Disciplinary Literacy!

Disciplinary literacy, and how it can be applied with adolescence, is especially interesting to me as someone who has studied multiple disciplines.  It is relevant to how we teach within our own discipline, what our expectations are of our fellow educators, and how we work on cross disciplinary projects (such as my own).  For now, however, I want to focus on what disciplinary literacy is and why implementing it at the secondary school level could be valuable. 

Disciplinary literacy, as applied in the school setting, is the belief and application that literacy is anchored in the discipline in which it is practiced.  This means that there should be a focus on developing more specialized literacy skills.  This is opposed to the idea of content area literacy (which is quite common at the secondary school level), which assumes that reading and writing is generally the same across the content areas and therefore doesn’t need to be taught in any sort of specialized ways (Fang, 628).

As a preservice English Language Arts teacher, both approaches have very practical effects on how I teach and how I interact with my colleagues.  It is a common perception that ELA teachers are primarily responsible for all reading and writing instruction and that all “writing is writing is writing” and all “reading is reading is reading” (Smagorinsky, 141).  What this means is that teachers who believe this also believe that they also believe that building these skills belongs in the ELA classroom and only the ELA classroom.  However, Smagorinsky argues that this is not the case.  There are basic characteristics that carry over, such as building cohesive sentences and paragraphs, but this is not everything.  What writers need to be truly affective is what is called “communicative competence,” and this is what varies across the disciplines.  Communicative competence is defined as the ability to adjust ones speech and writing to fit the situation, and different disciplines require language to be used differently (Smagorinsky, 143).  Meaning, the way you express yourself and seek information in an English classroom is different than the way you would do so in a science, math, or history classroom.   As a former English and History student, my response to this was “well, of course!”  However, the question from here becomes whether or not it is affective to introduce these strategies at the novice level (secondary school) or if it should wait until they are seeking expertise in a field (higher education).    

The different literacy needs of the disciplines is a phenomenon on which sociocultural scholars agree as well, that literacy is incredibly complex and we use different tools based on the need of the situation.  This all being said, if disciplinary literacy is to be introduced at the middle or high school level it does require careful scaffolding on the part of the teacher.  Middle and high school students are not specialized scholars in these areas, so creating opportunities for them to hone skills and better learn what these literacies look like is crucial to greater understanding (Rainey, 54-55).  This is what can make enacting this model challenging.  It is difficult to introduce new practices, especially in secondary schools, because students have begun to develop expectations and beliefs about what literacy looks like, especially if they feel that subject area literacy is working for them.  For this reason, as well as many teachers own skepticism, many teachers forego enacting it at all and favor sticking to the status quo (Moje, 98).   The changes that would need to take place in order for disciplinary literacy to function most effectively involves a change in the structure of the school, not just a single classroom; this includes students, teachers, and administrators.  This allows teachers to better support students, if administrators are supporting them in this dynamic (Moje, 105).  This is where teachers expectations of one another come in, and this can already be a muddled area without introducing new literacy practices.  Returning to Smagorinsky, there is already a discrepancy between teachers as to just who is responsible for literacy of students.  An added flexibility between the disciplines on this issue, as well as greater support between teachers, would also allow for more collaboration.  In a cross disciplinary project there are more opportunities for collaboration between teachers and for them to show the literacies of the disciplines juxtaposed to one another.

Lastly, I want to return to what disciplinary literacy looks like in the ELA classroom.  This would be the most pertinent to my own interests.  ELA is often seen is the only place in which literacy education takes place.  Literary literacy, for instance, involves a series of skills that are most commonly used.  These include finding and seeking patterns within texts and between texts; identifying strangeness, surprise, and confusion; considering the history behind the text and other contexts; and making original observations about the text (Rainey, 62-65).  There are a variety of ways teachers can go about introducing these, but they are all incredibly relevant to teaching literary texts. 

This is also only scratching the surface of the requirements of literary literacy and the argument for disciplinary literacy, of course, and look forward to continuing to learn about it and implement what I learn.