It could be argued that in many content areas, such as science and social studies, a failing of instruction has ever been that they have been taught to students as ends unto themselves. We’ve offered these as science for the sake of science and social studies for the sake of studies, and in that vein, we have tended to also offer a lot of inert facts, via lecture, showing videos, note taking, and quizzes, that have no relevance to students and are forgotten readily. The end result is that we have an astonishing level of content area illiteracy. Many teachers are embracing the idea of discipline are literacy to change all of that, and as a trend toward project-based learning, which supports discipline area literacy, increases in the nation, we’re seeing that students are benefiting from the new trend.
In traditional content area literacy instruction, the goal has been to use reading and writing as the chief means by which to transmit the skills and knowledge related to such areas as science and social studies. We have labored to increase student engagement with such content, to make students better informed about matters related to the sciences, history, geography, and civics. The aspiration has always been to get students to functionally analyze, evaluate and think critically in these areas. (Ingram, Bumstead & Wilson, 2016)
To accomplish this, the traditional approach has been the use of text books, offered by various educational publishers, directed to address each specific content. Strategies employed to read the content are fairly rote, although not entirely unsuccessful. Teachers will attempt to access prior knowledge from students, using such tools as the KWL chart. Teachers will ask and generate questions about something like terminal velocity, the Mexican American War, or the demographics of Japan, and use this as a lead-in to reading and writing. They will often do text book tours, helping students to use the prompts, cues, and formatting of said texts to help them navigate the reading and determine which concepts are most important. They will do a bit of pre-reading before fully jumping in, making predictions about what they’re about to learn, and teachers will use clear learning objectives to set goals for the day’s acquisition of information. (Chauvin, Theodore, 2015)
During the reading, in content area literacy, teachers will use such strategies as the read-aloud-think-aloud to pause and ask questions about the content, deepening the inquiry, loading the information more firmly into memory, and monitoring for comprehension. Word walls are often employed to build content-related vocabulary. One might see the word “mitochondria” posted with its use in a sentence and pictures students have drawn. Teachers may stop, at points in the reading, to see what inferences students can make about the reading, hoping to connect it to the real world. Teachers will rely on written responses to reading and exit passes to summarize what’s being read. (Chauvin, Theodore, 2015) While these are all effective strategies for deepening a reading experience, they may not have the ultimately desired effect, however, of achieving true content literacy.
In Discipline Area Literacy, the goal is to go beyond just being able to successfully comprehend reading about a subject, and it goes beyond merely being able to form written responses about social studies or science. The idea is to imbue students with the skills that allow them to think like a historian, or a mathematician, or a physicist. (Ingram, Bumstead, Wilson, 2016). This demands more than a single text book. These are secondary sources, all too often deemed credible, despite that fact that the creation of text books has become increasingly political and that these texts have been found to have flaws in their facts. The use of primary sources becomes more prevalent. Research, analysis, and investigation are chief to Discipline Area Literacy as well.
In the best cases, students are provided with a number of resources from which to choose, in multiple media, at multiple levels of difficulty, and from multiple points of view. Students are given an essential question, based in authentic real-world problems encountered in science or social studies, and they must make claims, backed up by logical and credible arguments to answer them. Here, they develop the important 21st Century Skills related to evaluation information. They learn to determine whether or not sources can be trusted and what makes a resource a credible one verses a resource that is not. Here, they are challenged to reflect upon their own practices as well. (Chauvin, Theodore, 2015) It’s hard to make meaningful mistakes with a top-down approach like those mentioned about in traditional content area literacy, but with their hands on the wheel of their own discovery, as is the case with Discipline Area Learning, these mistakes are inevitable and valuable. They offer meaningful opportunities for developing metacognition and critical thinking.
Project-Based Learning most strongly supports Discipline Area Literacy. Projects begin with authentic, real-world bases, such as “What does it mean to be civilized?”, “Could 1860s technology have prevented the Civil War?”, or “What would make a successful manned mission to Mars?” Teachers provide numerous resources to support the investigation, and students drive the effort forward. The teacher becomes the facilitator and project manager as the kids learn to think like a policy maker, a laboratory researcher, an explorer, a professor, and so on. They deal in the same ambiguities as real professionals do, they deal with working with colleagues the way real professionals do, and they present their findings the way real professionals do. This is far different than simply relying upon a text book as the sole repository of enlightenment that so many classroom teachers do.
In the book Setting the Standard for Project-Based Learning, the authors compared two groups of students. One group learned content via traditional classroom teaching, traditional content area literacy methods, and the other, learned via PBL, laden with Discipline Area Literacy. The test results were higher for those in the PBL group. The PBL group demonstrated greater positivity about learning and higher levels of engagement in class. The results of testing demonstrated that the economic learning gap of students in PBL was more diminished than with those in the traditional setting. Students in the PBL group mastered 21st Century Skills like time and task management, communicating to solve problems, comfort with ambiguity, evaluating arguments, etc, more noticeably than did students in the traditional setting, and they were deemed more college and career ready as a result. (Larmer, Mergendoller, Boss, 2015)
In the end, there is a difference between transmitting facts and learning. Facts, in and of themselves, are inert. They are nothing without action. If the facts cannot be used to solve problems, if the words cannot be turned into actions, then the literacy we’re hoping our students will develop will not adequately be developed. Both methods of teaching content are good, but Discipline Area Literacy is the most effective, and when supported by a PBL methodology, all the more so.
SOURCES CITED
Ingram, J.M., Bumstead, S., Wilson, T., 2016, Content and Disciplinary Literacy: A compromise to Benefit
Pre-Service Teachers, National Educational Journal, 9(2), 103-108
Chauvin, R., Ph.D, Theodore, K., 2015 spring, Teaching Content-Area and Disciplinary-Area Literacy,
www.sedl.com, afilliated with AIR (the American Institute for Research)
Larmer, J, Mergendoller, J.R., Boss, S., Setting the Standard for Project-Based Learning: A
Proven Approach to Rigorous Classroom Instruction, Arlington, VA, ASCD