Disciplinary literacy: Redefining deep understanding and leadership for 21st century demands

Piercy, T., & Piercy, W. (2011). Disciplinary literacy: Redefining deep understanding and leadership for 21st-century demands. Englewood, CO: The Leadership and Learning Center.

Background

The authors feel that the approach known as ‘reading in the content areas’ has misdirected literacy teaching as it has suggested that literacy skills are the same across the entire curriculum. As a result, appropriate help has not been given students to learn literacy skills that are peculiar to certain disciplines or school subjects. Thus, students do not learn new skills necessary to becoming ‘citizen journalists’ able to deal with the vast amount of information they now have access to online.

Aims

The aim is to introduce the authors’ concept of ‘disciplinary literacy’.

Sample

While some classroom conversations are examined, there is no information on where these came from. No other samples are used.

Method

The writers propose concepts, principles and frameworks for disciplinary literacy. They support these with quotes from the literature.

Findings

The authors note that, as text complexity increases, the unique strategies required for each discipline increase. They claim the traditional distinctions between literacy skills, strategies and processes are confusing and propose ‘literacy actions’ instead. The list of eleven literacy actions includes analysing, applying, creating, evaluating, exploring, inferring, judging, monitoring, questioning, synthesizing and understanding. They then draw up a ‘framework’ for each literacy action. They suggest that these together with disciplinary literacy and their ‘Habits of Mind’ list (which includes such habits as ‘Striving for accuracy’) are vital for literacy development. The aim is to develop ‘citizen journalists’ who, while not historians, scientists, etc., can use the appropriate ‘filters’ to understand and evaluate texts from these subject areas.

Their Four-Stage Model of Text Investigation (context, text and two subtext components: impersonal and personal) is then demonstrated with material from history, literature, science, mathematics and music, i.e. from across all subjects, but with each using different ‘filters’. For example, they suggest that in mathematics students should learn how to apply a mathematical analysis to a newspaper article that includes relevant mathematical data.

The writers also introduce a four-stage system for school leadership which they call ‘Disciplined Practice: A Literacy Leadership Model’. The model uses the same literacy actions introduced earlier.

Implications

Modern technology has introduced adolescents to masses of information online. If they are to be able to work with this information, they will need help to develop as ‘citizen journalists’ using the literacy actions identified by the writers.

Book available at READ@Academy on the AST campus.