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Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 57(8) May 2014 doi: 10.1002/jaal.297 © 2014 International Reading Association (pp. 628–631)

During the past several years, middle schools and high schools have been shifting their attention to disciplinary literacy. The

Common Core State Standards are explicit in requiring teachers to teach the literacy of science, literature, and history, and even states that are not part of Common Core (such as Texas) are making this shift as well.

TS : Cyndie, you ’ ve been doing research on disciplinary literacy for about 20 years now. In that time, you ’ ve probably been asked just about everything possible. What question comes up most often these days?

CS : That ’ s easy. We ’ re doing better convincing teachers that disciplinary literacy is worth teaching, but they still are hesitant about their students’ reactions. A teacher said to me recently, “I have enough trouble getting my kids to read a textbook chapter. How would I ever motivate them to read in a disciplinary way?”

TS : Is that a real question or is it just a mask for teacher resistance?

CS : I think it ’ s a real question, but it may be com-ing up because many teachers still don ’ t understand the distinctions

between content area reading and disciplinary literacy.

TS : Certainly, much of the past resistance to content area reading has been the concern that the reading strategies haven ’ t matched well with how content is actually read in the content subjects.

CS : That ’ s right, and an emphasis on disciplin-ary literacy may overcome that kind of resistance because the reading practices promoted by disciplinary literacy are actually drawn from the disciplines themselves rather than being im-posed on them by the reading community.

TS : That explains why a teacher might be motivated to teach disciplinary literacy, but what about the concern about student motivation?

CS : We don ’ t yet have studies that have probed into motivation and disciplinary literacy in the classroom, but there are reasons to suspect that it might work differently. In other words, it might

The Implications of Disciplinary Literacy

CYNTHIA SHANAHAN & TIMOTHY SHANAHAN

The department editor welcomes reader comments. Zhihui Fang is a professor at the University of Florida, Gainesville, USA; e- mail zfang@coe.ufl.edu .

Water Cooler With this column, I conclude my role as editor of the Content Area Literacies

Department for JAAL Volume 57. During the past year, the department features four columns that address issues of both theoretical and practical significance to disciplinary literacy. The first col-umn provides a brief critique of text complexity and close reading, two constructs highlighted in the Common Core State Standards, and offers concrete ideas for implementing them in second-ary classrooms. The second column describes several classroom ploys for using science trade books to promote science literacy development for all students. The third column identifies some of the roles literacy teacher educators can play in helping address the challenges presented by a disciplinary literacy focus in secondary teacher preparation. This fourth and final column fea-tures a water cooler conversation between two noted disciplinary literacy scholars that explores the implications of disciplinary literacy for moti-vation, assessment, teacher education, and pro-fessional development. I hope these columns have been informative and useful to the JAAL readership. (Zhihui Fang)

Timothy Shanahan and Cyndie Shanahan are both professors of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA; e- mail shanahan@uic.edu and chynd@uic.edu .

Authors (left to right)

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be easier to motivate some adolescents with disciplinary literacy when we couldn ’ t do so with content area approaches.

TS : Why ’ s that?

CS : We find things to be motivating if they appear like they will fulfill our needs or desires.

TS : Right. So teachers have encouraged students to use graphic organizers, anticipation guides, KWL, and all the rest of it so they could become better students.

CS : Yeah, and those techniques really can im-prove student learning so there is a real chance that if students engage in such practices they might become better students.

TS : Which suggests that traditional content area reading techniques should be motivational.

CS : They would be if being a better student was a major desire of most teens.

TS : Getting good grades, high scores on ACTs, and positive college recommendations will turn on some kids, but they don ’ t all care that much about school.

CS : That ’ s right, and so for such kids getting to be a “better student” is not what they want (and for many of the ones who do want that, they might not want it bad enough to do the extra work required by those strategies).

TS : That explains why content area reading isn ’ t especially motivational. What about disciplinary literacy? You said that ’ s different.

CS : Disciplinary literacy doesn ’ t promise to make someone a better student. It invites students to join the disciplinary field itself. It ’ s a kind of invitation to join a club.

