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 Danger of a Single Story: Why ELA Classrooms Matter

I have wanted to write this post for awhile, as I've loved Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie since the moment I learned about her and her work.  Adichie is an incredible author who was born and raised in Nigeria and has written several novels and short stories that have been published in over 30 languages.  She is an articulate and talented individual; she uses her identity and skillsets to create beautiful work, but also to actively promote values and ideals she holds important.  I could spend an overwhelming number of words describing her books, talks, and life accomplishments and I'd actually be happy to do that, but, I wanted to dedicate this particular blog post to a TED talk that Adichie gave in July of 2009. [embed]http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en[/embed]

In her talk, Adichie reflects on the danger of only knowing one story, one narrative, or one perspective.  She shares how growing up with a "single story" depicted in the literature she read hindered her own ability to express her culture and life as a child in Nigeria.  As an adult, the "single story" myth caused her to accidentally develop one-dimensional and inaccurate images of peoples foreign to her.  Coming out of those experiences, Adichie poses the questions: How can we really know anyone through a single story?  How can a single story ever capture the complexity of a culture, a people, or a nation?

Adichie goes on to push this one step further by analyzing how the myth of the single story not only puts the hearer or reader in the position of having an incomplete or simplistic impression of people or places; it also heavily represses and misrepresents the individuals depicted.

'Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.' - Adichie

This TED talk captures, in essence, what I believe to be the most important role of the ELA classroom: to teach students to demand multiple stories, to question suspiciously unified narratives, and to embrace the duality and complexity that comes with gathering information about the unfamiliar.  Developing students who insist on more stories and refuse to accept any single story as representative of a people or a place not only respects and honors our increasingly diverse classrooms and societies; it also creates the kinds of citizens our increasingly complex world needs.  I want my classroom to produce individuals who have meaningfully read white, Western literature, but who have also wrestled with female, multicultural authors and who have considered the multitude of perceptions that exist in any given topic.  These are the students who will be able to operate meaningfully, intelligently, and justly throughout our globalized society.  These are the students who will hear, respect, and respond to voices speaking for and from all classes, races, and genders.  These are the students that I make it my goal to cultivate.

"I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise." -Adichie

Alternatives to the Canonical Heavy-Hitters

Behaviorist B.F. Skinner wrote “We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.  Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement.  Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.”  In this short quote, Skinner captures what I believe to be the lion’s share of where things are going awry with the literacy educations of students entering high school.  Our culture holds fast to a particular list of books that we feel any American student needs to have exposure to in order to qualify as truly literate and educated.  We shape much of our teaching policy and curricula around this list and how to best communicate it to students.  Generally, this list is referred to as the Western canon. Hemingway, Melville, Dickens, Hawthorne, and a host of their white, male colleagues preside over this canon with a certain rigidity that seems to have held our classrooms hostage for many years now.  While I hold these authors and their works in the highest esteem and often personal affection, I will be the first to say that I did not enjoy Melville’s “Moby Dick” in high school.  If the only books I had read in high school made me feel like Melville’s did, then I might never have grown to be the true lover of Shakespeare and Conrad that I am today.  My proposal, then, is that we explore the possibility of teaching a love of reading to our students in a way that will train them for lifetime literacy.

I am not suggesting that we torch the Western canon in the modern classroom.  Many of the teachers I have spoke with have reiterated the institutional importance of classic works in the classroom.  Several of the teachers I have discussed this with truly enjoy teaching the classics in certain circumstances.  For better or for worse, the classics are not something that we can ignore for the sake of our students, who will have to operate in the existing educational system.  I am suggesting, however, that we accompany this canonical education with authentic, enjoyable reading that falls outside of the hard lines of the canon.  I am suggesting that we explore ways to integrate everyday literacy and love of reading into the traditional, canon-based curriculum that we use today.  I am suggesting that we communicate in every way possible to our students the things that really matter about literacy.

The route I would like to follow in investigating this potential would be to search out accessible, non-canonical texts that have the potential to either pair with or, in certain situations, replace classical texts in the high school classroom.  If we can find a way to achieve our literary educational goals while integrating books that high school students will enjoy, relate to, and engage with, then we might be able to revive the idea of loving literacy as a lifelong skill.  Literature that might be able to achieve this goal would have to come from a more diverse background.  As opposed to the white, male authors of the canon, this supplementary literature would be authored by women or by multiethnic writers.

In our progressively diversifying classrooms, utilizing literature from a variety of ethnic backgrounds has been shown to increase the potential benefits for kids of non-white cultural and ethnic backgrounds.  Research shows that texts which relate directly to a student’s life and background are more likely to engage and appeal to them.  Florze-Tighe’s research demonstrated that culturally authentic literature notably enhanced the language development and thought processes of African-American children.  If we know this, as teachers, we need to be proactive about searching out texts that our multiethnic and female students can engage with and relate to on an authentic and personal level.  Our classrooms cannot be relatable and accessibly only for the white, male population.  Reading from strictly canonical classics can often make a curriculum inaccessible for even the white, male students.  I propose we explore creative ways to integrate modern, multiethnic, and female literature into the high school classroom without compromising our academic and curriculum standards.  In the words of Salem State University's Chair of English Theresa DeFrancis, “We need to stop spending all our time teaching our students stuff written by dead, white guys.”

I have created a list of sample, canonical texts that are traditionally used in the high school classroom.  From this list, I have researched and generated complementary literary titles that would pair well with these works.  My intent in creating these sample lists is to indicate the potential that exists to engage alternative learners, multicultural students, and female learners from a variety of backgrounds in ways that are meaningful to them without compromising the traditional values of what is considered to be “literacy” in the existing academic community.

Canonical Text	Alternatives/Complements
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter	Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson explores societal expectations surrounding female sexuality using strong symbolism to represent female and adolescent identity and themes. The Outcast by Jolina Petersheim is a modern retelling of Hawthorne’s novel placed in an Old Order Mennonite community. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is a graphic novel exploring religious and cultural ideas of female identity through the eyes of a young girl growing up in Iran.
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath	The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls is an honest exploration of modern-day homelessness and poverty. Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende chronicles the story of a Chilean woman who leaves her home to travel to California and join the transient and feverish culture of gold rushers in 1849.
Orwell’s 1984	Feed by M.T. Anderson tells the story of a young boy living in a mechanized, dystopian future. Y: The Last Man by Bryan K. Vaughan is a graphic novel chronicling the story of the last surviving man navigates a dystopian world dominated entirely by women.
Dickens’ Great Expectations	Feed by M.T. Anderson tells the story of a young boy living in a mechanized, dystopian future. A Step From Heaven by An Na. Young Ju and her family emigrate from Korea to the United States, where they struggle to make their way.  The story follows Young Ju’s personal development from a young age until she heads to college.
Melville’s Moby Dick	White as the Waves by Alison Baird is a modern retelling of the classic told from the perspective of the whale. Moby Dick: The Graphic Novel by Lance Stahlberg is a graphic adaptation of Melville’s tale.

Ultimately, our students will leave our classrooms with whatever skills and knowledge we help and direct them to attain.  While I personally am very motivated to see my students graduate with a working knowledge of several of the most important classics in the Western canon, it is more important to me that my students know how to relate to, engage with, and respond meaningfully to a literary text.  It is critical to me that they know how to and desire to read texts in order to learn more about their world, the people around them, and themselves.  My ultimate goal is not necessarily to teach great books.  In B.F. Skinner’s words, my goal is to teach a love of reading and I would like to explore ways in which our academic community can do that for our increasingly diverse body of students.