Disciplinary Literacy: An UnConference

My aforementioned love for conferences grows with every conference I am able to attend.  Fortunately, just yesterday, I had the opportunity to further convince myself of the importance of conferences in my own personal growth as an educator by attending the truly unique Massachusetts Disciplinary Literacy UnConference held at Brookline High School. This unconference was organized by Salem State University's illustrious Jacy Ippolito and focused, as the title promises, on disciplinary literacy. As an unconference, yesterday's events were designed in order to shift the locus of expertise from the keynote speakers and presenters, as with a traditional conference, to the attendees, making this an unconference.  Working with our collective expertise, the unconference attendees made for a fantastic collaborative and generative environment in which educators, administrators, and even MA state officials were able to share their knowledge, experience, and concerns on how to effectively implement disciplinary literacy in the MA school systems.  We were encouraged to focus on learning from teachers who work in disciplines different than our own in order to broaden and challenge our understandings of literacy education. As you can imagine, the day was a whirlpool of networking, collaboration, creative problem-solving, idea-generation, and sharing of resources.

In addition to the list of contacts, resources, and ideas I left the unconference with, I also left with a new conviction of the critical importance of disciplinary literacy education in the modern classroom.  My goal for this post is to share some of that conviction and explain my own understanding of how teaching reading and writing within the difference academic disciplines can shape and guide our pedagogy.

Traditionally, reading and writing has been understood, according to Timothy Shanahan and Cynthia Shanahan as "a basic set of skills, widely adaptable and applicable to all kinds of texts and reading situations" (40).  This essentially means that, if you learn to read, summarize, paraphrase, and identify main topics in a piece of writing, you should be able to apply those skills generally across any discipline.  The basic skills you learn in middle school need only to be honed and applied across the academic disciplines in order to achieve successful learning. So why are secondary and higher education literacy skills so poor?  Why do universities and colleges from the entire array of academic disciplines bemoan the atrocious literacy skills their scholars bring to the classroom?

What Shanahan and Shanahan propose is that a student's literacy skills need to develop as the literacy-related tasks become more difficult and more specialized throughout a student's coursework.  Figure 1 below shows the pyramid diagram from Shanahan and Shanahan's article, "Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy."

Shanahan and Shanahan are making the point that the skills we nebulously think of as "reading and writing skills" actually work very differently within the different disciplines.  A chemist will read differently than a mathematician who will read differently than a historian.  The writing skills that a literary critic uses will be of very little use for someone who is writing a technical report or an article for a scientific journal.  If we are not explicitly teaching students how to read within the respective disciplines they are studying, we are not adequately equipping them to have success with the content we are trying to teach them.

The next step in solving this equation is equipping all teachers to be aware of and teach literacy skills within their discipline.  This means helping math, science, history, and world language teachers to become aware of specific strategies and expectations that characterize reading and writing within their disciplines so that they can model and share those skills with their students.  Students need to learn to read like a historian  when reading a history textbook or to write like a biologist when writing a research paper for biology class in order to successfully access the disciplinary content.

Sometimes problems with implementing this kind of disciplinary literacy education occur when we run up against the common misconception that literacy is an ELA teacher's responsibility.  Traditionally, ELA teachers are supposed to educate students on how to read and write so that they can apply those skills in their other disciplinary classes.  In theory, this means that, if a student hands in a horrifically written lab report to her science teacher, the ELA teacher has failed his job in preparing the student to write in that genre.  If a student is unable to comprehend the word problem in his geometry textbook, the ELA teacher has failed to adequately teach reading comprehension.  The absurdity of this becomes apparent when we realize that many ELA teachers are not equipped with the disciplinary knowledge to teach scientific writing or mathematic reading comprehension.  The literacy skills required in each of these disciplinary tasks are vastly different from the skills required to write analytical essays or read and analyze novels. Doug Buehl says it best by saying, "In other words, students need to be mentored to read, write, and think in ways that are characteristic of discrete academic disciplines" (10).

All these ideas and more were the foundation for much of the discussion in yesterday's unconference.  It was truly inspiring to see educators from all disciplines and districts coming together to work towards a better plan for helping students achieve the literacy skills they need to succeed academically.  Science teachers were learning how to teach reading skills and reading teachers were learning how to help their students prepare for their discipline-specific literacy tasks.  My notes from our time together are fairly extensive and I hope this post is just the starting place for future thoughts and research on interdisciplinary literacy as a part of this blog.

On Rediscovering my Discovery of Books in a Blue and White Library

There isn't too much to love about returning to a chilly, rain-soaked New England from a sunny trip to the Bahamas.  One of those sparse, loveable things, however, is the fact that I can share how one of the stops on my trip reminded me of the lifelong joy and goodness that a skilled reading teacher can gift to her students. When I was young, my family lived on a sailboat for many years.  My mum, dad, sister, and I floated around from port to port following our wandering whims.  My mum homeschooled both my sister and I from preschool straight up until we returned to the States which, for me, was around 5th grade.  This meant that my mum taught me to read.

