Reading Matters Winter 2019

Designing Purpose and Engagement for Disciplinary Reading in Secondary Schools

By PhillipWilder, Clemson University & Lorraine A. Jacques, Louisiana Tech University

Reading Matters Place Matters

Thirty minutes into investigating the impact of 2015 flooding on South Carolina farmers, Sabra and her 9th grade science peers had no answer, and this was a good thing. Told she had been hired by the South Carolina Farm Bureau to devise a series of recommendations for eligible farmers on how to use relief funds, Sabra’s group debated whether addressing nutrient leaching, water control, or topsoil erosion would most significantly improve future crop yields for farmers in Berkeley county. Students examined soil analysis data from area farms, aerial photographs, recent Farm Bureau reports, and audio- recorded interviews with local farmers. Noticing Sabra and her peers’ uncertainty of how to interpret the soil analysis numbers, Ms. Washington, their science teacher, responded to her observations by asking if she might share her thoughts: “ I noticed your discussion seemed to cease when you were looking at the soil charts. Would it be okay if I shared what I notice when I read the data? When I see this chart, I see the variance in the pH column and wonder if it’s a reflection of nitrate variability. I wonder what connections might exist between the nitrate levels and potential crop yields in these plots of land. I’ll be back soon to see what patterns you notice in this data.” Sabra and her peers were learning not just about pH and nitrate variability and soil analysis, but how to use texts and language within science to participate in disciplinary inquiry. As students navigate texts and discourses throughout a typical middle or secondary school day, the requisite disciplinary literacy skills become increasingly specialized (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008) with content knowledge and language used to represent knowledge entwined with each other (Schleppegrell, Achugar, & Oteíza, 2004). Intentionality of curricular design and responsive pedagogy matters even more when we recognize adolescents navigate multiple secondary disciplines each day with each discipline representing a distinct culture where certain texts are read or written for certain purposes (Moje, 2015, p. 255). These disciplinary cultures hold varying beliefs about what counts as disciplinary knowledge (Manderino, 2012, pp. 121-122), and how texts and discourse should function as tools for disciplinary inquiry and knowledge production (Billman & Pearson, 2013; Moje, 2008). Disciplinary literacy, then, represents student ability to use the valued texts and discourses of a discipline to construct and critique knowledge in the discipline. Moje (2015) argued disciplinary literacy teaching should support how students become metadiscursive , navigating multiple disciplinary contexts, engaging them in using texts and language to construct and critique knowledge.

including science, are influenced by the extent to which inquiry is meaningful, tasks are complex, and scaffolding is appropriate. But, how can teachers support the disciplinary literacies of adolescents when students are often exhausted from navigating numerous distinct disciplinary cultures in a single day? Instead of suggesting all teachers utilize the same literacy instructional strategies, school-wide efforts to support the disciplinary literacies of adolescents will find greater success when teachers from all disciplines employ common instructional design principles. This common framework must reflect a shared view of literacy teaching while respecting how different disciplines utilize varied inquiry, tasks, texts, and talk (McConachie et al., 2006). Teachers can support the disciplinary literacies of adolescents by (1) designing appropriate purpose for disciplinary texts, (2) choosing appropriate disciplinary texts rich in complexity, and (3) providing appropriate modeling of disciplinary thinking for students. Designing Appropriate Purpose for Disciplinary Texts Disciplinary texts have the potential to bore or engage students. Student disengagement with texts can often mask student reading abilities and ways they need to improve as readers. On the other hand, when students are engaged in thinking about and problem solving a disciplinary issue, students can bring increased focus to their reading with disciplinary texts. To students, why are these texts worth the cognitive effort demanded by close reading? Purpose provides the reader with a specific goal for the reading (Knutson, 1997), affecting the strategies used while reading, which information the reader remembers (Narvaez, van den Broek, & Ruiz, 1999), even engaging typically reluctant readers (Smith & Scuilli, 2011). In science, then, the flooding task required Sabra and her peers critically read a variety of texts valued in science, including aerial photographs, soil data, and audio-recorded interviews, to identify a more precise problem which likely affected the flood- damaged land. In order to create purpose and engagement with disciplinary texts, authentic disciplinary inquiry marries the complex, open-ended questions pursued by experts with the issues valued by students and local communities. While the inquiry question could address issues involving many disciplines or an interdisciplinary approach, as most complex issues in the real world do, it should suggest an approach mirroring how a specific discipline’s experts would approach the issue (see Table 1). For example, in the autumn of 2015, mid-state South Carolina experienced devastating floods. Area teachers may elect to use this issue because of its local relevance affecting their students, but the inquiry questions employed by each discipline’s teacher would vary and provide different reasons to use different texts or even the same texts. The history teacher might ask if New Deal construction projects impacted the effects of the 2015 flood, while the math teacher might ask if the FEMA’s flood zone designations

Therefore, Sabra’s disciplinary literacy in every classroom,

| 26 | Reading Matters | Volume 19 • Winter 2019 | scira.org

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