Literacy Matters - Vol 21 - Winter 2021

Disentangling Content-area and Disciplinary Literacy: Educators Analyzing Their Own Reading Strategies as Professional Development by Britnie Delinger Kane, The Citadel; Jennifer D. Morrison, University of South Carolina; Charlene Aldrich, College of Charleston; Rachelle S. Savitz, Clemson University; Kavin Ming, Winthrop University; W. Ian O’Byrne, College of Charleston and Todd Lilly, University of South Carolina

ABSTRACT—Content-area and disciplinary literacy are increasingly influential topics of discussion in South Carolina’s secondary schools. Educators are often aware of content-area literacy, but less familiar with disciplinary literacy. In this article, we present a series of activities we have designed for use in university coursework and professional development. These activities are rooted in research, coming out of the learning sciences, on teachers’ professional learning. The goal of these activities is to help educators to become metacognitive about their own use of literacy strategies, to understand some of the ways that literacy differs within disciplines, and to open up discussions about the instructional implications of these new understandings. Throughout, we provide a discussion of how a similar set of activities might be used by others in differing contexts for teachers’ professional learning, so that preservice teachers, in-service teachers, coaches, and administrators might develop a strong grounding in content-area and disciplinary literacy and better understand how both might be used to support secondary students’ literacy and content-area learning. [Keywords: content-area literacy, disciplinary literacy, professional development, teachers’ learning, adolescent literacy] As a ninth-grade English teacher in Charleston, I (first author) remember a particularly exhausting Tuesday: My voice had become rattled and harsh as I struggled to teach students to make inferences based on literary texts. I sounded something like this: “When we read, it’s ok if everything isn’t written down in actual words. You think about what is happening even though it doesn’t explicitly say it. You make assumptions about how the characters are feeling and why they might be doing what they’re doing. You know, like reading between the lines. It’s called making an inference.” At the time, I was also co-coaching the junior varsity volleyball team. After school, I tossed my gym bag on the bench and rubbed my tired temples. My co-coach—a science teacher—flopped down next to me: “They’re killing me,” she said. “When they read, they make up answers that aren’t in the text. They’re like, ‘I’m reading between the lines.’”At this, my ears perked up—my science teacher friend and I taught the same ninth-grade students, which meant that my students were hearing me; they were heeding my advice. My joy, however, was quickly stoppered. She shook her head as she told her story, “I keep telling them to stop doing that!” It was my first experience with the idea of disciplinary literacy, and, although I did not realize it at the time, it showed me the ways that reading in science and reading in English language arts can be very different. I wish I could say my colleague and I had a long and profound conversation after and that our instruction

was forever changed by our insights, but the whistle blew on that particular conversation. Instead, nearly 15 years later, the authors of this paper and I formed an organization, called Literacy in the Disciplines 6-12 (literacy6-12.org), focused on the very issues this vignette brings up: supporting literacy at the secondary level. Early this year, we presented on content area and disciplinary literacy at several conferences around the state. We found rooms packed with educators holding positions across the spectrum: English teachers and literacy coaches, yes, but also social studies teachers, assistant principals, principals, and math coaches. Math coaches! We have been fortunate, in these venues, to speak with many dedicated and accomplished professionals and to gain a broader view of what it means to support literacy across the content areas. We found, in our discussions, that much was known about content area literacy. Yet a newer set of findings in the literature on secondary literacy, called disciplinary literacy, was less familiar. Several attendees had heard of it, but most pointed out that they were not sure how disciplinary literacy differs from content area literacy or why that distinction is important for middle grade and high school students. To exemplify that difference, we present a series of activities designed to help preservice and in-service teachers, as well as instructional coaches and administrators, differentiate between content-area and disciplinary literacy. This series of activities is grounded in research on teachers’ professional learning, coming out of the learning sciences and elsewhere, which highlights teachers must experience the work they expect of their students at a level suitable to their own learning (e.g., Borko, 2004; Lieberman &Wood, 2004). These activities support educators to become metacognitive about their own meaning-making strategies so they might consider how the discipline in which we read, write, speak, listen, and think influences the ways we practice literacy. In turn, we can open up discussions about both content-area and disciplinary literacy as well as the instructional implications of these differing approaches. We end with a few tips on how such an activity might be adapted for use in coursework in teacher education, as well as in school-based professional development settings. Content Area Literacy By some accounts, content-area literacy has existed, as an idea, for over a century (Mraz, Rickelman &Vacca, 2009). Content-area literacy began from the hope that, if educators across the content areas worked to better support students’reading comprehension, then students would—presumably—develop better reading comprehension skills, which would allow them to performbetter

Reading Matters Displinary Literacy Matters

Literacy Matters | Volume 21 • Winter 2021 | 77 |

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