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Self as Part of Family and Community

My mom named me after Laura Ingalls Wilder from book Little House on the Prairie. I vividly remember  reading these books with my family before bedtime.

In my family, education was highly valued. I am following in the footsteps of 4 generations of educators- my great grandma was a high school art teacher, my grandfather was a professor of psychology, my grandma was a 4th grade teacher, my mom is a school psychologist, and my dad (after retiring from the corporate world) is a professor in finance.

My family has always made it a priority to attend all school events like plays and sporting events. I will continue this with my own family.

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Self as Part of Family and Community

Growing up, my family valued education and tried to involve my brother and I in as many learning experiences in the community as possible.

My favorite learning experience was attending museums locally or when we traveled.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is one of my favorite art museums. Because I had studied art history extensively in school, I was able to walk my family through the museum and teach them about the artists.

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Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, home of the Dutch masters

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The museum of the Netherlands, in Amsterdam. 800 years of Dutch history, with the great Dutch masters as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh.

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Self as a Literate Person

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Self as a Literate Person

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Self as a Disciplinary Expert and Disciplinary Teacher

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Self as a Disciplinary Expert and Disciplinary Teacher: continuing education and areas of improvement

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My definition of disciplinary literacy:

Reading and writing to learn a specific subject.

According to McConachie and Petrosky (2010), disciplinary literacy refers to “the use of reading, reasoning, investigating, speaking, and writing required to learn and form complex content knowledge appropriate to a particular discipline” (p. 16).

Depending on the discipline, truth and knowledge are communicated in different ways through a variety of texts. Promotes deeper learning in the specific field.

Timothy Shanahan's blog (from our module 2 journal) was especially helpful in understanding disciplinary literacy.

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A slew of letters seeking ideas on disciplinary literacy.

Teacher 1: The Common Core highlights that every teacher is a reading and writing teacher in their discipline. I think this idea is important in combination with the best practices for content area learning. My main interest in this is based on helping students who struggle to learn to read in early grade levels, and, as a result, can quickly get behind when "reading to learn" in the secondary grades.

Teacher 2: What is the place of disciplinary literacy in elementary school? I am also aware of the work of Nell Duke and the importance of informational text with young children as well as the significance of teaching academic vocabulary and scaffolding its use by the children.

Teacher 3: I very much like your explanation of Content Literacy vs. Disciplinary Literacy. With this in mind, how would you best support kindergarten-first grade  teachers in the area of Disciplinary Literacy? Non-fiction informational texts, read alouds, inquiries, academic vocabulary, learning to read charts, photos etc. ...The ways to scaffold Disciplinary Literacy are much more clear to me as the children move up the grades.

Teacher 4: What would you say are some current best practices for secondary content area literacy?

Shanahan responds:

One hears the term disciplinary literacy a lot these days. That’s because the Common Core standards (CCSS) address the teaching of disciplinary literacy (as do non-CCSS states like Texas and Indiana).

Of course, the term is often misused. Disciplinary literacy is based upon the idea that literacy and text are specialized, and even unique, across the disciplines. Historians engage in very different approaches to reading than mathematicians do, for instance. Similarly, even those who know little about math or literature can easily distinguish as science text from a literary one.

Fundamentally, because each field of study has its own purposes, its own kinds of evidence, and its own style of critique, each will produce different texts, and reading those different kinds of texts are going to require some different reading strategies. Scientists spend a lot of time comparing data presentation devices with each other and with prose, while literary types strive to make sense of theme, characterization, and style.

The idea of teaching disciplinary literacy is quite different from the long promoted content area literacy teaching. The latter has often championed the disciplinary literacy notion, but the result has been an emphasis on general comprehension skills and study skills, rather than apprenticing young readers into reading like disciplinary experts. K-W-L, three-level guides, Frayer model, 4-squares, etc. are all great teaching tools—they can enhance kids learning from text, but you are unlikely to find chemists or historians who use those approaches in their work. Thus, content area reading aims to build better students, while disciplinary literacy tries to get them to grasp the ways literacy is used to create, disseminate, and critique information in the various disciplines.

This can get pretty confusing. Educators have a tendency to latch onto new terms without developing much of an understanding of them. These days many teachers think disciplinary literacy is just the cool new term for content area reading. Even some “scholars” are playing this game; grabbing onto family resemblances and seeing identical twins.

For example, Cyndie Shanahan and I studied chemists and learned the key information that they looked for when reading chemistry text and some of the techniques they used for making sense of that information. They even provided us with cogent explanations of why their approaches were beneficial, given the purposes of their inquiry and the nature of their texts.

We turned that into a method that chemistry students could use to summarize information in a chemistry-centric way. Some “scholars” decided such charting made disciplinary literacy the same as content area reading (since it often recommends charts, too), ignoring that the categories of disciplinary-specific information were the essential element, and not the piece of paper on which the kids were recording the information (Dunkerly-Bean & Bean, 2017).

