Moving Beyond the Textbook to Reframe Disciplinary Literacy Using Text Sets: Content Area Literacy for Pre-Service Teachers

Introduction

One of the most challenging yet promising pre-service literacy courses we teach is content literacy; such courses are taught within most teacher preparation programs and are generally designed for those who will teach in the ‘content areas’ or ‘disciplines’--in other words, middle grade and secondary teachers whose work will focus on subjects such as science, math, social studies, health education, physical education, the arts, language arts, etc. We often describe the first weeks of any content area literacy course as sites of resistance where future teachers must reconstruct their knowledge of what it will be to teach a content area and the literacies they will need to embrace to do this. This doesn’t surprise us as we saw this same initial resistance in our years as secondary literacy specialists in secondary settings where our primary job was to support in-service content area teachers in infusing literacy into their classrooms to scaffold content area learning. We know that some of this resistance came from early movements in adolescent literacy professional development in schools that cited “every teacher a teacher of reading” (Gray, 1925). We worked with teachers who would balk at such a suggestion, letting us know “I’m a biology teacher--not a reading teacher!” As professionally trained language arts teachers with undergraduate degrees in English, we understood. Prior to our continued education in literacy at the graduate level, we too were trained in a content--literature. We had received little training in teaching reading and literacy skills. We were drawn back to our own graduate work precisely because we weren’t teachers of reading as we didn’t have the knowledge we needed to do such work.

So, yes, we understand the resistance that many secondary teachers initially express at the notion that they will be literacy teachers. Yet our own experiences working with young readers and writers in K-12 schools remind us that this is essential work. Students need the skills and foundations to understand what it is to read and write across the disciplines (Fisher & Frey, 2020). Their teachers need theoretical, pedagogical, and practical knowledge to scaffold their own instruction to build those bridges for students between literacy and the content they teach. When we consider the adage “every teacher a teacher of reading,” our notion of this problematic stance has shifted over the years in two major ways--1) we now understand this concept under the framework of disciplinary literacy and the ways in which each discipline naturally and authentically feature literacies including texts, which has also led us to 2) embrace a focus on diverse texts throughout our content area literacy instruction, especially texts designed for youth such as picture books, graphic novels, and middle grade and young adult literature. Focusing on a diverse selection of literature--in format, genre, perspective, point of view, and attention to moving away from dominant discourses has impacted the ways in which the future teachers in our classes embrace and understand how literacy sources will be centered in their future classrooms. This focus on “of what” (texts) “for what” (learning) seems to resonate with our pre-service teachers, providing them a concrete bridge between their own content area understandings and the ways they both learned these and will teach them to their students.

In this chapter we review related research on content and disciplinary literacy and describe our own rationale for encouraging a hybrid content-area/disciplinary literacy approach to embracing diverse literature, especially youth-oriented literature such as children’s literature, young adult literature, and multimodal texts. This chapter includes several pedagogical tools we weave throughout the curriculum of our courses where students have opportunities to explore, practice with, apply, and design their own disciplinary assignments centered in diverse literature and disciplinary texts. We ground this work in a framework for text selection and provide sample class engagements for working with diverse youth literature.