The challenges of disciplinary literacy

As I was reading through the articles "Effective Literacy Instruction" and "Who Are Adolescents Today?" I was reminded of how important it is to relate the content we teach students to their experiences, cultures, backgrounds, and interests. The idea is that the students will become more engaged in the lessons, find more meaning in them, and become more motivated in their classes. I know this has been a common theme in many of our classes, but it doesn't hurt to emphasize it again. I think this is one of the most important aspects of teaching.

The article "Doing and Teaching Disciplinary Literacy" provides us with a strategy (disciplinary literacy) to help engage and give meaning to the content student's are learning. According to the author Elizabeth Birr Moje, "Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialized literacy practices of a given domain" (256).

At the beginning of the article I had a good feeling about the effectiveness of implementing disciplinary literacy in the classroom. I saw how it can give meaning to certain disciplines that students have a tendency to find unimportant and useless in their everyday lives.

As I continued to read, I started thinking about the realistic possibility of implementing this type of framework into a school curriculum. On pages 271-272 Moje explains the different resources teachers need in order to effectively use disciplinary literacy in the classroom. Among other things, her plan calls for "standards to be finely tuned to reflect the expected shifts in development and learning of young people over time" (272), schools to "coordinate student learning and development across the grades" (272), and teachers to talk and plan across grade levels and disciplines.

I would be interested to hear from you all how realistic you think it is to implement disciplinary literacy into a school in the way Moje describes.

In my opinion, the standards have not been developed sufficiently enough to support this framework Since finely tuning the standards is the basis for this framework according to Moje, how can it work if the standards don't support it? I think there are ways around the standards and teachers can work with them to create a curriculum based on disciplinary literacy, but if it is so reliant on outside factors (in Moje's view), doing it will be very difficult. I think that it's possible to implement aspects of disciplinary literacy in a classroom without following Moje's exact guidelines. However, because of the challenges that come with using this type of framework, I can see how teachers would be hesitant to use it.

A few questions I thought of in response to this article are,,,

What are some ways to implement disciplinary literacy in classrooms right now?

Have you seen aspects of disciplinary literacy in any of your fieldwork?

What steps do you think need to be made so that this type of education is more prevalent and achievable school-wide, not just in a particular classrooms?

In the reading, Effective Literacy Instruction for Adolescents, there was a point that was made which stood out to me. "People think one-size instruction fits all" (pg 191). This is an approach to teaching that needs to be changed. Every child learns and adapts to things differently. Not every child is the same and not every child will learn certain things the same way. For example, some students are visual learners while some students can learn by just listening. 

The reading Who Are Adolescents Today? can be related to what I am currently learning in my EPSY 446 class. What this reading describes and tells us is exactly what I read for that class. That a lot of times adolescents act the way they act is due to different factors including friends, family, and peers. It was interesting to read two different articles that relate to the same subject and topic. 

"Indeed, disciplinary literacy teaching can be considered a form of socially just teaching, one that not only gives youth access to these highly specialized discourse communities but that may actually produce social justice by supporting the development of new kinds of knowledge as people from a range of backgrounds and experiences gain access to these specialized domains. Thus, disciplinary literacy teaching is not about producing new members of the disciplines (although it surely will produce some new members, and perhaps some from a range of diverse backgrounds) but about providing all students with the opportunity to understand how disciplines work and to raise questions about the trustworthiness of disciplinary knowledge (Moje, 2007, 2008, 2010)." What I liked about this is that it went against my thinking of disciplinary literacy. I thought disciplinary literacy is having a strict way of teaching or doing something but in reality it provides students with a lot of opportunities and information. 

I found the article, “Who Are Adolescents Today” to be very interesting. It concentrates on teacher and student relationships. It points out the problem of engagement that adolescents are experiencing nowadays with school, and how that can be due to teacher and student relationships.  The authors suggest that students want, “affirmation, acceptance, and support from the adults who work with the in the classroom setting”. It also mentions the importance of maintaining classroom dialogue when teaching literacy; “youth report that they are most motivated when a passionate teacher asks questions about issues and listens deeply to students understandings on paper and through conversation...other youth explain that not only do they want more dialogue, but they yearn for classroom conversation that explores questions of central purpose and meaning”.