TS : It invites students to join the “history club” by reading like a historian or the “science club” by reading like a scientist.

CS : Right again, but it goes beyond that. It says, “We in (fill in the field) want you to join us. We want to share with you our cognitive secrets, our ways of thinking about the world, and how we solve problems. We want to count you as one of us.” In doing that, it both holds out the promise of affiliation (connecting with others is

a big motivator) and of greater competency with challenging tasks—not competency in being a kid (a student), but competency in being successful with the kinds of things that adults do.

TS : I was one of those kinds of kids in high school. I wanted to participate in what the adults were doing, not what the kids were doing.

CS : Do you think you would have stayed in high school [Tim was a dropout] if those opportunities had existed for you?

TS : Maybe. After I left school, I used to come back and hang out with the teachers in the teacher ’ s lounge, so the idea of having an op-portunity to learn how things actually work and why things are done as they are would have definitely interested me.

CS : It is also true that disciplinary literacy activities by their very nature can create a lot of opportunities for collaborative work and peer interaction.

TS : Many of the things that historians and sci-entists do during reading are really just problem-solving maneuvers within their field of study. As such, that kind of reading often poses more chances to work together as teams. You and I have both done a lot of work in the Chicago Public Schools. What about diverse populations?

CS : Studies have shown that achievement moti-vation is not that different across race, ethnicity, or social class (Graham, 1994 ; Suarez-Orozco & Suarez-Orozco, 1995 ). Students, no matter their demographics, strive to meet challenges, yearn to understand, and seek affiliations; so disciplinary approaches make equal sense in any neighborhood.

TS : I doubt that kids differ much in what moti-vates them or how motivation works, but their circumstances can differ a great deal.

CS : School and the doings of adults can seem pretty mysterious to all kids, and yet, those who don ’ t have a strong academic background might be the most mystified; they might even attribute their sense of alienation to age or race differenc-es even when those aren ’ t the issue. If they can ’ t figure out what is going on or why it is going on, they are more likely to retreat (and to seem

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unmotivated). I remember when teachers started going on and on about the symbolism in a novel, I thought they were making it up. Teachers should explain how disciplinary texts work and the reasons for reading them or writing them in particular ways. Why do scientists write sentenc-es so differently than those touted by English teachers? What ’ s the relationship between the prose and a table? Why does math embed equa-tions and data in the text, while science texts segregate them? Why are the vocabulary words in history and science so different? Increasingly, research is showing us that teachers can success-fully provide students with insights into such mysteries, and to participate in the same pro-cesses that disciplinary practitioners commonly engage in.

TS : What about assessment? How do we test disciplinary literacy?

CS : There aren ’ t any standardized disciplinary reading or writing tests yet, but one can eas-ily imagine how classroom assessments could change in the future as instruction becomes more disciplinary in focus.

TS : Past assessments in history, literature, or science have aimed to find out if students had mastered particular information. Questions about content would certainly still have a place in disciplinary literacy (knowledge matters in disciplinary literacy too). But what would a more disciplinary assessment look like?

CS : I think a more disciplinary assessment would seek to find out whether students are interpreting such information in a sophisticated way according to the traditions of that discipline. For example, a disciplinary test in history might ask not only what we know about an event, but how we know about it—students would be questioned about the source of the informa-tion, the reliability of the source, and how the information matches with information from other sources. In cases where the information is contradictory, the assessment might ask students to determine whose account was more credible, requiring students to weigh evidence using the same kinds of criteria that historians use. Or a literature assessment might ask students to engage in deeper interpretation than in the past. Instead of asking about the theme of a story, for

example, an assessment might ask students to de-termine alternative themes and to decide—based on text evidence—which one the author seemed most sympathetic to. In other words, it would ask the student to participate in the reading more as a literary critic than a student.

TS : How should we prepare teachers to teach disciplinary literacy? What is that going to take?

CS : A big hurdle in preparing in-service teachers to teach disciplinary literacy is helping them understand that disciplinary literacy is not content area reading.

TS : Really, I would have thought it was convincing them to use text in their subjects.

