Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change

In the paper

“Finally, as Lee (2007) has eloquently argued, knowledge and skill in the subject areas is essential to supporting young people in becoming active participants in a democratic society.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Lee, 2007

In the paper

“Young people do not need to go to school to learn what they already know; content literacy instruction can help youth gain access to the accepted knowledge of the disciplines, thereby allowing them also to critique and change that knowledge.”

In the paper

“O'Brien et al. (1995) argued that students' beliefs, values, and knowledges support and constrain teachers' practices and the dominant structures of the secondary school.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites O'Brien et al., 1995 source

In the paper

“Disciplinary learning is, from Lee's and Bain's perspective (and that of many others who advocate for a disciplinary stance toward secondary school learning) a form of critical literacy because it builds an understanding of how knowledge is produced in the disciplines, rather than just building knowledge in the disciplines.”

What the sources say

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  cites Lee
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  cites Bain

In the paper

“A significant body of research over the last 20 years has demonstrated that preservice teachers are skeptical about the efficacy of teaching and learning strategies offered by content literacy research, and inservice teachers rarely enact such strategies in their subject area classrooms (Alvermann & Moore, 1991;Holt-Reynolds, 1992;O'Brien & Stewart, 1990;Ratekin, Simpson, Alvermann, & Dishner, 198”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Alvermann & Moore, 1991
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Holt-Reynolds, 1992 source
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites O'Brien & Stewart, 1990 source

In the paper

“Students bring ideas about what counts as learning to their disciplinary classrooms, and teachers make decisions about classroom practices in interaction with students and in the context of the secondary school as an institution (Moje, 1996).”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Moje, 1996 source

In the paper

“These practices and strategies, although important to improving literacy learning, overlook an important question: What does literacy instruction do for learning in the subject areas?”

In the paper

“Thus, it may be that beginning with disciplinary practices in efforts to bring literacy instruction into secondary schools will better position secondary school researchers, teacher educators, and teachers to draw from the new texts and literate practices of adolescent students' lives as well.”

In the paper

“Drawing from their study of engineering students, Stevens and colleagues (in press) suggested that disciplinary learning is a matter of simultaneous intersections of constructing knowledge, identifying with a domain, and navigating different pathways toward goals.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Stevens et al., in press

In the paper

“More to the point, teachers do not operate in a vacuum: The structures of the secondary school, an amazingly stable and enduring institution that has changed little over the course of its existence (Cuban, 1986), constrain and support the ways that teachers and students carry out their day-to-day classroom practices.”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Cuban, 1986

In the paper

“Even more important, knowledge production in the disciplines needs to be understood to be the result of human interaction.”

In the paper

“The time period in which a claim is situated matters tremendously to an historian; thus, temporal context is one dimension-among many other dimensions-a reader of historical texts must know, uncover, or examine as she or he reads (Bain, 2000;Wineburg, 1991).”

What the sources say

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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Bain, 2000
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Wineburg, 1991 source

In the paper

“They demonstrated that these engineering students developed engineering knowledge in multiple sources and practices, and that the knowledge itself contributed to whether and how they identified as engineering students and, ultimately, as engineers.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Stevens et al., in press

In the paper

“The role of knowledge and information as described here has, I believe, often been backgrounded in literacy research and teaching in an attempt to avoid communicating the idea that knowledge should be simply transferred from teacher to learner.”

In the paper

“In other words, knowledge, identities, and critical literacy skill develop iteratively; this development requires scaffolding and mediation by teachers who know the content well and understand the role that language and literate practice play in producing knowledge within it.”

In the paper

“Knowledge production in the disciplines operates according to particular norms for everyday practice, conventions for communicating and representing knowledge and ideas, and ways of interacting, defending ideas, and challenging the deeply held ideas of others in the discipline.”

In the paper

“For others, literate skill is undeveloped, creating a similar challenge but one with a different etiology.”

In the paper

“That is, in the past, secondary literacy has been approached from the standpoint of literacy theory, rather than from the standpoint of the disciplinary learning theory.”

In the paper

“For example, in science, a norm of practice is that researchable problems be carefully defined and systematically and repeatedly studied before claims can be made about phenomena.”

In the paper

“We have not acknowledged that the disciplines themselves are replete with cultural practices and can be considered discourse communities students must navigate.”

In the paper

“Particular forms of evidence-typically empirical or observable forms that derive from experimental study-are required to make claims.”

In the paper

“That is, we might argue that adolescent students learn in the disciplines by simultaneously navigating through various practices and texts of the disciplines, thus supporting the construction of knowledge in practice and identification with the discipline.”

In the paper

“Each of these forms-now readily available through digital venues-can support the construction of knowledge necessary to access the abstract and dense print texts of the disciplines.”

In the paper

“Finally, motivation to take on or engage with the identity as historian, scientist, mathematician, or literary critic/writer may be waning as students enter secondary schools with little evidence that disciplinary knowledge or practice is meaningful for their lives.”

In the paper

“A number of theorists have argued that the subject areas can be viewed as spaces in which knowledge is produced or constructed, rather than as repositories of content knowledge or information (Foucault, 1972;Halliday & Martin, 1993;Hicks, 1995;Lemke, 1990;Luke, 2001).”

What the sources say

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  cites Foucault, 1972
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  cites Halliday & Martin, 1993
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Hicks, 1995 source

In the paper

“To learn deeply in a subject area, then, young people need to have access to the ways that conventions of disciplinary knowledge production and communication can be routinely or more explicitly challenged and reshaped; such knowledge gives young people the power to read critically across various texts and various disciplines.”

