Please join Dr. Janelle Williams as she leads participants through the current state of disciplinary literacy implementation. She and her audience discuss common barriers to coherent implementation, as well as practical suggestions for starting well and maintaining momentum.
Session notes:
Please enjoy this discussion that connects formative and performance-based assessment with disciplinary literacy in social studies, science, and mathematics!
Throughout human history, competition has served as an essential catalyst for growth and development. It is widely recognized for enhancing cognitive functions, promoting reasoning and analytical skills, by engaging individuals in situations that challenge their adaptability and problem-solving abilities. Within the African-American community, traditional competitive experiences have often been rooted in athletic pursuits. While sports indeed offer significant cognitive benefits, such as fostering strategic and creative thinking, it is worthwhile considering additional avenues that may be equally or more effective in advancing cognitive development. One such approach, which I have utilized extensively to shape high school students, is the business case competition.
To provide context, business case competitions are collaborative, team-based events where students devise and present solutions to genuine business challenges before experienced professionals. Participants conduct thorough research and develop practical recommendations within a dynamic group environment. In relation to cognitive development, these competitions address three key areas:
Abstract Thinking
Business case competitions confront students with multifaceted problems that demand abstract thought. Participants must interpret extensive information concerning a company, its industry, and external factors. This complexity encourages creative, out-of-the-box thinking and requires a broad perspective to craft innovative solutions. The business sector frequently relies on original concepts that transcend established modes of thought, motivating students to deliver such insight.
Metacognition
Cultivating the ability to reflect on one’s thinking processes is vital for navigating life’s intricacies. Recognizing and adapting personal cognitive strengths and weaknesses promotes resilience in the face of evolving circumstances. Case competitions require methodical analysis to formulate effective solutions. Students not only justify their approaches but also communicate them to seasoned professionals, receiving constructive critiques that refine their thinking and support ongoing intellectual growth.
Problem Solving
Participation in business case competitions markedly strengthens students’ problem-solving skills. Confronted with intricate, real-world business dilemmas, students are required to systematically analyze a wealth of information, discerning critical issues and underlying causes. This process involves evaluating multiple variables and perspectives to construct well-reasoned, actionable solutions. By engaging in this rigorous exercise, students develop a disciplined approach to addressing multifaceted problems, preparing them to navigate challenges both in academic settings and future professional environments.
Beyond cognitive development, this project allows students to demonstrate disciplinary understanding in ways that mirror the authentic practices of the business field. In tackling real organizational challenges, students must interpret data, assess market dynamics, evaluate operational constraints, and craft strategic recommendations — the same analytical processes used by professionals. Their learning becomes visible through the creation of deliverables that reflect industry standards, such as executive summaries, financial models, strategic frameworks, and persuasive presentations. By engaging directly with the tools, language, and decision-making structures of the discipline, students move beyond theoretical knowledge and instead enact business thinking in context. This authentic performance reveals a deep, applied understanding that traditional classroom tasks rarely capture.
Business case competitions serve as powerful platforms for fostering essential cognitive skills among students. By engaging in these challenging events, students enhance their abilities in abstract thinking, metacognition, and problem-solving skills that are crucial for academic achievement and future career success. The dynamic and collaborative nature of these competitions not only sharpens students’ intellectual capacities but also prepares them to face complex, real-world challenges with confidence and creativity. Empowerment that remains with students for life. Is that not the point of education…
Practical Approach for a Classroom (Small Scale):
This project allows students to show what they know by doing the actual work of the discipline. Instead of completing worksheets or answering isolated questions, students take on real business challenges that require them to analyze information, evaluate options, and develop solutions. They must think like business professionals—considering audience, feasibility, and impact—while using academic language and evidence to support their decisions.
Their understanding becomes visible through what they produce and present. Students create proposals, explain their reasoning, and defend their ideas in front of others, often receiving feedback like what professionals’ experience. This process pushes them to refine both their thinking and communication. As a result, students are not just learning about business concepts, they are actively applying them in authentic, meaningful ways.
For teachers looking to begin embedding a business logic mindset in their students, the following quick lesson provides an accessible starting point.
Students will analyze a real-world business scenario and develop a recommendation supported by evidence.
Prompt:
A local business is losing customers. What could be the problem? What should they do?
Students:
Teacher introduces a short business case (ex: café losing customers).
Model aloud:
Model Sentence:
“The business is struggling because ___. One piece of evidence is ___. Therefore, they should ___.”
Students work in small groups:
Task:
Provide Sentence Frames:
✔ Encourage:
Each group presents:
Audience listens and responds:
Students respond individually:
“What was your group’s solution, and what evidence supports it?”
