Exploring an important skillset for ELA students
I think we all have a drawer in our house containing useful bits of stuff that don’t really have a home. My husband refers to this drawer as the “kite string drawer” because where are you supposed to put something like kite string?
In many ways, English Language Arts has become the "kite string" content area. The Common Core Standards outline many—but not all—of ELA teachers’ responsibilities. As an English teacher, I taught students to act out parts of plays, write creatively, speak publically, and develop disciplinary literacy practices (among other things).
While you may be familiar with some of those skills, you may not have heard much about disciplinary literacy. This “buzzy” movement in English Language Arts started picking up steam in the fall of 2022 and has continued to generate interest.
Not only does it represent a paradigm shift in literacy education, but teaching with a disciplinary literacy approach has the potential to help students still struggling to catch up from pandemic-era learning loss.
Let’s explore what I mean by disciplinary literacy, the research-proven benefits of teaching it, and how you can bring this to your classroom.
What is disciplinary literacy?
Disciplinary literacy is about reading, writing, thinking, and communicating like people in a specific academic field or career. It encompasses each discipline's specialized texts, vocabulary, concepts, reasoning processes, sociocultural practices, and modes of inquiry. This can include mathematical proofs, historical analysis of documents, and even medical writing skills for the healthcare industry.
Disciplinary literacy recognizes that the subject being studied affects how people read, write, think, and communicate within that field. For example, a historian must know how to corroborate, source, and contextualize texts they interact with. A scientist must be able to hypothesize, gather evidence, and analyze data. These are all literacy skills, and recognizing their ties to distinct disciplines contextualizes them in important ways for students.
What is the difference between disciplinary literacy and content literacy?
Many often conflate disciplinary literacy with content-area literacy. It's easy to make that mistake because sometimes the content area closely matches the discipline. But mapping content areas onto disciplines is difficult, and content literacy practices often differ from disciplinary literacy ones.
Let’s return to the kite string drawer of ELA, our beloved content area. ELA is tricky because it does not map cleanly onto any discipline. In fact, it can actually map onto multiple disciplines such as literature studies, linguistics, and theater arts.
For example, in a science class, students read like scientists, and in a history class, they read like historians.
But who do students read like in an English class? That's a little tougher to answer.
Recently, disciplinary literacy scholars have focused on literary studies as an important component of ELA. They would answer that English students often read like literarians—those who study literature.
So let's keep things simple for now and talk about disciplinary literacy in ELA as defined as literary studies. Yes, there are more disciplines in the content area of ELA than just literacy studies, but we can save that deep dive for another day.
As an example of what disciplinary literacy is not, let’s take the example of a KWL chart.
Teachers across content areas often use KWL charts, which can be useful in activating students’ prior knowledge. But it's unlikely that a biologist would fill out a KWL chart before reading a scientific journal. A teacher doesn’t use a KWL chart before writing a lesson plan.
I want to make it clear that KWL charts and other generic strategies are not ineffective. They just do not fall under the category of disciplinary literacy practice.
What is an example of disciplinary literacy practices?
Disciplinary literacy practices are unique in how they re-frame generic strategies to serve more targeted goals by content area. The following table provides examples of discipline-specific texts, reading practices, and writing products in ELA, social studies, and STEM.
How do these ELA products compare to what your students currently read and write? You may already be teaching disciplinary literacy practices!
What does disciplinary literacy look like in the classroom?
In the ELA classroom, disciplinary literacy often looks like empowering students to think of themselves as literarians. This can include building background knowledge about texts, reading literary criticism with students, and facilitating discussions about authorial intent.
It can be helpful to pose questions to students that literarians consider while they read. Here’s a list of common questions used in generic literacy instruction and questions that might appear in disciplinary literacy instruction.
What are the benefits of teaching disciplinary literacy?
We should teach disciplinary literacy not because it’s trendy but because of the benefits it affords our students.
One such benefit is that disciplinary literacy may be one of the most targeted ways to give students–especially historically marginalized ones–access to an exclusive space in society: academia.
Historically, academia and society have placed higher value on content-area knowledge than on personal and cultural knowledge. In order to best serve our students, we need to provide students access to that overvalued knowledge as we welcome their personal knowledge into the classroom.
