Much of what we know about disciplinary literacy is focused on applications for middle and secondary English, math, science, and history classrooms. Some even suggest that disciplinary literacy instruction, because of its focus on written discourse practices, cannot begin earlier than middle school. Very little has been written about what, if any, disciplinary literacy pedagogy might be applicable in the early grades. What if the key to moving forward in understanding the pedagogy of disciplinary literacy is to start with the youngest learners? This chapter provides a theoretical link between early childhood education and secondary disciplinary literacy practices. It outlines key practices of disciplinary thinking exemplified in intentional play pedagogy in early childhood classrooms. Connections between these key practices and applications in a secondary history classroom show how the foundations of disciplinary literacy are laid in early childhood.
TopThe Evolution Of Dl
A review of the history of DL provides insight into important differences between content-area literacy (CAL) and DL (Cervetti, 2011; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, 2012). CAL is based on the idea that general strategies for learning material through reading (often learned in English or language arts classrooms) can be applied to various subjects like science and history.
Training in CAL initially prompted English language arts (ELA) teachers to ramp up their use of nonfiction texts focused on science and history. Secondary students were asked to apply general literacy strategies (e.g., skimming, main idea generation, text feature analysis) and use graphic organizers while reading nonfiction texts in English classes. The hope was the practice would successfully carry over to the literacy tasks required in content classrooms.
Eventually, science and history content teachers were asked to teach these strategies and the use of these graphic organizers as well. However, many of those content teachers had not been trained to teach literacy strategies and were reluctant to become reading teachers because they were, after all, teachers of content outside of English classes. Those content-area teachers who felt equipped to teach these strategies found that they generally worked for information gathering in textbooks, but problems arose when students began to read and respond to other discipline-specific texts, like primary source documents or lab reports.
The general literacy strategies and graphic organizers would not work for all contents and all text types, and these strategies did not allow students to have authentic disciplinary responses to texts. What worked was a focus on strategies that were specific to their disciplines (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008).
DL is often defined by specialized, as opposed to general, skills needed for successfully creating and sharing knowledge in specific disciplines.
Thus, the focus of content-area instruction is less on providing students with an insider’s perspective of a discipline and ways of coping with the unique properties of particular disciplines than on providing students with tools to better remember the information regardless of the nature of the discipline. (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012, p. 12)
With a focus on adolescent reading for understanding in disciplines, research revealed some nuances that were important to consider for the development of DL.
Literature reviews of theoretical and empirical research on comprehension models, intervention, argument, and inquiry brought to light how both novice and experts interact with and communicate about literacy in content areas (Goldman et al., 2016; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, 2012). In addition, a “thought experiment” (Goldman et al., 2016, p. 224) and systematic interviews of disciplinary experts (e.g., college professors, classroom teachers, content specialists) revealed specialized literacy moves made by disciplinarians.
Initially, researchers focused on the results that seemed to show that novice readers relied on prescribed strategies related to content literacy, while experts were able to delve into deeper practices specific to disciplines. Shanahan and Shanahan (2008) developed “reading facilitators” (p. 48) based on the reading processes used by “disciplinary experts” (p. 48) and then used those facilitators to modify strategies for teaching secondary students to read discipline-specific, content-area textbooks. This process, combined with other avenues of results that emerged, evolved into frameworks of core processes and constructs used by specific disciplinarians (Goldman et al., 2016). The idea of applying these specialized processes and constructs in content-area classrooms was born.