their respective disciplinary text differently from each other.  They then implemented the use of these strategies in schools by teaching them to students and found the strategies to be successful.  In her article, “Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change,” Moje (2008) supports the Shanahans article.  She specifically explores the importance of building disciplinary literacy instructional programs, rather than just having teachers squeeze in literacy teaching practices and strategies.  Moje also displays the importance of including younger people to participate in the disciplines by expanding their access to the specific knowledge, so that they can also critique and change that knowledge.

     Through my own experiences, the argument that the Shanahans and Moje are making are very true.  As a young student, I was a terrific reader of children’s books, and truly enjoyed reading.  Science, particularly biology, started to really interest me and I became fascinated with it.  I excelled in my middle school science classes because it wasn’t reading focused, but when I got to high school, I really struggled with the exams and class assignments, just because they were text book heavy.  I slowly started to improve in science classes because I learned how to use different strategies to further my understanding of topics.  For example, I paid attention to sourcing more, improved my data and experimental analysis, and learned to determine variables.  I also started to practice close reading, road mapping and paragraph summarizing.  I've included an image of a poster that demonstrates close reading as being a "detective," which I believe would really help students understand what exactly close reading is because I didn't really understand what it was at first until my teacher modeled it for me many times.  The poster, using a detective metaphor, breaks down how to close read by looking for clues, asking questions, and being a critical reader.  

(We Are Teachers, 2013)

Unfortunately, it was not my science teacher who taught me these skills, but rather an ACT prep instructor for the reading and science portion of the ACT.   The confidence of doing really well in my science classes my junior and senior year of high school motivated me to pursue my love for science in college as a biology major.  Throughout college, I maintained my reading skills and did well in my biology classes, and even added a psychology major to my plate.  Luckily, I was able to apply some of these skills to other classes as well and improved in my classes overall.  I found them particularly helpful in my history classes because they kept me on track and paying attention.  I always found history really boring, no offense!  As a future science teacher, I know I will personally do Think-Aloud sessions with my students early on in the school year, and then some refresher courses through the semesters.  I don’t want them to struggle in science due not knowing how to read the texts I assign.  Plus, they’ll be able to apply the strategies to other courses, for example, they can apply the importance of sourcing to scientific and historical texts.  The use of reading strategies supports that idea that has been improved from the old view of “thinking about thinking” and actively turns it in the new view of “monitoring and control of thought” (Martinez, 2006).  It creates active metacognition.  Another thing it improves upon is the resistance that teachers display by taking the idea of all teachers need to be teachers of reading, but rather teachers are experts in their subject fields and can easily model specific reading skills to the relative class, so that their students can learn how to read for that subject matter.  The goal of teaching students to be specific content readers is not so that all of the students can become mathematicians, scientists, and historians, but so that they can use these specific set of content based skills to actually learn in their classes.  It is what they’ll be learning using those skills that is important.  The idea of having literacy as being discipline specific has even been incorporated in Common Core.  Shea Kerkhoff, in her YouTube video, "Why Disciplinary Literacy is Important," she reinforces the same ideas that the Shanahans and Moje established.  She also describes how it ties into Common Core (Appendix A), and as future CPS educators, I think it's important that we understand how what we're learning about specific subject literacy ties into how we have to and will be teaching one day.  She also emphasizes that we all need to have shared responsibility and contribute to students our part of the area (subject matter).  Click here for the video. (Is not directly accessible/link-able with Blogger).

References:

Kerkhoff, S. (2013, August 28). Why Disciplinary Literacy is Important. YouTube. Retrieved June 23, 2014, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unt4pR2HAb4

Martinez, M. What is Metacognition. Phi Delta Kappan, 87, 696-699.

Moje, E. B. Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching And Learning: A Call for Change. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52, 96-107.

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content- Area Literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78, 40-59.

We Are Teachers. (2013, January 1). Close Reading Classroom Poster. Retrieved June 23, 2014, from http://www.weareteachers.com/hot-topics/topics-in-education/understanding-close-reading-download-our-poster-now