I remember one classroom experience in particular where classroom dialogue was a key to staying motivated and on task. My past ninth grade English teacher was one who gave school mandatory readings, but always ensured to have classroom discussions about the readings, and relate them to history or current events. I remember she used to bring up her background and incorporate that with literary novels or ideas. Since, the classroom discussions related to many of us in the classroom, it was easy for us to share out our opinions or even just stay focused on the discussion. Further, the teacher was very supportive to student needs, and made sure to let her students know that they are free to approach her with any questions and concerns. The positive classroom experience I have had in the past ensures me that a supportive and inclusive teacher is necessary for good instruction, especially for literacy (when certain subjects my bore students and push them away from participation).

I have provided a short video link on building positive teacher-student relationships that I found to be useful, but I also want to hear from you.

Feel free to use these questions as a guide, or write about any experiences or thoughts of your own.

• What relationships with teachers made it possible for you to enjoy learning and stay engaged in classroom discussions/activities?
• Can you think of anything can contribute to positive student and teacher relationships in the classroom?
• How would you as a teacher ensure that your students stay engaged?

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkjQsu2hISM

Students Learn From Teachers, and Teachers Learn From Students

The readings this week left me feeling kind of dumbfounded. An ongoing theme throughout all three articles was that we have research showing that kids perform better in any environment when given the chance the have their voice heard, and have a give & take relationship with their teachers.

"...the growing research on 'youth voice' suggests to us that the relationships between teachers and their adolescent students must be dialogical in nature, a cultivation of listening and learning by both adults and teens." (Intrator & Kunzman 30)

On page 33 of this same article, it gives a list of straight statistics that show the positive side-effects of students who feel they have a voice in making classroom decisions. 

If we know that this is the case, why are there still such different teaching styles between students of minorities and low income areas vs. suburban students/ largely white student populations? Is this something that is being involved in teacher evaluations if proven to be so important to students success?
It should be.

I would like to pose the question to you all,
did you feel that you had a say in your classroom/ classroom decisions when you were in adolescent?
How do you feel that affected your performance/ your peers performance in the class?

Kim Fugman - August 30th

Disciplinary Literacy: Literacy practice that is domain specific. This is a great idea, but how do we become masters while teaching students to become masters as well? The Moje article explains a few teaching practices. I decided to focus one part of one of the readings. I hope that is allowed.

The "4E's" are an easy way to include disciplinary literacy into a classroom. Engaging, Eliciting/Engineering, Examining, Evaluating. To me, this seems like a good way to ease a teacher into learning how to include disciplinary literacy into daily practice. Engaging a student, to me, is always important and should be a priority to every teacher. For me personally, it will be very challenging to, not only figure what are the key disciplines are, but to become well-versed in those as well. There are six practices that are shared among disciplines and I found the chart in the article so helpful. It was one of those charts I would keep for my classroom later on down the road. The chart is included way at the bottom because I was not going to try and sit here for an hour while I tried to format it.

My personal favorite of the practices was using different types of media. We live in an age now where being social media savvy and understanding "text lingo" is super important. Also, I think "text lingo" is a terrible way to describe it but had no idea what was a better phrase. But being able to teach students how to take the knowledge they have and being able to communicate that in a variety of ways is pretty much a life skill. I think it is important to also teach when to use and when not to use more informal language. I was a perfect example of this earlier today. I had to text my boss at work that I would have to change my schedule. And while he is very laid back and we have a chill work relationship, he is still my boss. I had to sit there and analyze my text message 12 times and have somebody proofread it for me to make sure I used capital letters and punctuation. I had to make sure I typed "because" instead of "bcuz". This is just one example but I think it is important to be flexible and be able to communicate knowledge in more than one way. Every student learns differently and every student should be taught to share ideas in different ways as well. Maybe it is just me, and while I think that all of the practices are important, this would be my number one practice if I had to sit there and rank them. I am curious to see what other people's most important practice would be.


Here is the chart because I am not good at computers:




hey guys thanks for reading (and why are there not any fun emojis?)