The “How” of Content Area Literacy and the “What” of Disciplinary Literacy

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As I have been interacting with educators within classrooms and leading district professional learning, it has become apparent to me that despite a great deal of research energy being placed into distinguishing disciplinary literacy (DL) from content area literacy (CAL), this distinction has not carried sufficiently into professional learning practices. In fact, these ideas are still significantly conflated, with DL largely being represented by vocabulary instruction within subject-specific courses. While this can be an entry point for teachers seeking to embed DL practices into their instruction (Savitz, et al., under review), it is limiting and misrepresents DL’s opportunities for real-world problem-solving, interdisciplinary development, and critical thought. The subsequent goal of this blog, as well as the next three month’s themes, is to return to the defining and conceptualizing of DL from a practical standpoint.

Distinguishing Disciplinary Literacy and Content Area Literacy

Helping teachers and future educators distinguish DL from CAL is one of the challenges within the literacy coursework. Recognizing this is an oversimplified concept, I often begin by having students identify DL as the “what” of their teaching – the knowledge, skills, language, discourse, practices, and habits of mind contextualized to and specific within the subject areas (Ippolito et al., 2024; Lent & Voight, 2019). CAL, on the other hand, is the “how” of teaching; it constitutes content-neutral strategies and tools used to support students in attaining knowledge of the content (McKenna & Robinson, 2014; Ortlieb et al., 2024).

To help students better understand the concept behind DL, I ask them to follow a set of instructions they are given auditorily. They are told to follow these instructions to the best of their ability: “Virabhadrasana I, Prasarita Padottanasana, Trikonasana, Parivrtta Trikonasana”. I am usually met with dumbfounded looks. Then, I present the instructions in English: “Warrior I, Intense Leg Stretch, Triangle, Reverse Triangle.” Here, I often get students standing with their arms making a triangle over their heads. While students can decode the words – they understand the concept of a triangle or warrior – and some may even recognize the words are associated with yoga, most are not able to connect the words to the kinesthetic actions needed to perform these yoga poses (Morrison, 2024). This is because the task for this yoga sequence – and for literacy practices in specific disciplines – is not just to acquire information from a text but “rather to embody it in dynamic three-dimensional space, as it unfolds over time, in concert with other individuals” (Chandler-Olcott, 2017, p.151).

I then ask students to demonstrate their understanding of CAL and DL within their own subject area. One of my students, Angelina, explained it this way:

They [DL and CAL] are similar in that they both involve an understanding of how to navigate the topic. Disciplinary literacy involves understanding how the specific content area works—common vocabulary words that may not have the same meaning in other contexts, how to analyze and correct form in a P.E. setting, how to tell the difference between a rondo and trio in a music theory setting, or how to structure a haiku in a language arts setting, among other things. In short, it is everything one needs to be fluent and knowledgeable in the discipline. Content area literacy, however, is all about analyzing, synthesizing, summarizing, and questioning. It is the tools (sic) one needs to think critically about the information to gain a greater understanding of the content…This helps to reinforce the material, provoke focused thought, and engage the students in active learning, as is the goal of content area literacy.

Figure 1: Venn Diagram Showing Student Interpretation of DL and CAL

Another student, Alexis, demonstrated his conceptualization of CAL and DL through a graphic organizer (Figure 1). As can be seen in his example, he has shown the complexity and interaction of CAL and DL while also explaining the distinction between them. He identified content-neutral literacy strategies, like anticipation guides and accountable talk, as well as cross-disciplinary student practices, the 5 Es, as CAL used to support students’ learning. He explained that DL, in his case music literacy, is not just about the vocabulary and ability to read notation or the ability to play notes on a page. As he points out, DL is about students’ ability to “take a piece of music, study it, perform it, and fix any mistakes so they can put on the best performance they can.” In this example, we see how DL becomes about the complex “embodiment” (Chandler-Olcott, 2017, p. 151) of text because a performer who does not have strong DL will not be able to make the immediate pivots and corrections necessary within a performance circumstance.