CS : That has to be done too, of course, but it is easier to convince them if they really get what we mean by disciplinary literacy.

TS : Yeah, lots of teachers (and teacher educators) seem to think that disciplinary literacy is meant as a synonym for content area reading.

CS : That ’ s right, and there is plenty of documentation that subject area teachers can be resistant to content area reading.

TS : So, if they think that disciplinary literacy is just the new name for content area reading, then they don ’ t like that either?

CS : That ’ s right. Subject area teachers already have plenty to teach without “every teacher being a teacher of reading.” The reading coach ’ s suggestions to include reading strategies in their curriculum often are seen as coming from left field. Subject matter teachers see reading and content as two separate things.

TS : That ’ s why I think I have always gotten along so well with the science and history teachers. They don ’ t see disciplinary literacy as an imposition from outside; it is more of an apprenticeship into the reading and writing practices used by a field of study to create and disseminate information. In other words, we ’ re trying to make certain that they share the literacy practices of their field—not to adopt the ones created by our field.

CS : That ’ s also why the schools that embrace this most quickly are the ones with the most

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committed disciplinary teachers. A teacher who is teaching an extra section outside of his or her certification or who has emergency credentials is not as likely to be dedicated to mathematics, lit-erature, or science. Since they are teaching out-side of their own intellectual passions, they are less likely to even know what to teach in terms of literate practices of a scientist or a historian. Teachers who feel that they are actually part of the historical or scientific community are more likely to want to induct kids into their discipline.

TS : How does that work with pre-service teachers?

CS : So far, teacher preparation institutions haven ’ t done a very good job of helping subject matter teachers understand the discourse prac-tices of their disciplines; so those practices often remain implicit.

TS : I agree with that. But have you seen any good examples?

CS : Sure, there are some examples of programs that do make disciplinary literacy practices ex-plicit. The best of these, in my opinion, are the result of literacy and disciplinary experts collabo-rating to determine what these practices are and then engaging students in them. The research project you and I were involved in (funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York) illus-trates just how successful these collaborations can be, especially if the literacy expert takes the back seat and listens to discipline experts about what they do when they read and tries to under-stand the underlying beliefs and assumptions that guide their literacy practices.

TS : Yeah, I was particularly impressed by the collaboration of Bob Bain (history educator) and Elizabeth Moje (reading educator) at the University of Michigan. They co-taught pre-ser-vice history teachers. Those students got a rich dose of history education and history reading.

CS : I agree. That ’ s a richer model than one where the reading class emphasizes all the

different disciplines in the same room taught by a literacy expert alone. However, most colleges don ’ t have the resources or sufficient numbers of students in each discipline to have discipline-specific literacy courses, so teacher preparation programs need to be creative in how these collaborations can work. How do you approach professional preparation in disciplinary literacy in the schools for those who are already in the classroom?

TS : One thing I learned when I was director of reading in Chicago is that the only way to make this kind of professional development work ef-fectively is within the disciplines. Studies have shown that professional development works best when all the teachers in the school take part; but those studies were done with elementary schools. I think in high schools you can be most effective working with a group of math or science teachers, even if they are drawn from different schools.

New studies of disciplinary literacy are emerging all the time, especially in history. On the whole, these stud-ies are showing the benefits of disciplinary perspectives on student writing, motivation, reading comprehension, and critical thinking. But there is more to come. Most notable in this regard is the “Reading Evidence and Argumentation in Disciplinary Instruction (READI)” project at the University of Illinois at Chicago under the direction of Professor Susan Goldman. This effort is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences (U.S. Department of Education), and is studying disciplin-ary literacy in science, history, and literature in Grades 6-12. Cyndie is the project leader of the history inter-vention team. These studies are in their fourth year (of a five-year funding cycle), so they should soon be pro-viding results. Stay tuned.

References Graham , S. ( 1994 ). Motivation in African Americans . Review of

Educational Research , 64 , 55 – 117 . Suarez-Orozco , S. , & Suarez-Orozco , M. ( 1995 ). Transformations:

Migration, family life, and achievement motivation among Latino immigrants . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press .