In the paper

“In history, by contrast, the norms of practice differ.Historians, like natural scientists, study researchable problems systematically, but the means of obtaining evidence and the forms that provide warrant for claims differ.”

In the paper

“For some students, requisite disciplinary background knowledge is lacking and so reading upper-level texts and textbooks is challenging.”

In the paper

“These constraints, even taken together, however, fail to pinpoint a central problem in secondary school literacy: Without careful attention to what it means to learn in the subject areas and what counts as knowledge in the disciplines that undergird those subjects, educators will continue to struggle to integrate literacy instruction and those areas.”

In the paper

“In particular, the division of secondary school learning into subject areas drawn from the disciplines reifies a belief (and constructs sets of practices) that implies knowledge is inherently different in different disciplines.”

In the paper

“People cannot learn in a deep way within a semiotic domain if they are not willing to commit themselves fully to the learning in terms of time, effort, and active engagement.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Gee, 2007

In the paper

“Just as secondary school teachers do not teach in a vacuum, young people do not learn in one; they encounter many different forms of text and employ many different literate practices throughout a given day.”

In the paper

“Key to preventing the construction of knowledge-in-practice from devolving into the transfer of rote information is providing opportunities for young people to examine how the norms of knowing, doing, and communicating are constructed.”

In the paper

“These studies demonstrate that the youths' knowledge of and identifications with the domain both support their skill in reading and writing and motivate them to persevere even when confronted with a challenging text or writing task.”

What the sources say

• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Alvermann, 2001
• ?Not checked — no full text of the sourcecites Gustavson, 2007 source
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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Moje, 2008

In the paper

“Such a commitment requires that they are willing to see themselves in terms of a new identity, that is, to see themselves as the kind of person who can learn, use, and value the new semiotic domain.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Gee, 2007

In the paper

“All deep learning-that is, active, critical learningis inextricably caught up with identity in a variety of ways....”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Gee, 2007

In the paper

“Finally, we have not thoroughly conceptualized language and literacy practice as an integral aspect of subject area learning, rather than as a set of strategies for engaging with texts.”

In the paper

“This last question reminds me of Orellana and colleagues' (2003) analysis of young Latino/a children co-constructing meaning of complex Englishlanguage documents with their Spanish-speaking parents: The children could access the language codes of English, but could not make meaning of words and concepts; their parents brought sophisticated world knowledge to the decoding process, and thereby the”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Orellana and colleagues' (2003)

In the paper

“Teachers can employ many different forms of representation to construct knowledge of one concept-different genres (e.g., narrative, expository, poetics, music), different symbol systems (e.g., print, graphs, tables), and different semiotic tools (image, sound, and performance).”

In the paper

“In addition, secondary school teachers will face challenges at the classroom level with the question of how to support young people as they construct identities across different disciplines.”

In the paper

“Disciplinary texts, however, can be extremely challenging to the reader with little prior knowledge of the discipline, thus producing the conundrum mentioned previously.”

In the paper

“This fear of reifying knowledge has resulted in a great deal of talk about disciplinary identity development and strategy instruction without attention to how being a certain kind of person (developing a disciplinary identity) and engaging in strategic practice is dependent on knowing some things about the domain in which one is practicing.”

In the paper

“In a typical school day, young people in secondary school are expected to participate in the discourses of the disciplines, to incorporate those discourses with other discourses and identities they experience throughout the day, and to forge, or at least try out, new identities as they take up those discourses (cf.Gee, 2000Gee, /2001;;Luke, 2001).”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Gee, 2000/2001
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  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Luke, 2001

In the paper

“To learn deeply in a subject area, then, young people need to have access to the ways that conventions of disciplinary knowledge production and communication can be routinely or more explicitly challenged and reshaped; such knowledge gives young people the power to read critically across various texts and various disciplines.”

In the paper

“Bain (2000) calls this the generation of an epistemically grounded curriculum and pedagogy, or one in which students come to understand that knowing how knowledge is produced is as important as access to the knowledge itself.”

What the sources say

• ?Not matched

  Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.

  cites Bain (2000)

In the paper

“Subject areas become subcultures of the secondary school, with their own ways of knowing, doing, and believing.”

In the paper

“Without a change in the typical school structures of 50-minute classes, relative isolation of teachers in single classrooms, and confinement of classes within the physical school space, a broad, metadiscursive pedagogy and curriculum will be difficult to develop.”

In the paper

“These constraints do not exist in some sort of hierarchical form (i.e., changes in structures lead to changes in culture or vice versa) and, therefore, each set of constraints needs to be addressed simultaneously as interlocking pieces of the disciplinary/secondary school literacy puzzle.”

In the paper

“The integration of literacy instruction in the secondary schools is a complex change process that will require collaboration, com-”

In the paper

“No one group can act alone.”

In the paper

“These pieces include teacher educators, school administrators, teachers, researchers, local and national policymakers, and the young people themselves.”

In the paper

“The work and commitment required for developing an integrated approach to literacy teaching and learning in the secondary subject areas is enormous, requiring conceptual changes in our definitions, cultural changes in our practices, and structural changes in the enduring institutions of the secondary school and secondary teacher education.”

In the paper

“The issues of the subject area subcultures, limited opportunities for teachers to work across disciplines, and the implacable structure and timing of the typical secondary school day all work to challenge a metadiscursive approach to content literacy, just as they challenge strategy-based approaches.”