Figure 2: Student Representation of Disciplinary Literacy and Content Area Literacy

Shifting the “Thinking Like” Mantra

Building on this idea of text “embodiment,” one of the prime mantras of DL has been to have students “think like experts” within the specific discipline, e.g. to “think like scientists” or “think like mathematicians” (e.g. Lent & Voigt, 2019). However, instruction within subject areas is really less about “thinking like an [expert]” and more about inhabiting the habits of mind – the perspectives and worldviews – that align with the discipline. It is about solving real-world problems and engaging in real-world experiences using the knowledge and epistemologies of specific disciplines in contextualized ways.

Here is a way I think about this. Four years ago when I moved to Texas, I decided to be a beekeeper because… “Save the bees!” I entered into this field with little knowledge and no skills related to beekeeping. However, as I have progressed in my learning to care for and provide for my hives, I have had to approach problems that arise in ways I would never have previously considered. Yes, I use vocabulary related to beekeeping – swarm, drone, absconding – and yes, I have gained a conceptual understanding of how bees gather pollen, make honey, and communicate with each other. However, I have had to gain knowledge through the reading, writing, communicating, and viewing practices master beekeepers engage in. This includes reading many, many articles, working with a mentor, and watching way too many YouTube videos at 1 AM in order to gather information that helps me make decisions that significantly impact the welfare of my hives. I have learned to “read” brood patterns on my frames to determine the health of my queen and make decisions about what I might need to provide the hive to ensure her strong production or, sometimes, her replacement. I have learned what bearding looks like and, given particular factors, if that means I have a potential swarm situation or if the bees are just getting fresh air.

Perhaps more importantly, I have noted my shift in thinking about my environment as it has become more “bee-centric”. I am adamant about planting native pollinator-friendly plants within my yard including using tiny purslane succulents as groundcover in lieu of mulch in order to feed the honey bees through Texas summer droughts. I do not spray or even pull out dandelion “weeds” because they are often the first food bees have in the spring. I see bees in other places and closely examine them, garnering information about their health and production from these observations. In essence, my view of the world has changed, and I operate in it differently because of my gaining DL on beekeeping. What is important here is that I have gained DL in beekeeping to conduct discourse with other beekeepers and to solve the problems we are all faced with (e.g. varroa mites, hive beetle infestations) through an embodiment of the discipline.

As we teacher leaders, teacher educators, and professional development leaders work toward greater DL implementation within classrooms, it is important for us to realize that discipline-specific vocabulary instruction – while a good entry point – is far from encompassing the complex and multifaceted conceptions undergirding DL.

References

Chandler-Olcott, K. (2017). Disciplinary literacy and multimodal text design in physical education. Literacy UKLA, 51(3), 147-153.

Ippolito, J., Dobbs, C., Charner-Laird, M, Uttaro, J. & Williams, J. (2024). Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry & Instruction (2nd ed.). Harvard Education Press.

Lent, R.C., & Voigt, M.M. (2019). Disciplinary literacy in action: How to create and sustain a school-wide culture of deep reading, writing, and thinking. Corwin Literacy.

McKenna, M.C. & Robinson, R.C. (2014). Teaching Through Text: Reading and Writing in the Content Areas. Pearson.

Morrison, J.D. (2018). [Paper presentation]. Disciplinary literacy in the “othered” courses: Valuing the related arts’ and physical education’s literacies. South Carolina Council for Teachers of English (SCCTE) conference. Kiawah Island, SC.

Morrison, J.D. (2024). Disciplinary literacy in the visual arts. In E. Ortlieb, B.D. Kane & E.H.Cheek (Ed.), Unpacking Disciplinary Literacies: From Research to Practice. New York, NY: Guilford.

Ortlieb, E., Kane, B.D. & Cheek, E.H. (2024). Disciplinary Literacies: Unpacking Research, Theory, and Practice. Guilford Press.

Savitz, R., Kane, B.D., Brown, C., Morrison, J.D., Aldrich, C. & O’Byrne, W.I. (in review). Secondary teachers’ self-efficacy in disciplinary literacy.