Not surprisingly, since disciplinary literacy is a relatively new thing for schools, there is a flood of questions about it. And, because the research is lagging classroom demand, there is only a trickle of research-based answers to provide. Much of what O will write here will be based on my own personal experiences (teaching and co-teaching middle school and high school classes in various disciplines).

So what are the big issues in implementing disciplinary literacy?

First, reading has to be a big part of students’ disciplinary classes. I can’t think of anything more fundamental. If there are not real reasons to read in these classrooms, then there is no reason to teach disciplinary literacy or for kids to try to learn it. I do not believe that teachers of biology, algebra, American History, British Literature, economics, or any other subject in the curriculum should be deterred from teaching their subject matter. But part of that teaching should come through text.

What too many teachers do is to seek ways to avoid text. A biology textbook is hard to read, 15-year-olds struggle with it, so teachers present the pertinent information some other way: Powerpoint lectures, dumbed-down study sheets, etc. Those teachers often tell me that students have the option of reading—though why they would, given that all the test answers are provided fully digested, I can’t imagine.

Even math classes should include reading. I don’t mean story problems, though they have their place. I mean that kids should be reading theorems, problem explanations, formulas, proofs, and whatever mathematical information is appropriate. “But my students aren’t good readers?” I get it… and, yet, it is hard to see how avoiding math reading could possibly improve that situation.

In the elementary grades, making sure that kids are reading about geography, economics, history, culture, biography, environmental science, life science, physical science, music, art, and current events is really important. Building kids’ stores of knowledge in those areas and giving them practice dealing with that kind of language and content is imperative. Stories are great, but a narrow diet of stories alone can make you sick.

Second, if students are to read, there needs to be text… disciplinary appropriate text. That means in a history class it is essential students be given opportunities to pore over conflicting evidence and alternative points of view. That doesn’t mean that history textbooks have no place, only that students need chances to evaluate primary and secondary texts, too.

Science reading is less about alternative perspectives and more about accurate information carefully grounded in the observations and experiments that identified it. Accordingly, science information tends to be expressed in a multiplicity of forms (e.g., prose, tables, charts, formulae, photos), often within the same account—in part this is done because of the inadequacy of language to precisely summarize findings.

Students need opportunities to work with these alternative forms and to see more than science textbooks (not for alternative information, but to see how scientists report their findings). I taught a group of high-schoolers to read Watson & Crick’s landmark report of their discovery of the structure of DNA. Man it was tough slogging—for them and for me, but we got there, and the kids were enthusiastic about results (they asked their real teacher if they could do more of that).

A counter-example. Last year, I was co-teaching some math classes. The math textbook had been written purposely to place as little reading demand on students as possible. The math book was largely a collection of math problems, without explanation (the teachers capably provided that). That book not only failed to provide kids with opportunities to read math, but the parents hated it because if their children didn’t understand the math, they couldn’t help them to figure it out.

Elementary textbooks and tradebooks often report content information, but they rarely do so from a disciplinary perspective. Historical accounts tend to tell stories rather than revealing controversies, disagreements, or the use of evidence. Science accounts often provide terrific explanations of scientific phenomena, but without much revelation of how this information came into being. And, how often are younger children exposed to literary criticism as opposed to literature.

My point isn’t necessarily that such texts should be included in the elementary curriculum, but if they aren’t then it doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to engage them in disciplinary approaches. Those only make sense when one is reading works that have a definite disciplinary cast or when one is engaged in disciplinary inquiry that includes reading. Until such texts become available—and that could be earlier, but often isn’t until middle school—satisfy yourself with exposing students to lots of informational texts and the knowledge they represent.

Third, disciplinary classes should have a deep dedication to imparting the content of the subjects to students, including information about the nature of inquiry in those fields. What does it mean to work as a historian, scientist, geographer, mathematician, or literary critic? What do they read and why? How do they report their results? What constitutes evidence in their field of study? What does criticism look like?

Some curriculum experts believe that means students have to be engaged in inquiry themselves in the various fields. I like that idea, and it often makes sense. Labs are common in high school sciences, though the lab reporting too often seems distant from how scientists report their findings. In history classes, it has become much more common to see students reading text sets that expose them to conflicting accounts (e.g., History Scene Investigations), so kids can weigh in on contested issues in history.

But inquiry is not without problems (I’ve yet to see a text set that shows students how historians take into account the economic or geographic antecedents of historical events).

Inquiry can be cumbersome and time consuming; it always requires a wise balance of content coverage and the appreciations to be derived from hands-on investigation. And, there are disciplines that simply aren’t amenable to inquiry—math is particularly knotty in this regard (making me wonder if math isn’t different than the other disciplines in that having students acting like nascent mathematicians might not have the same payoffs as trying to read like scientists or literary critics).

In the elementary school, it makes great sense to emphasize learning as well, and there will be times when inquiry is the way to go. (There might be wonderful benefits for writing reports of various types, but such reports tend not to be disciplinary by nature—a report on photosynthesis written by a fourth-grader is going to be more about finding facts in various sources than about reporting scientific information in the way a scientist would).

