Literacy Matters - Vol 21 - Winter 2021

and learnmore in the content areas (Dobbs, Ippolito & Charner- Laird, 2017; Lent &Voigt, 2018). As such, content-area literacy lays out several reading comprehension strategies that can be useful across content areas, which“good readers presumably use fluidly and automatically: making connections, generating questions, visualizing, making inferences, determining importance, synthesizing, andmonitoring or fixing up comprehension”(Dobbs, Ippolito & Charner-Laird, 2017, p. 16). Thus, content area literacy is about supporting students’general reading comprehension strategies first, and thenmoving intomore subject-specific literacy strategies, such as readingmaps in social studies (e.g., McKenna & Robinson, 2014). Research has shown modest support for these strategy-based approaches, but problems have also arisen. As the International Literacy Association (2017) describes, some studies have “indicated that an exclusive focus on common literacy strategies, without a concurrent emphasis on discipline-specific content and practices, does not produce optimal results in students’ learning” (p. 3). Indeed, scholars and practitioners have questioned the extent to which particular literacy strategies can be used across content areas (e.g., Lent, 2016; Moje, 2007). Producing written explanations, for instance, looks very different in a math class than it does in English, so teaching students general strategies for explaining may not support them in understanding the larger purposes for which mathematicians and literary critics build explanations or how to structure an argument appropriately in either one of those disciplines. Consider also the opening vignette, in which an English teacher and a science teacher had very different expectations about what it means to draw inferences during reading. As Dobbs and her colleagues (2017) put it: “Content- area reading instruction alone has not produced widespread academic achievement for adolescents, and some secondary teachers and literacy researchers have wondered whether the limits of this instruction prevent it from fully preparing adolescents to meet college and workplace literacy demands” (p. 16). For these reasons, content-area literacy is frequently understood as a precursor to disciplinary literacy, based on the assumption that students in the middle grades and early high school need, first, a repertoire of content-neutral reading comprehension strategies on which to draw (e.g., Dobbs, Ippolito & Charner-Laird, 2016; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). As texts become more complex and specific to particular disciplines, students are expected to move into the use of disciplinary literacy strategies, which we describe in the following section. Disciplinary Literacy Disciplinary literacy starts from the premise that academic disciplines have particular ways of “creating, synthesizing, and evaluating knowledge” (ILA, 2017; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Thus, they are communities in which members are expected to speak, listen, read, write, view, and act in specific ways (Wenger, 1998). Indeed, research has repeatedly found each discipline is characterized by specific vocabularies, particular structures and conventions for spoken and written language use, and even different criteria for comprehension (ILA, 2017; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008; Snow & Moje, 2010).

Thus, a U.S. History teacher, for example, who teaches from a disciplinary literacy stance would not only teach generic reading strategies to help with general comprehension and meaning- making but would “consider how best to model for her students the ways in which she reads historical texts, as a disciplinary insider trained as a historian” (Dobbs, Ippolito & Charner-Laird, 2017, p. 18). From this standpoint, history students should learn not only a host of content-neutral reading comprehension strategies, but—more importantly—how to read, communicate, and think like historians do (Monte-sano et al., 2017). As is true of research on content-area reading and writing, a number of studies have shown positive outcomes for the use of disciplinary literacy in secondary classrooms. However, according to the ILA (2017), “some scholars have cautioned that this approach alone does not adequately support students who experience difficulties with reading or writing…students also deserve explicit instruction on basic reading and writing processes in each discipline” (p. 5). Importantly, recent work has highlighted the ways students and teachers can draw upon both content-area or disciplinary literacy to best support students’ learning and literacy in particular content areas (Brozo, Moorman, Meyer & Stuart, 2014; Dobbs et al., 2017; ILA, 2017). Yet supporting students to read, write, speak, listen, view, and think like experts in particular disciplines, while also supporting students to use content-neutral literacy strategies, can be complex instructional work. The activities described below use discipline- specific texts to support educators to become metacognitive about their own use of literacy strategies and to understand the ways that even content-area literacy strategies, which are intended to be used across content-areas, may be used in slightly different ways, given differences in disciplinary expectations and practices. We have used these activities in school-based professional development and university-based coursework, and they are an effective way to open up conversations about how content-area and disciplinary literacy strategies can be used in tandem to support secondary students’ literacy and content-area learning. Leading Teachers to Analyze their Own Reading Strategies: A Rationale As we will describe in greater detail, we begin by asking educators to read (or view) short texts from a variety of disciplinary stances. We do so because the design of these activities is rooted in research on teachers’ professional learning. This body of work repeatedly highlights that, if teachers are to engage students in higher-order thinking and literacy practices, they need opportunities to participate as learners in the learning they will expect of their K-12 students (Borko, 2004; Jackson et al., 2018; Whyte et al., 2007). In general, research has suggested teachers need to participate in the work they expect of their students for three reasons: (1) doing so enriches teachers’ thinking about the processes by which experts in an area (teachers themselves) achieve a task (Borko, 2004; Gibbons & Cobb, 2017; Kane, 2016; Lieberman &Wood, 2003; Saclarides & Kane, in submission; Whitney et al., 2008); (2) teachers themselves may lack confidence in particular subject areas or tasks (Kiuhara et al., 2009; Norman & Spencer, 2005); and/or (3) the instructional practices and tasks being suggested by teacher educators are not consistent with the more rote and

Reading Matters Displinary Literacy Matters

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