Disciplinary literacy makes visible the overvalued knowledge from professional disciplines and provides scaffolds for students to obtain that knowledge. It makes explicit the ways people within disciplinary communities think, read, and write. This allows students the opportunity to understand those practices so they can better navigate those spaces in society.
Perhaps the most powerful part of disciplinary literacy is that it apprentices students into those academic communities, providing them an opportunity to make change from within. Fields that were previously restricted are now being improved by the very people who were once excluded from them. This is how students can become agents of change.
Additionally, disciplinary literacy helps students build critical thinking. In order to “think like a literarian,” students must engage with complex texts in new and varied ways.
Literarians make connections between a text and society and examine how it resists or replicates systems of power. In a disciplinary literacy ELA lesson, students may analyze a text’s historical and cultural context, as well as its symbolic interpretations. In contrast, students learning generic literacy strategies may only be asked to evaluate a text for its symbolic meaning.
With disciplinary literacy under their belts, students will be better equipped for college and career success–whether or not their career paths lead to academia.
What are the challenges of implementing disciplinary literacy?
Implementing disciplinary literacy in ELA classrooms can be challenging. Moving from generic literacy strategies (like a KWL chart) to discipline-specific ones (like considering how a poem’s form contributes to its theme) can require a significant adjustment for students, parents, and administrators.
Teachers also find it more difficult to find resources to facilitate disciplinary literacy practices. While many resources are available for generic literacy strategies, finding quality resources for teaching disciplinary literacy can be more challenging.
What can help teachers implement disciplinary literacy?
Finding high-quality resources to teach disciplinary literacy may not be easy, but it's not impossible. Here’s a brief list of resources for more support:
Another resource is one I’ve had the honor to design. As a literacy instructional designer, I've had the opportunity to take my 15 years of classroom experience, my PhD research and publications on disciplinary literacy, and all my dream ELA wishlist items and pour them into Lenses on Literature.
How Lenses on Literature teaches disciplinary literacy
Lenses on Literature is a 6-12 literacy curriculum driven by disciplinary literacy tasks. This curriculum guides students to use analytical lenses to consider various interpretations and disciplinary concepts while engaging with complex texts.
For example, in our 12th-grade unit titled “Speculation: Dystopia and Science Fiction,” students write an argumentative essay evaluating the role of authorial intent in readers' interpretation of science fiction stories.
In this unit, students act as literarians as they puzzle through debated topics in literary studies. They closely examine elements of dystopia and science fiction, as well as debate how the meaning of art is defined.
Their learning culminates in an argumentative essay in which they provide evidence from the unit's dystopian, science fiction, and informational texts to support their stance on authorial intent and its role in reader interpretation.
In this way, Lenses shepherds students through a series of standards-driven tasks that ultimately teach them about evidence, argumentation, and how to consider intent. All of these skills are authentic to literacy studies, which is one of the biggest components of our kite-string content area of ELA.
A new wave in teaching literacy
Whereas literacy education used to focus on general comprehension strategies that can be applied to any text in any content area, the field is moving towards embracing and articulating disciplinary differences in reading, writing, thinking, and communicating.
Nearly every career path has a set of (often unspoken) literacy practices required by that field. To best prepare our learners for the 21st century and beyond, teaching them to navigate literacy skills that differ by discipline is essential.
Disciplinary literacy allows students to nurture unique lenses for not only literature but also for life. Let’s give all students access and opportunities to go far!
Corey A. Humphrey, NBCT, was a high school English Language Arts teacher for fifteen years, and she has worked in both independent and public schools throughout the U.S. She is a current doctoral candidate in Language, Literacy, and Culture at the University of Pittsburgh and a 6-12 literacy instructional designer at Carnegie Learning. She is passionate about creating opportunities for students to engage in authentic and disciplinary thinking, discussing, and creating. She has taught disciplinary literacy at the college level to pre-service teachers, and she is a co-author of the chapter “Teaching and Learning Literary Literacy” in Disciplinary Literacies: Unpacking Research, Theory, and Practice.
Explore more related to this authorWe should teach disciplinary literacy not because it's trendy but because of the benefits it affords our students.
Corey Humphrey, Instructional Designer for 6-12 Literacy
