Next up: Disciplinary Literacy

I'm beginning the second summer semester and my only course is Disciplinary Literacy. Essentially, the course is going to be a consideration of how literacy plays out across non-ELA and non-reading classes. (Non-reading as in the class is not titled 'Reading' but Math or Science or something like that.) This should be an interesting course as I don't know much about what teachers in other subjects do. Yes, I did teach Algebra I during half of summer school but that was mostly the result of an incompetent and possibly intellectually disabled administrator just parking warm bodies in a classroom full of 40 remedial math students. It wasn't pretty.

Anyway, the overall gist of the class is that every discipline has it's own culture. A scientist, mathematician, computer programmer, or engineer (see, those are the only acceptable careers so they're all anyone talks about) each work within a discipline that expects certain things of them. Some of what's expected is explicit and that's generally what is taught in the classroom: scientific method, pythagorean theorem, object oriented coding, and whatever the hell an engineer learns. The problem is, there's also a lot of stuff that's not communicated.

A good example of this is the differing citation systems. While we teach that every discipline has a different way of creating citations (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc), we don't ever explain why. In the grand scheme of things this particular why is small beans but there's a lot of disciplinary weight placed on how citations are written. Each discipline features dozens if not hundreds of similar signifiers which show someone as either participating in a discipline or not. Added together, these start to make the culture of that discipline.

Now, I don't know much about other disciplines and I can't think of many from, say, science to fill this post with examples but I hope you catch my meaning. It's not enough to take a kid into science class and have them work through a bunch of science information without giving them the inside scoop on the culture that is academic science. Part of the reason scientists think like scientists is that they've been trained in the culture of science. Students don't automatically have that culture unless they're lucky enough to have parents who make that their home culture. Even then, they will lack some other disciplinary literacy.

I'm interested to see what methods the class brings up to support better teaching of disciplinary literacy. I can already see that student discussions and debate are going to feature heavily but I would like to know how structured those are. Just because kids talk about plant biology doesn't mean they're in the discipline. How explicit do I have to be to help them learn to participate in science like a scientist would? And what about math?