This chapter will examine the role of multimodal texts to support students' disciplinary learning. Disciplinary literacy is based on a premise of access to advanced ways of thinking and doing as contextualized by individual disciplines. The authors put forth a framework of disciplinary literacy that combines habits of thinking such as thinking strategies, habits of practice or the actions experts engage in, beliefs experts hold about the discipline, and language use and vocabulary in the discipline. Disciplinary literacy in the classroom utilizes all these components to help students read, write, and think similar to ways that experts do in order to help them move past memorizing information and instead engage in authentic disciplinary argumentation and problem solving.
TopDisciplinary Literacies And Multimodal Texts
Disciplinary literacy combines habits of thinking such as thinking strategies (e.g., Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008; Moje, 2007), habits of practice or the actions experts engage in (Wickens et al., 2015), beliefs experts hold about the discipline (Moje, 2008), and language use and vocabulary in the discipline (Fang, 2012). Disciplinary literacy is based on a premise of access to advanced ways of thinking and doing as contextualized by individual disciplines. Disciplinary literacy in the classroom utilizes all these components to help students read, write, and think like ways that experts do to help them move past memorizing information and instead engage in authentic disciplinary argumentation (Goldman et al., 2016) and problem solving.
Disciplinary and digital literacies have been at the forefront of research and practice articles in major literacy publications (Spires et al., 2018). As Spires et al. (2018) argue, literacy should be pluralized to capture the complexity of discourses required to engage with the texts and cognitive practices that constitute disciplinary inquiry. Disciplinary literacy is predicated on what it means to be literate in a particular discipline (e.g., history) by engaging in the habits of reading and writing that are valued in that discipline (McConachie, et al., 2006). Engaging in disciplinary literacy requires full discursive participation within the community rules of a particular discipline (Moje, 2008). While discourse communities are established within disciplines, a major focus of discipline experts in their everyday practice is their engagement with texts in their respective discipline (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). As a result, in order to develop a level of disciplinary learning, it is crucial to understand the processes by which students read texts in various disciplines.
Integrating disciplinary literacy into courses can be a specific support for students who struggle with reading and writing. Teaching students how experts inquire and argue can give them access to what it means to think historically or scientifically or using literary analysis (Moje, 2007; 2008). Thus, if students know the goals they are working toward rather than memorizing information, they’re better prepared for the text demands in the disciplines. Further, when students are given autonomy and purpose, all of which disciplinary literacy provides, they’ll be more motivated (Ryan & Deci, 2016). Thus, disciplinary literacy helps students move from information consumers to curators of information. This is especially important for students who have a history of struggling with literacy because other common supports like reducing the complexity of texts don’t help (Brown et al., 2018; Lupo et al., 2019). Instead, leveraging the disciplinary framework we put forth in this chapter to instruct struggling readers in the disciplines supports disciplinary comprehension of a range of texts.
An integrated model of reading comprehension considers the interrelationship of the reader, the text, and the task all while situated in a sociocultural context (Snow, 2002). The reader brings their background experiences and knowledge to a text but also their experiences with that mode or genre. Taking an expanded view of what constitutes a text, anything that makes meaning can be construed as a text (Bakhtin, 1981). Multimodal texts make use of multiple semiotic tools such as words and images together to create meaning that is more textured than that created by mono-modal texts. Multiple semiotic signs are not read as individual signs but as an integrated sign (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996). The combination of various textual modes provides a multitude of potential configurations and integrated forms of representation (Lemke, 2002). These potential configurations are multiplicative as the student works with an increasing number of texts. And, because there are so many possibilities for interpretation, it is important to understand them.