As a middle level educator, the focal point for our 7th and 8th grade classes is English. At the beginning of the class, I had no idea what disciplinary literacy was. Getting more in depth with it, I realized how disciplinary literacy can be helpful in these English classes. In order to be able to give your students their fullest potential of learning, it forces them to reach to levels they previously were not at. In english class, a lot of the times students will read something and just read it to read it. They do not take away anything that the author or teacher wants them to grasp from it.

Because not all students learn the same way, through different types of disciplinary literacy the students can adjust to find their groove to learn. When they learn something, that information can be used down the line and develop their skills even more. One thing in English class that students will do is understanding pieces of literature. Going deeper into the text and its meaning takes the students into a deeper understanding of the purpose. By using prior knowledge, they are able to develop their own way of thinking and to interpret the literature pieces.

For this week, the article I chose to read was “We Real Cool.” Within the article, there is mention of how literacy is partially determined by culture described as “coolness.” It is not unknown that white culture differs from black culture. Throughout history, African Americans have been close with one another due to the segregation that occurred in our country, while the white culture is said to have had “white privilege.” Because of times being different now, blacks have been, looking through observation, known to show the “coolness” through their dress and language. Within Kirkland and Jackson’s research, they came to the conclusion that there are four possible reasons as to why blacks take on their “coolness.”

Throughout their research, they observed the way that the students of different cultures talk to one another. Being in an interracial relationship myself, I can 100% see the difference in how African Americans talk to one another. When I spend time with my boyfriend’s family, their dialect with each other is different than how my family would talk to each other. In my high school, we had that group of “cool kids” as Kirkland and Jackson described. Even though the different cultures are all speaking the same language, sometimes the way people speak is different than others.

When looking through the list of articles, the one that stuck out to me the most was “Using apps to support disciplinary literacy and science learning” by Beach and Castek. Within the use of the apps, looking past the technological features, the article puts emphasis on affordances of using the apps. Affordances is defined as “those specific disciplinary literacy practices or tools that mediate the relationships between students and learning goals.” The disciplinary literacy for science is more complex than that of a historian literacy or a mathematical literacy. One of the ways that using the apps in the science class can be to have apps that students can take notes and be able to share them to other students. By sharing these note takings with other students, the goal would be for the other students to benefit off of one another and expand their focus. With having the students using apps, they can collaborate with other students on certain work to share ideas with one another. I believe that that using apps is a good way for students to be able to communicate with their peers even if they are not face to face with one another.

As the reading rocket’s video started, the very first thing that stood out was the depiction of words related from a story. After reading a story about gardening, the students were asked to give some words that was related to gardening. Some of the words used like “soil, water and sunshine” were apart of the list of words. From here the teacher then asked the students to categorize them in any way they wanted but they had to give an explanation on way the words were categorized that way. When the teacher told them that they could match the words up any way but had to have a reason as to why they worked in a group, it teaches the kids to think outside of the box and to be creative with their thinking. By the teacher wanting the children to be creative with their thinking, they can talk amongst each other to come up with ways to combine the words. Because of the students only working with words that they already know, it does not have them branch out to learn something new.

When watching the Tedd video, the math lesson had a similar goal as the reading rocket. While the reading rocket video had them telling why they categorized certain words, the Tedd video has the students determine whether or not the math problem was true or false. Each lesson had a goal to have the students give their explanation as to why they chose what they did. Although the students may have been wrong solving the problem, they had given a detailed explanation as to why they were making the argument. In their explanations, the students pulled vocabulary from the lesson and use it in their explanation. With this form of disciplinary literacy, the students are using their prior knowledge of the words and elaborating them into sentence form. Both of these videos were great and I think i would use both in my classroom. Although the reading rocket’s video was more of small group work than a whole group discussion, each are great examples to have of disciplinary literacy in the classrooms.

Back in elementary school, there would be little ways as to how my teachers would teach us disciplinary literacy skills. Although they may not be as enforced in the younger grades than in secondary, the gentle approach will stick in the long run. For example, in science, having the students collecting data is a way to help teach them disciplinary skills. For reading, the students are still learning new words and their meanings. The more that they learn, they are developing skills to prepare to look deeper into texts with the way they are worded. In the elementary level, implying disciplinary literacy is not necessarily a bad thing to do, but being so young and still developing, the students may not fully grasp the concept. If there are some forms that are working with the content to be well absorbed by the students then it may not be a bad thing to keep around.

