This chapter reports on teachers' disciplinary literacy planning within an online university-based disciplinary literacy course offered annually to preservice and practicing teachers working across subject areas and grade bands. Authors designed and taught the course and collected participants' work and reflections over 3 years (n=40). Results show that teachers productively engaged with conceptual and pedagogical tools of the course to develop disciplinary literacy approaches in their instructional planning. Compellingly, as teachers appropriated features of disciplinary literacy in their planning, they also tended to de-center themselves as the primary knowers of the classroom and more regularly positioned their students as knowers, underscoring the potential power of disciplinary literacy for teacher education. These findings are illustrated through a representative case of one early career preschool teacher.
TopTheoretical And Empirical Perspectives
Human development is mediated by material and symbolic tools (Vygotsky, 1978). Acting within socio-cultural contexts, individuals use tools to accomplish specific purposes; as they use those tools, they may internalize (i.e., appropriate) new forms of knowledge and activity (Wertsch, 1991). Importantly, learners are active in this process. Using their resources, they reconstruct the knowledge they are internalizing, reconciling it with prior values, beliefs, and identities and producing transformed forms of knowledge that may be then used by others.
Drawing on these dimensions of sociocultural theory, Grossman et al. (1999) elaborate on the function of conceptual tools in teacher education. Conceptual tools are “principles, frameworks, and ideas about teaching [and] learning … that teachers use as heuristics to guide decisions about teaching and learning” (p. 14). Conceptual tools may be distinguished from classroom routines, strategies, and resources that support day-to-day activity of the classroom but do not offer support for teachers’ overall decision making or reflection.
Teachers may appropriate conceptual tools to varying degrees within nested contexts or systems of activity. Grossman et al. (1999) offer five levels of appropriation:
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lack of appropriation (when the learner does not appropriate the tool, either because a concept is beyond the person’s point of development or because the learner rejects it, such as due to mismatch of cultural values or beliefs or because they are not persuaded by the premises that support it);
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appropriating a label (when the learner learns the name of the tool but none of its features);
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appropriating surface features (when the learner learns some features of a tool but does not yet understand the conceptual whole);
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appropriating conceptual underpinnings (when the learner understands the conceptual underpinnings of a tool); and
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achieving mastery (when the learner can use the tool effectively in context).
The social contexts of learning to teach, including how tools are introduced and used in teacher education courses, are meaningful factors in how tools are appropriated, as are characteristics of individual learners, such as their own apprenticeships of observation, their personal goals and expectations, and their content knowledge and beliefs. In response to the theoretically narrow connotation of “mastery,” one team recast Grossman et al.’s (1999) fifth level of appropriation as thoughtfully adapting within contexts (Hoffman et al., 2020).
This frame enables us to see our course’s representation of DL as a primary conceptual tool that teachers worked with throughout the term. The course’s representation of DL was paired with two specific teacher education pedagogical tools, which were both designed to represent or scaffold the professional learning of DL: a graphic organizer that teachers used to identify and name literacies of a focal discipline and a multi-parted assignment that teachers used to revise a lesson of their choice so that it could better accomplish goals of DL. (See Appendix A and B).