About the Author

Dr. Jennifer D. Morrison is an Associate Professor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. She was previously at the University of South Carolina. Her experiences include being a middle and high school English teacher, gifted education resource teacher, and instructional coach. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Nevada, Reno, in Language, Literacy & Culture. She is a National Board Certified Teacher (AYA/ELA) and supports National Board candidates across the country. Additionally, she is an alumnus of the Teaching Shakespeare Institute at the Folger Theater in Washington, D.C. and has won multiple awards for teaching and writing include NCTE’s Paul and Kate Farmer English Journal Award and AERA’s Dissertation Award in Research on Teacher Induction. She has been published in a range of journals including English Journal, Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Educational Leadership, and Reading Research Quarterly. Currently, her research focused on adolescent, digital, multimodal, and disciplinary literacies as well as narrative and qualitative methodologies.

Disciplinary Literacy: How it Started…How it’s Going

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How it Started

Once upon a time, there was an educational concept called disciplinary literacy. It changed and grew over time, experienced some setbacks, yet still offered hope for a better educational future for adolescent learners. Since this is a blog post about literacy, we may as well use story structure to our advantage–setting, characters, events, and even a little bit of conflict along the way. Like many stories (but certainly not all), it will be told in time order and according to the narrator’s understanding. For this reason, I hope that you will forgive any errors of fact or omissions.

While our story begins in 2008, it is only possible due to previous efforts of a wide cast of characters focused on researching literacy across many, many decades. For our purposes, however, we will only rewind to 2008. Prior to 2008, literacy was commonly understood as the ability to read and write in varied contexts, with an emphasis on the ability to decode texts and use information effectively. Efforts to support and extend students’ literacy abilities focused on reading and writing across the content areas, with slogans such as “all teachers are teachers of reading and writing.” While this understanding of literacy is certainly accurate, it is also incomplete. Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan published “Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking Content-Area Literacy” in 2008, seeking to articulate the idea of a literacy progression from basic literacy to intermediate literacy and finally to disciplinary literacy. In this work, they highlighted distinct literacy practices required in disciplines such as history, science, and mathematics. For example, scientific fields value precision, technical vocabulary, and the interpretation of data and visual representations. History involves sourcing, contextualizing, and corroborating documents to construct narratives about the past. In mathematics, experts rely on symbolic representations, concise explanations, and logical reasoning. Within the field of literature studies, there is an emphasis on exploring multiple representations, figurative language, and themes. Their article called for teachers to explicitly model and scaffold the reading and writing practices of their disciplines.

However, literacy exists within interactions among the learner, task, and context. Enter the work of Elizabeth Birr Moje, who co-authored “The Complex World of Adolescent Literacy: Myths, Motivations, and Mysteries” in 2008 with Melanie Overby, Nicole Tysvaer, and Karen Morris. This work dispelled the myth that adolescents were not engaging in reading outside of school and articulated the need to connect students’ interests with academic literacy tasks by naming that youth are motivated to read texts that resonate with their personal interests, social identities, and cultural background. Building upon this work, Moje published “Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change,” which advocated for developing disciplinary literacy instructional programs. This call emphasized that disciplinary literacy can provide all students with access to the specialized knowledge, skills, and practices of various fields, thus promoting educational equity.

As energy grew around the new concept of disciplinary literacy, additional researchers entered the scene. Instead of providing a broad definition of disciplinary literacy, some researchers offered explorations of particular components of disciplinary literacy. For example, Zhihui Fang and Mary J. Schleppegrell introduced the role of functional language analysis as a tool for educators to help students navigate complex disciplinary texts in 2010 with “Disciplinary Literacies Across Content Areas: Supporting Secondary Reading Through Functional Language Analysis” in 2010. Suggestions for application in various content areas include the following:

Science: Functional language analysis can help students unpack dense noun phrases and technical terms in order to understand complex concepts.
History: Analyzing the use of passive voice and nominalizations can reveal how historical events are presented and interpreted.
Mathematics: Understanding the precise language and symbolic representation aids in comprehending mathematical reasoning.

