Disciplinary Literacies Across the School Day

• In Event: Disciplinary Literacy and Learning From Text: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

Abstract

Purpose and Perspectives:
This paper investigates disciplinary literacy from the vantage point of individual students, examining how they navigate the range of literacy demands and expectations across their content area classes. Researchers and educators, armed with a growing body of knowledge about the literacy practices of experts in the disciplines, are grappling with how those practices ought to manifest in secondary content areas (Heller, 2010; Moje 2008). In order to move this discussion forward, we need to know more about what secondary teachers ask students to do on a daily basis and how the range of literacy demands students face are embodied within individuals as they move from class to class (Moje, 2010; Moje, Dillon & O’Brien, 2000).

Methods & Data Sources:
This qualitative multi-case study was conducted in an urban high school and followed three average-achieving 10th-grade students across their English, history, and science classes. Classroom observations and interviews with students and their teachers documented the literacy demands and expectations of each content class and the ways in which each student responded to those demands. Individual student interviews provided insights into students’ reading abilities, background knowledge, and learning in each class. Constant comparative analysis was used to capture themes, refine codes, and draw conclusions (Glaser & Straus, 1967).

Results:
Analyses of the data indicate three main findings. First, data show that there were more similarities than differences in the literacy demands and expectations for students across their three content areas. In particular, there was an absence of disciplinary literacy instruction and opportunities to engage deeply with texts, which resulted in students’ literacy experiences being generally disconnected from rich content learning. Each of the teachers assigned reading, indicating they valued texts in some way, but the nature of the assignments and low expectations communicated to students that they were not held responsible for building content knowledge through texts. Second, the students engaged with texts and approached text-based tasks in much the same ways across the content areas and little their teachers did served to interrupt these “default” practices, even when they were not effective in promoting comprehension. Only one of the three teachers recognized the value of supporting literacy, but even so she lacked the knowledge to effect change and struggled to find the balance between her students’ literacy needs and the push to cover content. Finally, findings from this study indicate that when a teacher provided a clear purpose for reading that was connected to a task and specific outcome, students were more likely to invest effort in the literacy tasks as compared to tasks where they lacked a purpose. This suggests that setting a clear purpose, even if it is not disciplinary in nature, may promote engagement with texts.

Significance:
This study suggests that more closely examining students’ cumulative literacy experiences and the literacy beliefs and practices of their content area teachers can help researchers and educators better bridge the gap between the vision of disciplinary literacy and the reality of secondary content area classrooms.

Author

• Carol Margaret Adams, University of Washington