Nurturing the Writer Within: Empowering Preservice Mathematics Teachers With Fiction and Nonfiction Picture Books

Disciplinary Literacy

Proponents of DL approaches (Fang & Chapman, 2020; Fang & Coatoam, 2013; Moje, 2015; Shanahan, 2015) asserted that “supporting students' DL promotes both the content knowledge and the process of constructing knowledge of a discipline” (Graham et al., 2017, p. 63). According to Lent (2017), DL moved teachers away from teaching general reading and writing strategies to asking them what they can do to help their students learn in the unique ways that experts in their fields learn. Lent (2017) noted that DL respected students reading, reasoning, writing, thinking, speaking, inquiring, and participating in specific disciplines. With this understanding, the professor of the middle grades field-based literacy methods course realized the purpose of the course was to guide PSTs to think like experts in their field (e.g., mathematicians, biologists, chemists, or historians) and “become apprentices of the discipline by linking the advance skills of the experts to the beginning skills of the students … rather than utilizing cognitive strategies to determine how reading will occur in content area literacy” (Ingram et al., 2016, p. 103). While DL is often described as teaching students particular skills to actively participate in a manner of an expert such as a mathematician or historian (Colwell et al., 2022), it is also considered “a democratic approach to learning” because it calls teachers to consider not only the discipline-specific implications (Davis, 2021) but also it empowers young people “… to develop their conclusions and relate their learning to real-life settings” (Colwell et al., 2020, p. 5).