Also published in 2010, “Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy” provided further insight into the specific literacy demands across various academic disciplines, contrasting content-area and disciplinary literacy examples. Additional ideas explored in the report include naming the difficulty that many students face as they transition from foundational and intermediate literacy skills to the advanced literacy demands in secondary schools; this difficulty is often compounded by increasing text complexity and assumptions that students already possess the skills needed to engage with complex texts. Researchers Carol D. Lee and Anika Spratley contributed to this publication and other research over time.

While many researchers were engaged in research and publication regarding disciplinary literacy over the next five years, the field was still lacking in a unifying framework that offered the promise of shifting educators’ overall approach to instruction in pedagogy. In 2015, Moje published “Doing and Teaching Disciplinary Literacy with Adolescent Learners: A Social and Cultural Enterprise.” This article provided the unifying structure that was sorely needed in the field–a teaching heuristic characterized by the 4Es: engage (engage students’ interest), elicit/engineer (identify existing skills), examine (guide students to critically examine texts, problems, or data), and evaluate (help students assess the quality of their work and thinking). This heuristic articulated not only the role of engaging adolescents in meaningful work aligned to their lives and community needs, but also the role of educators in planning for intentional instructional practices that apprentice students into the types of cognitive practices valued in various discourse communities.

Research continued after 2015, with many researchers digging deeper into the specific ways of not only reading and writing, but also speaking, listening, viewing, and thinking in various academic disciplines. While Sam Wineburg began researching the role of literacy within the field of history well before 2015, his work continues to be considered essential for educators in the field. As previously mentioned, the work of Fang and Schleppegrell focused on the literacies in scientific fields, along with Annemarie Palinscar and others. Deborah Ball, Judit Moschkovich, and Beth Herbel-Eisenmann provided insights into the intersection of language, literacy, and mathematics as well. Across the wide body of research into the concept of disciplinary, several key elements emerged:

Focusing on the language and literacy demands valued in various academic disciplines and professions, with a goal of making such literacy expectations visible to students through modeling.
Shifting toward student-centered learning for authentic purposes and audiences, with the teacher serving as the knowledgeable other, scaffolding and facilitating students’ learning.
Developing content knowledge alongside epistemological knowledge (understanding the ways disciplines construct and validate knowledge).

With such valiant research efforts, a reader might expect widespread implementation of disciplinary literacy. However, this was not the case. In many middle- and high-school settings, teaching content without attending to the literacy demands continued to be the status quo. Why was this the case? Perhaps it was due to the misunderstanding that disciplinary literacy was the “pinnacle” of literacy development, and therefore, not within the purview of “typical” or “struggling” learners. Perhaps it was the belief that disciplinary literacy approaches were simply a newly-branded version of content-area literacy approaches. Possibly educators were still struggling to identify what it might look like to align secondary settings to better support disciplinary literacy.

And, of course, there was a crisis called the COVID-19 pandemic that most certainly played a key role in this story. Nevertheless, the work continued.

How it’s Going

It is not a secret that, historically, key players in academia have tended to identify as White, upper-middle-class scholars. Unfortunately, this has prevented society from having a nuanced understanding of areas of study. Thankfully, we are starting to see broader representation in academic research of disciplinary literacy, both in terms of the students and educators serving as the primary focus of research efforts, as well as in terms of the researchers themselves. Since our story is a short story, we will only introduce a few such researchers here.

In “Culturally Sustaining Disciplinary Literacy for Bi/Multilingual Learners: Creating a Translanguaging Social Studies Classroom,” Garcia and Schleppegrell (2021) explore the intersections among disciplinary literacy approaches and culturally sustaining pedagogy; specifically, high-quality disciplinary literacy learning opportunities across subject areas that engage students in critically examining the world around them, interrogating accepted knowledge, contributing their own perspectives to shape that knowledge, and sustaining and developing the literacies needed to do this work.