However, again, that doesn’t mean there is no place for such work in an elementary classroom. Engaging students in trying to solve various kinds of quantitative problems and writing about these explorations makes a lot of sense. Having kids observing some natural phenomenon or conducting an experiment and reading about the phenomenon understudy to combine this information coherently could be very powerful.

The point is that content and inquiry are the point—and that disciplinary literacy should emanate from the demands of that content and inquiry. There will definitely be more opportunities at some levels than at others.

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Disciplinary Literacy: The Basics | Shanahan on Literacy

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Disciplinary literacy is based upon the idea that literacy and text are specialized, and even unique, across the disciplines. Historians engage in very different approaches to reading than mathematicians do, for instance. This blog entry explores the differences between disciplinary literacy and con…

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Future Teaching , Literacy Practice, and Equity

Here is a snippet of note taking in my sketchbook from Module 3 - I was inspired by social justice and disciplinary literacy! (You may have to click on the photo to enlarge to fully read the writing).

It is very important to promote an inquiry stance in my classroom.

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Not only is it important to incorporate a rich variety of texts in the art classroom to support content knowledge, it is also important that students know how to write to support their visual ideas authentically.

I thought this linked article /literacy was a nice bridge between writing and art. Literacy practices, like writing, are to be taken seriously in all disciplines.

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By Peg Grafwallner
As the school support teacher/reading specialist at a large urban high school, I create, develop, implement, and assess lessons with teachers of all content areas. I consider myself extremely lucky because every day brings a new learning experience and a new partnership.

Recently, I had the good fortune to collaborate with our art teacher, Mr. Chad, who asked me to read approximately 50 papers on the topic "Know Thyself." This was a junior art assignment in which students were to explain an event in their life that caused a discovery, a turning point, or an opportunity. One might consider Chad's class an anomaly among art classes in that he expects his students to write almost as much as expects them to create art. Chad expects his students to connect to the literacy of art.

As I was reading the papers, however, I was surprised at the poor quality of the writing. These are academically strong students with good writing skills. What happened, I wondered? Several papers read like an awkward stream-of-consciousness teenage ballad, suffering from an absence of cohesiveness. Many students' papers lacked complete thought and instead assumed the reader would know exactly what they were trying to say. Some papers were even missing the basics of proper grammar, punctuation, sentence structure. A few used ambiguous words like stuff, junk, and things as suitable vocabulary while incorporating a series of run-on sentences so long-winded that I ran out of breath.

Because this was an art class and not an English or humanities class, was the writing portion of the assignment not taken as seriously? Did students assume Mr. Chad wouldn't be "looking" for the writing basics, so they decided to forego them? Did students compartmentalize their learning and lack the transfer skills necessary to make the writing connections among classes?

After showing Chad the papers, we discussed our next step. We didn't want to simply return the papers and require revisions; rather, we decided to try to understand why the errors occurred. Giving the usual lecture expressing disappointment and offering another due date was not the answer in this case. We decided to survey students and ask them to help us understand the breakdown in their writing skills.

For the survey (see Figure 1), I read each question and gave students time to respond. Because we were inherently interested in their responses, we wanted to show them the value of the survey by giving them time to think and process.

Chad and I were surprised by the honesty of the students' responses. They told us how difficult it was to do homework at night and that when they did have the time, sometimes their content classes came first. They explained exactly what they needed from us and how we could help them get there. They also offered a sort of contrition, humbled that someone would actually take the time to understand how to help. See Figure 2 for sample responses to each question.

We read each response carefully. While we used only 8 sample responses out of approximately 50, we are confident that these 8 responses are representative of the entire class. We separated the responses into three categories of responsibility (see Figure 3).

We believe these simple steps will assist students in becoming better writers. One might argue that students expect this process in their English and humanities courses, but, because this process was bypassed in this art class, students did not seem to take the assignment as seriously as they would have in a "content" class. Therefore, by reviewing the writing process with students in art class, they will realize the value of writing and the expectations associated with writing-in all classes.

In closing, prior to assigning this paper next time, we will create a rubric, have student exemplars ready, and review writing guidelines. We will allow for more time prior to the paper submission to give students the opportunity to revise, self-review, and peer review. Chad and I are looking forward to giving this assignment again, and, like our students, we're grateful for a chance to self-reflect and get it right.

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Peg Grafwallner is an instructional coach and reading specialist at a large urban high school where she assists teachers in developing literacy opportunities to motivate, engage, and advance student learning. She is also a blogger, author, and national presenter.

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The Literacy of the Visual Arts - ASCD Inservice

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By Peg Grafwallner As the school support teacher/reading specialist at a large urban high school, I create, develop, implement, and assess lessons with teachers of all content areas. I consider myself extremely lucky because every day brings a new learning experience and a new partnership.

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National Art Education Association
https://www.arteducators.org/