Disciplinary literacies are the reading and writing practices that are valued in a community of practice. They can be thought of as “rules for use,” or the standards that guide students’ participation in the practices of a discipline. These rules are the conventions of a discipline that guide thinking, reading, writing, and talking practices (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). When we teach disciplinary literacies, we teach students to read, write, think and talk like members of a discipline. In this post, we discuss how text sets can help us provide our students with a broad perspective and the required background knowledge in a domain and access to texts written for disciplinary insiders that help students begin to move toward independent disciplinary reading.
Big Question: How can our students learn to cultivate these reading skills if the work is done for them by considerate texts?
Disciplines have different ways of using language as part of their work. These differences in language use are called disciplinary literacies or disciplinary discourses. For example, knowing how to read a table and integrate the data presented there with a narrative is essential for scientific reading comprehension. On the other hand, knowing how to read a table is not helpful to literary critics but being sensitive to implicit connotations of the language used in short stories is essential. Our students benefit when we are explicit about the literacy skills required to succeed in our discipline. And for our students to understand how to read like a scientist, they need to have access to texts with tables and data that allow them to practice reading like an expert. Using small excerpts of disciplinary expert text can help enliven disciplinary thinking in your classroom and improve the text sets you may be currently using. (Lupo, Strong, Lewis, Wapole & McKenna, 2018)
The challenge is that most texts that allow students to use disciplinary-specific reading skills are also challenging. Therefore, many publishers create resources to help make informational texts, primary sources, and other complex texts more accessible. For instance, in a math classroom, we may be reading an online resource that provides a video narrative in which the table provided in the text is interpreted for students, providing very few opportunities for students to engage as mathematicians (Weinberg, Wiesner, & Fulmer, 2022). Or we might be reading a version of the poem that uses font formats and callouts to draw attention to poetic language, offering little chance practice the disciplinary reading habits which literary scholars use to make meaning. These texts position students not as disciplinary insiders but instead as perpetual novices for whom significant scaffolds are provided.
This raises a central question: How can our students learn to cultivate these reading skills if the work is done for them by considerate texts? And how can we give access to expert texts without frustrating and discouraging students still developing as readers? This post introduces the concept of disciplinary expert texts and disciplinary pedagogical texts (Galloway, Lawrence, and Moje 2013). We describe why both are important and can help students gain essential reading skills when they are used in our text sets.
To be clear, it is not only school texts that endeavor to be considerate of their readers. Texts exist on a continuum from more disciplinary to less. Some texts are written for a general audience or to introduce a topic. They do not make assumptions about the readers’ background knowledge or position the reader as a disciplinary insider. These texts include popular science articles appearing in newspapers containing supportive infographics, youtube videos that broker disciplinary ideas, and printed resources like TIME magazine for kids. Other texts, such as those written in peer-reviewed journals, books written for a disciplinary audience, or primary source texts, are written by and for experts. These texts assume the reader has expert knowledge and is comfortable using specialized reading skills. Even strong readers may find these texts extraordinarily challenging and not a great way to learn about a new topic.
Thus there is always tension between how expert a text is and how considerate it is for a novice. Using texts written for audiences of disciplinary experts is not without challenge. However, we have come to see how it is possible when close reading is scaffolded by thoughtful lesson plans and clear essential questions. We now believe that both kinds of texts are important and should be considered in every secondary text set.