Published in 2022 by Susan Watts-Taffe and colleagues, “Disciplinary Literacy in Action: High School Students Doing Research for Change” describes how disciplinary literacy practices were enacted among youth within the context of Youth Built Change, a science based program incorporating principles of Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR). Highlighting two YPAR projects, one conducted in a predominantly Black and Latino/a suburban school and one conducted in a predominantly White rural school, specific examples of the disciplinary literacy practices of Believing, Knowing, Doing, and Communicating are illustrated.

Rachael Gabriel, a professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut, has made significant contributions to the field of disciplinary literacy through her research and publications. Her 2023 book, Doing Disciplinary Literacy: Teaching Reading and Writing Across the Content Areas, emphasized the importance of engaging students as active participants in the authentic activities of each content area, such as conducting experiments in science, analyzing primary sources in history, or solving real-world problems in mathematics. In addition to offering practical suggestions for educators on implementing disciplinary literacy, Gabriel’s body of work integrates culturally sustaining pedagogies and neurodiversity inclusion within literacy approaches.

What’s Next

Our story doesn’t end here. Longstanding researchers in the area of disciplinary literacy, Christina L. Dobbs, Megin Charner-Laird, Jacy Ippolito, and Christine Montecillo Leider, recently published Critical Disciplinary Literacy: An Equity-Driven and Culturally Responsive Approach to Disciplinary Learning and Teaching. This book introduces a new theory of CDL that combines critical and disciplinary literacy approaches into a cohesive framework. It remains to be seen what sort of impact this work might have on the widespread implementation of disciplinary literacy.

All stories are certainly affected by the events that do happen, but they are equally affected by the events that did not happen. Our story is no different. There has not yet been a deep focus on defining disciplinary literacy in English language arts beyond literary analysis up to this point. Perhaps a new cast of characters will enter the field in the coming years, providing rich nuance to our current understanding. Research into the impact of COVID-19 on learners’ cognition and motivation and disciplinary literacy approaches might also add to our story.

Regardless, our story of disciplinary literacy is far from finished. What started in 2008 with the goal of articulating literacy practices beyond generic, content-area approaches has progressed to a varied field of study seeking to provide a deep understanding of specific sub-categories of disciplinary literacy study. To Be Continued…

References

Moje, E. B., Overby, M., Tysvaer, N., & Morris, K. (2008). The complex world of adolescent literacy: Myths, motivations, and mysteries. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 107–154. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.78.1.54468j6204x24157

Dobbs, C. L., Leider, C. M., Ippolito, J., & Charner-Laird, M. (2024). Critical disciplinary literacy: An equity-driven and culturally responsive approach to disciplinary learning and teaching. Routledge.

Fang, Z., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2010). Disciplinary literacies across content areas: Supporting secondary reading through functional language analysis. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(7), 587–597. https://doi.org/10.1598/jaal.53.7.6

Gabriel, R. (2023). Doing disciplinary literacy: Teaching reading and writing across the content areas. Teachers College Press.

Garcia, M. H., & Schleppegrell, M. J. (2021). Culturally sustaining disciplinary literacy for bi/multilingual learners: Creating a translanguaging social studies classroom. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64(4), 449–454. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/jaal.1129

Lee, C. D., Spratley, A. (2010). Reading in the disciplines: The challenges of adolescent literacy. Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Moje, E. B. (2008). Foregrounding the disciplines in secondary literacy teaching and learning: A call for change. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 52(2), 96–107. https://doi.org/10.1598/jaal.52.2.1

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40–59. https://doi.org/10.17763/haer.78.1.v62444321p602101

Watts-Taffe, S., Vaughn, L. M., & Jacquez, F. (2022). Disciplinary literacy in action: High school students doing research for change. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 65(4), 331–341. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/jaal.1211