Throughout the years that we are growing up learning back in elementary school, English class was one I would always remember, and now I will be teaching it. There are many things that go into a reading class. When we start out, we have spelling and vocabulary to get the students to understand the concept of the words. As they graduate into being able to read and write sentences, they are able to begin reading stories. Although it may not look like much, but there is disciplinary learning, even in the slightest bit, in the content. By being able to understand the words and meanings, this can lead into interpreting a historical article in the perspective of the historian. Even being able to collect data and writing a scientific paper. Within my future classroom, I plan on trying different approaches as to what tactics may work well with getting my students to understand their content and apply it into their future.

Knowing that there are different styles of disciplinary literacy for different subjects, reading about Mr. Franchi’s history class was interesting. For his classroom, he incorporated the 4-Es, engaging, eliciting and engineering, examining words and language, and evaluating ways with words, into his lessons. By engaging his students into the reading and text, the students had to go through resources in order to make claims about a certain circumstance. For eliciting and engineering, Mr. Franchi was able to create a lesson where the students would put themselves in a historians shoes and debate with classmates. Because of the engineering behind the debate, the students have to do their research to display it in the debate. Knowing in that the historians time was different, he adjusted it to a way that would help adolescence to better understand. Within the article it states, “Historical perspective taking allows for students to consider the human construction of historical accounts and identify ways to assess these accounts for interpreting the past.” (Rainey, Maher, Coupland, Franchi, & Moje 2018) Another way of engineering was by telling the students to not look at him no matter what and to engage with one another. By looking at the different perspectives language of the text, the students were able to look at those different languages to come to a conclusion of their argument. Not only was Franchi giving his students the building blocks to do all of the work, the students take their previous skills of researching and taking it one step further to incorporate the point of view of their historian.

As for the physics class, Mr. Coupland wanted his students to not use the technical term for what they were witnessing but rather to simply say what they are watching. When talking to his students, Coupland said, You’re mixing observations and explanations….Focus on what you’re observing….Try to use regular words…try to separate your understanding, which is considerable, from your observation. It’s actually a barrier in science when you
think you understand something. It’s hard to see anything
but what you think you’ll see.” (Rainey, Maher, Coupland, Franchi, & Moje 2018) By students engaging in creating questions that require data and research, they are deepening the findings in many different ways of data representations. With having there be a scientific paper at the end of their entire lesson, the students need to take all of what they have acquired and had a group discussion with everyone to come to the conclusion.

Thinking of the different ways that my high school teachers gave us lessons, particularly in history class, I felt very ill prepared for the exams that were to follow the lesson. For my future classes, instead of going through a chapter just talking to everyone, engagement within the lessons would be a better way to help the students understand the material. Giving guidelines to help them develop their own style of disciplinary literacy can help the students adjust to any type of work they come across.

Although the different subjects will have different content, the ways to get the information across can tend to be similar. Each students’ disciplinary literacy may vary, but the way that they are able to comprehend different types of texts for each subject in order to strive. No one can ever stop learning and with different types of disciplinary literacy it helps them take their lessons one step further.

Until reading these articles, I did not know that content, content area and disciplinary literacy are all important aspects of lessons. Although they all have different meanings, each one all ties back into an important aspect of learning. With content, it is “what” you are learning and reading. For a particular author, they use their own words to express the content for the readers to better understand. But as for content area, this goes beyond the surface of the content itself. For content area reading, it takes the content and how it is implied to help the students “to better understand and remember whatever they read.” (Wosley and Lapp 2017) Disciplinary literacy is not only a way to know the content but how to use reading and writing to implement learning of the content. Metadiscursivity is knowing students engage in many discourses and their understanding of these discourses throughout their life. From personal experiences in high school, I learned different ways to learn that worked for me. Everyone does not learn the same, but the way one can comprehend information on their own makes the learning unique.

In a particular subject or area, Moje believes that knowledge is created differently for each are. For Moje, one of the focuses is to have students take new ways to implement the knowledge given to them into other subjects. Regardless if the language of a subject is different, such as science or math, disciplinary literacy helps develop the skills needed to learn the different “languages.” Although Gee agrees a lot with Moje, he believes that all content is specifically organized for that content such as the words that are used.