Articles

This article from the International Literacy Association explores distinctions between content area literacy and disciplinary literacy, as well as tangible examples of how both can be incorporated within instruction. 

From podcast and webinars, blog posts and articles, you can find a wealth of recent publications related to disciplinary literacy work across Michigan.

This final report from the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy focuses specifically on the unique literacy needs of adolescent learners.

This article asserts that disciplinary literacy simultaneously builds secondary students’ academic content knowledge and their reading, writing, and thinking skills.

Teaching the literacies of specific disciplines means positioning students as competent, active participants as opposed to passive novices.

This chart, excerpted from ReLeah Cossett Lent's recent ASCD article, "Teaching Literacy Skills for Real Life", provides a pictures of what it looks like to read, write, and think in multiple academic disciplines. 

In this essay, Elizabeth Birr Moje argues that educators can make radical change in student learning and well-being if they reframe teachers’ work with youth as less about meeting standards and more about teaching youth to navigate the multiple literacy contexts in which they live, learn, and work. To that end, Moje offers a take on disciplinary literacy instruction that puts the process of inquiry at its center.

This article explores common questions about how to support students' literacy development in the service of disciplinary learning. We offer this article to support ELA and other subject-area teachers as they think about why disciplinary literacy teaching is important and how to enact it in robust ways.

In this document, we (a) explain our previous work on project-based inquiry, (b) introduce the Model for Inquiry-based Disciplinary Literacy (IDL) with its 5 phases, and (c) illustrate how to read, write, speak, and listen like a disciplinary expert (i.e., literary critic, scientist, historian, and mathematician) within the inquiry process. 

The authors offer a framework for disciplinary literacy teaching and two illustrations of disciplinary literacy teaching in classrooms. 

The purpose of this document is to provide a research-based resource for media, policymakers, and teachers that acknowledges the complexities of reading as an ongoing, developmental process and addresses the needs of secondary readers and their teachers.

This issue provides insights on teaching disciplinary literacy, cultivating 21st century thinking skills, and providing students with authentic real-world literacy experiences and assessments.

Reading, writing, and thinking looks different, depending on the subject matter. Shifting to a disciplinary literacy approach makes sense because it honors that difference and clarifies how teachers can help students read; reason; write; think; speak; and, most important, participate in specific content areas.

In this commentary, Elizabeth Birr Moje argues that it may be most productive to build disciplinary literacy instructional programs, rather than to merely encourage content teachers to employ literacy teaching practices and strategies.