I don't remember many of the details of my reading education; the only things left are pieces of memories and a giddy love for the feel of a new book in my hands.  One of those hazy, rose-tinted memory pieces lives forever in the sunny island library in Georgetown in the Great Exuma islands of the Bahamas, where I had the unexpected chance to visit on this trip.  My sister, dad, and I were strolling down the Georgetown streets in search of something other than books when my dad casually pointed to his left and said "Danah, do you remember that?"  I looked up.

And there I was, on the steps leading up to the little blue and white library with the big tree out front.

I wandered slowly in through the open door, stepping over the cats and feeling like an eight-year-old holding her mum's hand.  The creaky floors, the humidity-curled pages of the much-loved volumes, and the surprisingly smaller librarian's desk were all right where I had left them. The memories crystallized into perfect clarity.

My mum and I would come here together several times each week, taking 3 books at a time.  It was our big adventure; sometimes we would get ice cream on the way.  Always we would spend the afternoon hunting through the shelves for hidden treasures, exclaiming in delight as we discovered beautiful covers, funny titles, and anything that related to horses.  Each outing would end with a small armful of carefully selected books.  I could never take out more than 3 at a time, meaning that sometimes I had to leave a truly tempting choice #4 hidden in the shelves until my next visit.

We would then read our books together over the next few days, chatting about what was happening, favorite illustrations, words we didn't understand, and hopeful predictions.  My mum would always read anything my eight-year-old self recommended to her so that we could have serious discussions about it.  Sometimes we would read together, theatrical voices and all.  We shared our reading and it became an exciting part of every week, laying the foundation for my lifelong love of literature and writing.

I recognize, probably incompletely, how incredibly blessed and privileged I am to have been raised in a literature-rich home under the watchful eye of my mother, the reading specialist.  I understand that my situation is very unique and my intent is in no way to suggest that a background like mine is the only surefire recipe for a love of literature.  My trip to the Georgetown library simply reminded me of the incredible importance of being a careful, intentional teacher who fosters joy and community in learning.  Even if the specific teaching moments and strategies get lost in the dust over time, real love for learning can't be misplaced.  It's the very thing we often suffocate in our fervent desire to educate.  It's the thing that is at stake and the thing to fix our eyes on as we wade through the complexities of curricula, texts, and grading.  It's the kind of thing one finds in a blue and white library on an island in the sun.

The Academic Value in Digital Writing

In my last post, I started a discussion on the 21st century literacies that modern students must acquire in order to be prepared for their post-high school lives.  These literacies require students to achieve flexibility and fluency with multimedia composition, technology, and collaborative writing.  In this post, I wanted to continue this discussion by taking a look at digital writing in particular.  Educating our students to read and write skillfully in digital forums equips them to meet the challenges of what the National Writing Project calls "our information-rich, high-speed, high-tech culture." Just so we're all starting on the same page, the National Writing Project defines digital writing as...

"compositions created with, and often times for reading or viewing on, a computer or other device that is connected to the Internet."  

This can include blogs, Facebook, twitter, emails, texting, and a wide range of social networking and media sites.  All of these forums I have just listed are entirely digital, but ask participants to engage in fairly complex and sophisticated rhetorical situations.  They are genres in their own rights, requiring students to think critically about their choices as readers and writers.  Despite the complexity of these digital writing genres as well as their increasing importance in today's career and academic spheres, they are often dismissed in the high school classroom as unimportant, nonacademic, and distracting.

I would like to offer up a few reason as to why I believe that digital writing should not be dismissed, but rather encouraged as a tool with immense potential to help equip our students with modern and relevant literacies in the 21st century.

1) As teachers, one of our goals is to get students writing or reading in their daily lives.  I have witnessed a wide variety of strategies and even outright bribes on the parts of teachers engaging in the very noble attempt to infuse their students' lives with reading and writing.  Meanwhile, seemingly unnoticed, reading and writing in the digital spheres has permeated adolescent life extensively.  A new study by the Pew Research Center found that the average teen sends 60 texts a day. Internet Live Stats has a live and running count of how many Google searches were performed each day and the number is regularly well into the 3-4 billions.  Facebook's Newsroom stats show that, in December of 2014, they logged approximately 890 million daily active users, all of whom were reading and writing social interactions.  As Kathleen Yancey points out, "Note that no one is making anyone do any of this writing." I'm not entirely sure anyone needs too much convincing on this front, but teens are reading and writing somewhat constantly in digital forms.  Let's harness that.

