Thought Two

What did Disciplinary Literacy teaching look like in a history and physics class? What might it look like in other school subjects?

In this article, the authors, E. Rainey, B. Maher, D. Copeland, R. Franchi, and E. Moje, offer two key ideas of successful disciplinary literacy teaching by presenting in classroom practices and elaborating on their importance in literacy development. The first of the ideas is described by an example, Mr. Franchi’s history lesson. In his lesson, he breaks down key aspects of disciplinary literacy in teaching practices, describing his thoughts and theories through actualteaching. For example, under the section, “Where’s the Disciplinary Literacy Teaching in Mr. Franchi’s Lesson: Engaging”, Franchi explains how he, “told students historians use[d] shared practices to make meaning with primary sources, …identifying bias[es], and he indicated that these literary practices would be important for students to routinely use…to pursue historical questions.” (Rainey, Maher, Copeland, Franchi, and Moji, 2018) Through this example, Franchi highlights how merely mentioning to students how historians themselves utilized a myriad of literacy communities, they too can grasp the use of many literacies throughout many content areas. Yet, this practice made me beg the question, is identifying how others explored literacy communities, rather than students themselves engaging in how to explore literacies, effective alone as a teaching method? In Franchi’s defense, before and after this example there are a plentiful number of other examples of practice, yet as a hopeful, future teacher reading many articles looking for teaching practices from each, would this practice alone be effective in incorporating disciplinary literacy in my classroom?

Along with sharing examples of disciplinary literacy teaching in history lessons, the authors’ second idea is shown through successfully incorporating literacy into a physics classroom. Both examples highlight teachers supporting student development of disciplinary literacies and concepts in secondary classrooms. When diving into “Examining Words and Language”, Franchi describes a, “key moment…in his attention to the meaning and purpose of scientific observation.” (Rainey, Maher, Copeland, Franchi, and Moji, 2018) Franchi continues to explain the difference between an observation and an explanation, stating how the difference is important in, “engineering [students’] abilities to conduct meaningful data collection and analysis” (Rainey, Maher, Copeland, Franchi, and Moji, 2018). I believe, in this example, Franchi is trying to exemplify the colliding of two literacies. He does so by focusing on “observation”, more of a scientific literacy, and explanation, more of a language literacy. It is very interesting to see in this lesson how incorporating literacies into teaching practices can be as simple as finding two examples of literacies in the methodology of the content area and focus on it. I was especially curious in Franchi’s use of observation and explanation due to their simple, yet large importance in interpreting the sciences.

Reading this article lead me to begin thinking about literacy communities throughout content areas. In particular, hoping to be a language arts teacher someday, I was curious on the incorporation of literacies other than those surrounding language. Pulling from Franchi’s physics example, I pondered the importance of observation in literacy. When could observation be incorporated into a literature lesson and be interesting, engaging, and thought provoking? Then it hit me, students in this day and age are very in tune with technologies, and, therefore, social medias. I began thinking it would be interesting to engage students in observing one of their idols through a social media and news platform for a period of time. Through their personal observations on their devices, apps, and even newspapers and magazines, students are to illustrate a narrative for their idol’s life. This can be a creative writing experience that not only incorporates language and observation, yet tie in collection of data, organization, and use of technology.