I’m going to try to talk about the value and purpose of teaching disciplinary literacies (broadly construed) in middle and high school using an article by Tim and Cynthia Shanahan.  I hope to have something to say beyond a mere summary, and I hope that I don’t sound too high-falutin’ to be useful.

(I should also add that I have a pile of thoughts to explain about that word by itself – “literacies” – that should be the subject of a separate post.  More later, I promise.)

In short, the Shanahans found that “general purpose” literacy strategies – like KWL charts, for example – are not as useful or widely used by high school content-area teachers.  When focused on strategies more aligned with the specific reading and writing practices used within a discipline, content area teachers both used the literacy strategies and reported an improvement in student understandings.

More interesting to me were the specific literacy strategies used within each of the three disciplines that were studied.  Math teachers, according to the Shanahans, reported that close reading was more important within their discipline than some other strategies.  Chemistry teachers – and chemists – tend to read for the experimental design and conditions that created specific conclusions or results.  History teachers read to see the connections between sources and conclusions, and they – more than mathematicians and chemists – are more concerned with the credibility of a source, as opposed to the conditions of an experiment or the exact terms of a proof or theorem.

As far as strategies used for these disciplinary literacy practices, math teachers reported liking a three-column note-taking structure, where students write a “big idea” in the first column, an explanation of that big idea in the second column, and an example, graph, diagram, or illustration in the final column.  (Or perhaps four columns could be used.)

History teachers liked the “history events chart,” where students summarize events in a series, and then determine the relationship between the first and second event, or events in a series: “Students are asked to think about the most likely connections and to write these on the chart.  The historians were approving of this task because it mirrored the kind of thinking that historians do” (55-6).

Chemistry teachers used a “structured summarization” chart, which appears to use several different sections or boxes, that “required students to summarize substances, properties, processes, and interactions,” and later included atomic expression (54).

I think the point of this conversation is to help content area teachers realize that a discipline already includes specific literacy practices that also need to be taught as part of the discipline.  Chemistry texts – though perhaps not always chemistry textbooks – participate in a specific kind of discourse, and students need to be able to understand and participate in that discourse in order to fully learn chemistry (to be part of the discourse community, if we want to bust out some more technical terms).

Perhaps my biggest criticism of this article is the narrow focus on print literacy, despite clear evidence from the various disciplines discussed that these fields depend on familiarity with other specific academic practices that are not text-based.  Chemistry, for example, depends on visual and conceptual understanding beyond words on a page – something we might call “experimental literacy” or “laboratory literacy.”  Even history, which might seem to be the most text-based of the three disciplines investigated, depends on an understanding of events and human relations and how these events are recorded, deliberately, purposefully, and often unevenly, by specific human actors.

In other words, it could be argued that the Shanahans, as self-described “literacy experts,” have a tendency to elevate print-based text above other media, and they might focus too much on the transmission and negotiation of disciplinary understandings through print.

I don’t mean to say that print isn’t important, or that it does not participate in disciplinary knowledge-formation.  However, I think that we content-area teachers are concerned with more than the conventions of science reading and writing.

Perhaps this is where an apprenticeship model helps – our fledgling scientists and mathematicians need to learn more than just writing and reading like professionals, they also need to be able to “do” the totality of math or science.

Whatever that means.