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Disciplinary Literacy: The Basics
This article is reprinted from the blog Shanahan on Literacy with Dr. Shanahan’s permission.
www.shanahanonliteracy.com Posted: 15 Mar 2017 09:40 AM PDT
A slew of letters seeking ideas on disciplinary literacy:
Teacher 1: The Common Core highlights that every teacher is a reading and writing teacher in their discipline. I think this idea is important in combination with the best practices for content area learning. My main interest in this is based on helping students who struggle to learn to read in early grade levels, and, as a result, can quickly get behind when "reading to learn" in the secondary grades.
Teacher 2: What is the place of disciplinary literacy in elementary school? I am also aware of the work of Nell Duke and the importance of informational text with young children as well as the significance of teaching academic vocabulary and scaffolding its use by the children.
Teacher 3: I very much like your explanation of Content Literacy vs. Disciplinary Literacy. With this in mind, how would you best support kindergarten-first grade teachers in the area of Disciplinary Literacy? Non-fiction informational texts, read alouds, inquiries, academic vocabulary, learning to read charts, photos etc. ...The ways to scaffold Disciplinary Literacy are much more clear to me as the children move up the grades.
Teacher 4: What would you say are some current best practices for secondary content area literacy?
Shanahan responds:
One hears the term disciplinary literacy a lot these days. That’s because the Common Core standards (CCSS) address the teaching of disciplinary literacy (as do non-CCSS states like Texas and Indiana).
Of course, the term is often misused. Disciplinary literacy is based upon the idea that literacy and text are specialized, and even unique, across the disciplines. Historians engage in very different approaches to reading than mathematicians do, for instance. Similarly, even those who know little about math or literature can easily distinguish as science text from a literary one
Fundamentally, because each field of study has its own purposes, its own kinds of evidence, and its own style of critique, each will produce different texts, and reading those different kinds of texts are going to require some different reading strategies. Scientists spend a lot of time comparing data presentation devices with each other and with prose, while literary types strive to make sense of theme, characterization, and style
The idea of teaching disciplinary literacy is quite different from the long promoted content area literacy teaching. The latter has often championed the disciplinary literacy notion, but the result has been an emphasis on general comprehension skills and study skills, rather than apprenticing young readers into reading like disciplinary experts. K-W-L, three-level guides, Frayer model, 4-squares, etc. are all great teaching tools—they can enhance kids learning from text, but you are unlikely to find chemists or historians who use those approaches in their work. Thus, content area reading aims to build better students, while disciplinary literacy tries to get them to grasp the ways literacy is used to create, disseminate, and critique information in the various disciplines.
This can get pretty confusing. Educators have a tendency to latch onto new terms without developing much of an understanding of them. These days many teachers think disciplinary literacy is just the cool new term for content area reading. Even some “scholars” are playing this game; grabbing onto family resemblances and seeing identical twins.
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