Integrating Disciplinary Literacy Practices in One-to-One Classrooms

Introduction

This chapter examines the ways that disciplinary literacy instruction did or did not occur in elementary and middle grades classrooms that participated in a one-to-one iPad initiative. Literacy instruction can and should be embedded across disciplines, but is often relegated to English Language Arts classrooms or lessons (Appleman, 2010). At a basic level, reading can be understood as a transaction between the reader and the text in order to take or use information. Unfortunately, this very efferent view of reading tends to dominate in schools that are considered “under-achieving” and leads to a direct link between reading and testing. Because of the current emphasis on testing, literacy instruction tends to be isolated from other content area instruction (Appleman, 2010). Research has shown that explicit literacy instruction in the disciplines, including science, leads to deeper understandings of the content, interdisciplinary connections, and promotes reading comprehension (e.g., Akins & Akerson, 2002; Bangert-Drowns, Hurley, & Wilkinson, 2004; Hackney & Newman, 2013).

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) call on teachers to use technology in literacy instruction for a variety of purposes; for example, to integrate technology to publish a text and collaborate and interact with others (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.6), gather information from digital sources (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.8), and determine the meaning of discipline specific vocabulary in content areas (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.4.4). The centrality of technology in the CCSS English Language Arts standards has implications for interdisciplinary content area instruction because definitions of disciplinary and technological literacy are constantly evolving and becoming more nuanced. Using a TPACK framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006), balanced literacy integration, and sociocultural theory as lenses, the following research questions guided our study:

• 1.

  How is writing and explicit literacy instruction embedded in science content instruction?

• 2.

  How do teachers utilize technology in science lessons to demystify academic discourse?