Planning Within and Across Disciplines: Understanding the Disciplinary and Pedagogical Intersection of Content Areas

• In Event: 72.043 - Supporting Students' Evidence-Based Reasoning Across Content Areas and Grade Levels

Abstract

Objectives
This paper focuses on the nature of evidence-based claims in elementary English language arts (ELA) and mathematics instruction. By examining the design process of a researcher-practitioner design partnership, we address the following question: What is the potential disciplinary and pedagogical overlap when teaching elementary school students to make evidence-based claims in these subject areas?

Theoretical and Prior Research Framework
The term “disciplinary literacy” has been used to describe the stance that students need to learn discipline-specific ways of reading, writing, and communicating information (e.g., Moje, 2008; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008; Lee & Spratley, 2010). However, Stevens, Wineburg, Herrenkohl, and Bell (2005) point out the importance of understanding how students experience disciplinary learning throughout the school day. They propose that this focus on a “comparative understanding of school subjects” (p.127) would allow students to understand how knowledge is acquired and organized in different disciplines. Our analysis focuses on the disciplinary qualities of claims and evidence in elementary ELA and mathematics, as well as the pedagogical tools that participants applied when designing instruction in these areas.

Methods and Data Sources
This analysis draws from a researcher-practitioner design partnership at one elementary school. This partnership involves two participatory design (Schuler & Namioka, 1993) groups, which we call work circles (Author et al., 2006; Author et al., 2001; Fogleman, Fishman, & Krajcik, 2006; Reiser et al., 2000). Each work circle consisted of a grade-level team of teachers and university researchers. Both work circles had a focus on building students’ understanding of claims and evidence across the disciplines. Throughout the school year, the participants collaboratively planned and refined instructional resources in order to better understand the nature of evidence-based claims in different subject areas. The research associated with this effort involved documenting the work circle design process over two school years. The current analysis is derived from transcribed meeting transcripts, and artifacts related to lesson planning.

We began this analysis by identifying ELA and mathematics lessons and tasks that participants designed or discussed with the group. We identified portions of meeting transcripts that directly addressed the lessons and tasks, as well as the relevant meeting artifacts. We iteratively coded the data to identify themes related to practitioner and researcher understanding of the tasks and how to teach these tasks.

Results
Our preliminary findings relate to what the design team determined as being differences in disciplinary task demands and expectations (e.g., the content and purpose for tasks, text structures, types and forms of evidence), as well as how the participants negotiated disciplinary distinctions while also attending to coherence in the classroom learning environment (e.g., norms for discussion, expectation for use of evidence across subjects).

Scholarly Significance of the Work
By comparing lessons across the two content areas, we seek to add to the literature (e.g., Herrenkohl & Cornelius, 2013; Stevens, Wineburg, Herrenkohl, & Bell, 2005) that takes a comparative stance towards teaching school subjects. This work has implications for how teachers support students to use evidence and make connections across school subjects.

Authors

• Kimberley Gomez, University of California - Los Angeles

• Nicole Anne Mancevice, University of California - Los Angeles

• Ung-Sang Lee, University of California - Los Angeles

• Jahneille Cunningham, University of California - Los Angeles