2) Despite the fact that faculty and students alike disregard digital and social reading and writing as recreational and often detrimental with regards to student literacy, most digital writing platforms actually provide particularly unique and complex communicative situations that have the potential to carry real value into non-digital genres.  Twitter's 140-character limit could be considered to be a fairly advanced exercise in precision and conciseness in composition.  Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook's hashtag culture provides a very unique glimpse into the function of audience in our composition and how awareness of that audience shapes our compositions.  The dialogical structure of emails and forum sites presents a unique opportunity to explore the social nature of writing.  Texting, which relies heavily on emojis and gifs, provides a very interesting glimpse into the flexibility and functionality of multimodality in our compositions.  All of these composition exercises are fairly advanced and, with correct channeling, can serve to enrich and deepen students' overall skills in composition and reading.

3)  One of the things that sets digital writing genres apart from traditional print texts is the incredibly collaborative community in which this writing takes place.  The previously mentioned Krista Kennedy has said, “the simple fact that digital spaces do not require human bodies to be present in the same place at the same time opens up additional possibilities for all collaboration types.”  Blog posts, social networking sites, and academic forums all engage in worldwide, collaborative writing.  Returning to the NCTE's definition of 21st century literacies from my opening post, students must be able to "build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively."  Digital writing creates an incredibly powerful platform from which to launch students' ability to work collaboratively and cross-culturally.

4) Teaching reading or composition using digital writing is not necessarily a departure from already existing reading or composition teaching methods; it merely offers a unique and effective tool to help students gain valuable experience in necessary modern literacies.  While the unique affordances of digital writing genres create new opportunities for creativity in composition and collaboration, the ability to assess a rhetorical situation, compose a response, and then engage in an ongoing dialogue is and remains a fundamental concept in the writing process.

The ways in which digital writing can be brought into the classroom are numerous and oftentimes more accessible that it first seems.  It would be unrealistic and overwhelming to suggest that ELA teachers everywhere overhaul their lesson plans so that they take place in digital realms.  Much more reasonably, current teachers could begin to slowly incorporate these increasingly necessary skills into their already existing curricula, adding a low-stakes digital assignment or a digital option for an assignment into their lesson plans.  The important point here is to start somewhere in helping align our classroom assignments and environments with the real world challenges our students are going to face.

An Exploration of Literacy in the 21st Century

As high school English teachers, one of our major goals is to create literate students, equipped with flexible and complex writing and composition skills.  We want students to enter colleges and workplaces with a certain competence in formulating and articulating their thoughts, responses, and ideas.  But, in our current era of digital, globalized communication and technological workspaces, what does writing even mean anymore?  What does it mean to teach composition to modern students in ways that prepare them to function expertly in today's society? In their 2013 position statement, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), took a stab at answering those questions by attempting to define what it means to be literate in the 21st century.  Their definition pays close attention to the ways in which technology in particular has complicated the idea of literacy for our students, creating a need for students with multiple literacies capable of meeting the diverse needs of today's diverse society and culture. Their definition goes on to explain that...

"Active, successful participants in this 21st century global society must be able to

• Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;

• Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes;

• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts"

The overall theme here and elsewhere is that writing is becoming increasingly screen-based.  Creating literate students, skilled in writing and composition, in the 21st century necessarily involves incorporating technology and digital writing.  Understanding this more complicated view of modern literacy creates an infinite number of new possibilities for writing pedagogy in the high school classroom.  Krista Kennedy points out that "the need to create assignments that reflect the reality of contemporary writing environments remains a pressing pedagogical concern, along with the need to prepare students for workplaces that are increasingly reliant on digital, global communication, and collaborative labor."  As high school teachers developing curricula and assignments intended to prepare our students for their post-high school lives, we need to allow this evolving understanding of 21st century literacies to shape the pedagogical choices we are making.  Digital writing genres such as blogs, twitter, email, and forums are now academic and rhetorical composition situations with which a literature student must be comfortable and confident.  Our assignments must increasingly focus on developing discerning creators and interpreters of multimodal compositions, including composition using images, sounds, and video.  Regardless of our comfort level with the idea, literacy for today's high school students means something different than it has meant historically.  In order to best serve our students, we as teachers have to adapt our expectations and classroom designs to meet this new understanding of a literate individual.

Over my next few blog posts, I'm going to be exploring some possibilities as to what it looks like to bring this 21st century definition of literacy into the high school English classroom.  I am planning on posting some of my research and ideas surrounding digital writing in the classroom as well as a few of the multimodal projects I have been working on as part of my graduate coursework.  My goal is to share some of my exploration into what literacy looks like for modern high school students and to join in the ongoing conversation of educators who are working through the complications of this new and rich pedagogical landscape.  As always, please do comment, ask questions, criticize, and/or correct!