About the Author

Jenelle Williams is a Literacy Consultant within the Leadership and Continuous Improvement unit at Oakland Schools, an intermediate school district supporting the 28 districts in Oakland County, Michigan. She joined the organization in 2017 following 18 years of experience in public schools at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. She has served as a classroom teacher, IB Middle Years Programme Coordinator, teacher leader, and educational technology coach. An IB Educator and Examiner since 2013, Jenelle leads professional learning workshops and marks e-assessments for the International Baccalaureate Organization. She holds an Education Specialist in Leadership degree and a Master’s degree in Reading and Language Arts through Oakland University. In addition, Jenelle serves as an Adjunct Professor in Grand Valley State University’s Graduate Program and a co-editor of The Michigan Reading Journal, a publication from the Michigan Reading Association. Jenelle is passionate about supporting teachers, building leaders, and central office administrators in the area of secondary literacy, and she is especially excited to be able to support Michigan’s work around disciplinary literacy through her role as Co-Chair of the statewide Disciplinary Literacy Task Force. She can be reached at jenelle.williams@oakland.k12.mi.us, and on Twitter at @JenelleWilliam6 and @GELN612Literacy.

Taking a Leap of Faith: From Content Area Literacy to Disciplinary Literacy

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If you are reading this, you are probably an educator like me; your expertise is in the field of education. As we studied to be teachers, we also had to take other courses as well and had to comprehend challenging texts in those courses. It’s possible that these texts looked like a foreign language at times; they did for me! Attaching meaning to texts in each discipline was unique, and hopefully, your teachers were like mine, where they combined disciplinary literacy practices with content area literacy strategies as a part of their instructional process. [In general, content area literacy is the use of reading strategies across disciplines to comprehend what you read in any discipline, such as how summarization is a skill that can be applied regardless of content or field] These strategies blend into disciplinary literacy as content-area teachers begin to adapt the reading strategies for their specific discipline so that students are reading and writing as experts. For instance, while students in all disciplines can annotate a text as they read, how they annotate, and the types of codes they use will differ based on discipline. So, where does this leave disciplinary literacy in my eyes, and what does this mean for education?

Too often, we misunderstand the similarities and differences between content-area and disciplinary literacy, with people thinking they are disparate terms. While content-area literacy strategies support student comprehension, disciplinary literacy practices guide students to read, think, and communicate like experts in each discipline. However, within the disciplines, texts are specialized; vocabulary is precise. Reading strategies must morph to meet the challenge of reading and engaging with these diverse texts to move beyond surface-level or basic comprehension. The ability to read and communicate as an insider of certain disciplines results from reasoning, sociocultural practices, and engaging in inquiry as appropriate to the discipline (Carnegie Learning, 2024). These abilities grow stronger with teacher support, and disciplinary learning is practiced as students engage in the process of learning. The result is that teachers aren’t telling students what to do, what to know, and what to think; they are giving students the resources to acquire knowledge and the opportunities to apply it in new situations.

Personal Reflection of my Childhood Learning

And while I know this information now, I did not always understand the need for content area and disciplinary literacy. Therefore, I decided to reflect on my literacy teacher’s journey, and I invite you to think about what you remember about your journey, too. For instance, did you listen to someone read to you? Did you tell your own story to go with the illustrations in a picture book? Did you sing the alphabet and then match sounds with letters representing that sound? A healthy balance of these actions develops decoding and comprehension proficiency in the primary grades.

I learned about purposeful reading in the upper elementary grades—for entertainment or information. The text changed format, and its complexity grew. The way I read changed depending on what I was reading. My teachers modeled reading strategies for learning key vocabulary terms and for remembering complex concepts. Some teachers modeled unique practices specific to the discipline.

Personal Reflection as a Teacher Educator

Moving forward in my reflection, I reminisce about my teacher-educator experiences and consider the necessity of blending content area and disciplinary literacy so that all students can engage with their learning.

For almost ten years, I taught a required literacy recertification course, Content Area Literacy for Middle and High School Teachers. Ironically, I was also teaching college students who had graduated from high school and were underprepared for English Composition or College Algebra. I found myself working to develop literacy proficiency from two perspectives. It was enlightening. My college students demonstrated a lack of basic comprehension of text (content-area literacy); my in-service teachers taught through PowerPoint presentations, not expecting students to engage in a wide variety of complex text or purposeful learning that is part of the discipline (disciplinary literacy). Their students were graduating with the information teachers had vetted, not the ability to acquire and construct information independently.

About partway through those years, I became acutely aware that my teachers’ course was too focused on content-area literacy and not giving disciplinary literacy the attention it deserved. I had begun searching for a new textbook; the recent publications no longer used the two terms synonymously. My approach to content area reading and writing needed to make this change also. I began to differentiate content area literacy from disciplinary literacy with my in-service teachers while maintaining a blended approach using both. At the same time, my college expected me to teach integrated reading and writing to my underprepared college students as preparation for the discipline-specific texts they would encounter in their programs of study. I needed to blend the reading process, the writing process, content area literacy, and disciplinary literacy into an instructional model for constructing meaning from a wide variety of texts, both print and nonprint, for a wide variety of disciplines.

Disciplinary Literacy in Action

It appeared to me that many of my college students lacked the background knowledge and prior experiences to approach complex, disciplinary texts. We used class time for discussions, building shared knowledge to attack complex text. I layered key terms onto students’ vocabulary as they “read” images and other appropriate nonprint texts I had curated to elicit discussion. I guided their responses with open-ended questions, urging students to view the topic as an expert: Who might use this information? For what purposes?

Our primary reading source was an anthology of disciplinary texts: art, chemistry, history, psychology, biology, and literature. Students could apply content-area strategies while reading independently to grasp the general understanding of what they were reading. They discovered that reading diagrams was important in chemistry, timelines in history, examples or case studies in psychology, figurative language in literature, and images in art. Each discipline also carried its own key terms; familiar words took on new meanings appropriate to the discipline.

Responding to the text in each discipline became more than a test or writing a summary. Again, I used an open-ended question to guide students’ responses; what will you do with your new knowledge? Their thoughts, connections, and curiosities provided opportunities to demonstrate their understanding of real-world situations. According to Angela M. Banks, a doctoral student at Central Connecticut University, reading proficiency and disciplinary knowledge go beyond comprehension; they require complex skills: analysis, synthesis, organization, and evaluation (2024.) These skills are evidence of disciplinary literacy.

The Takeaway

My “underprepared” college students may have missed the high school experience of engaging in disciplinary literacy across their classrooms. They may or may not have been using content-area literacy strategies to gain a general understanding of a text. However, my class taught them how to blend the two to be more proficient college readers and writers. Providing this experience prepared them to construct meaningful information through complex text. Content-area literacy doesn’t end as disciplinary literacy begins; it blends into disciplinary literacy as students build competence and confidence to think like an expert.

Because the term disciplinary literacy is ever-evolving, I encourage you to return often to LiD’s blog as its writers continue to explore disciplinary literacy and what it looks like in the required and elective courses that students are choosing.

For additional information on the difference between CAL and DL, I refer you to

What Is Disciplinary Literacy and Why Is It Important? Carnegie Learning. https://www.carnegielearning.com/blog/what-is-disciplinary-literacy/#:~:text=Disciplinary%20literacy%20is%20about%20reading,in%20important%20ways%20for%20students.

Shanahan on Literacy, https://www.shanahanonliteracy.com/blog/disciplinary-literacy-the-basics

Reference

Banks, A.M. (2024). Training Secondary Teachers in Content-Disciplinary Literacy: A Blended Model for Meeting the Literacy Needs of Students in the Secondary Classroom. https://www.proquest.com/openview/da444e8e3146381b5d090c2338ae4a2c/1?cbl=18750&diss=y&pq-origsite=gscholar

About the Author

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After over 20 years in higher education, Charlene Aldrich officially retired in 2024. She remains connected to the literacy community through Literacy in the Disciplines, 6-12; she spends her spare time at Pet Helpers in Charleston, SC, a no-kill shelter for fostering and adopting dogs, cats, and small animals.