Presenter – Dr. Daris McInnis
Unit co-designed by Katelyn Zarr and Jessica McCullough
On a color-coded anchor chart are the ways historians read, write, and think: they interpret primary and secondary sources, identify bias, compare and contrast accounts, and ultimately synthesize information from multiple sources to create accurate narratives and timelines (Lent, 2017). While a concise (and visually appealing) resource, these practices cannot be taken exactly as they are, especially in K-12 schools. Underpinning these practices is the fact that the sources, accounts, and information to be interpreted are often one-sided, missing or entirely misrepresenting perspectives. What is required of educators [and students], then, is that the disciplines themselves are approached as pathways to social change, by which their texts, practices, and ways of knowing are continually questioned and reconstructed.
In our fifth-grade Causes of the American Revolution History Unit, this took the form of seeking out the perspectives of Black Americans, which were limited within district-provided textbooks and readily accessible primary and secondary sources in online databases. The very process of hunting for inclusive texts opened up a conversation between me and my fifth-graders: Why are only some perspectives prioritized, and, in turn, how can we amplify the voices of Black Americans when studying United States’ history? The snapshots below not only capture our search for multiple perspectives but also our reflections on the importance of doing so.
Questioning disciplinary texts can lead to the construction of inclusive and accurate pictures of history. When examining the Boston Massacre as one ‘cause’ of the American Revolution, for example, I noticed that our district textbook centers Paul Revere’s engraving, “The Bloody Massacre,” where British soldiers are depicted armed, against a row of white colonists, some wounded, some reaching to help one another, and some fleeing the square. While a biased depiction of the event itself, as many colonists, too, threw rock-filled snowballs at the soldiers, a key participant, Black American Crispus Attucks, is missing from the scene. I searched for alternate depictions of the event, pairing Paul Revere’s engraving with John H. Bufford’s, “Boston Massacre, March 5th, 1770,” which places Crispus Attucks front and center (Museum of the American Revolution, 2021). After joining the illustrations in a text set, my role in questioning texts, fifth-graders then compared and contrasted the accounts through a socratic seminar – drawing upon both to establish colonist and soldier involvement, infer deeper meanings, such as Attucks’ actions as a symbol of protection and independence, and contextualize the 13 Colonies as rooted in racism, a system perpetuated even in the media. By questioning which texts were included, and later, their contents, students were able to compare and contrast accounts to make sense of an event in its entirety and its connections to society at large.
Questioning disciplinary texts can amplify the joy and brilliance of Black Americans throughout history. Students’ inclusion and discussion of Attucks as a champion of independence and positive, social change left us eager to extend this work into writing. Using teacher, student, and librarian collected texts on Black Americans from the Revolutionary Era, including Crispus Attucks, Salem Poor, and Phillis Wheatley, students crafted biographies of their chosen ‘Revolutionary Hero.’ Only, when constructing the narratives or timelines of their hero’s role in the Revolution, students asserted the importance of learning from them today: Wheatley’s poems a means of social justice that can be continued today, Attucks an example of what it means to be a patriot, and Poor a symbol of unwavering bravery. By seeking out multiple accounts of history, students reconstructed the discipline by creating texts that amplified the perspectives and contributions of Black Americans that should have been included all along.
This Causes of the American Revolution Unit simply puts into action the pursuits of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Historically Responsive Literacy Framework, where she asserts criticality, or examining and disrupting power structures, as a non-negotiable of teaching and learning (2023). Not only does criticality build empathy, connection, and perspective, but it allows us to understand the world [and the disciplines] entirely – to seek and sustain social justice. Beautifully, this often looks like pushing the disciplines themselves. As my fifth-graders engaged in reflective discussion on their reading and writing in consideration of multiple perspectives, they shared things like, “Why isn’t it [history] always done this way? Otherwise, we wouldn’t know the full story!” Their comments demonstrate the power of criticality as well as the brilliance and readiness of students to change the disciplines in the pursuit of racial justice.
References
Muhammad, G. (2023). Unearthing joy: a guide to culturally and historically responsive teaching and learning. Scholastic Inc.
Lent, R. (2017). Disciplinary literacy: a shift that makes sense. ASCD Express, 12(12).
Museum of the American Revolution. (2021, March 5). Boston massacre and propaganda: changing depictions of Crispus Attucks. https://www.amrevmuseum.org/boston-massacre-and-propaganda-changing-depictions-of-crispus-attucks.
by Dr. Kristen Duncan
Happy Black History Month! This year marks the 100th anniversary of what began as Negro History Week, which evolved in to Black History Month. Founded by Carter G. Woodson, these Black celebrations are intended to help us celebrate the achievements of Black Americans as well as help us understand the ways Black Americans have contributed to the progress of the nation.
Black History Month has an amazing purpose—a purpose that is often not fulfilled in K-12 classrooms in any month. Michael Dumas has argued that schools are a site of suffering for Black students, and I contend that social studies classrooms often serve as sites of suffering for Black students. In traditional social studies curriculum, the only times Black people are present are slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow/Civil Rights Movement. What do these historical eras have in common? Dehumanization. Black people were seen as less than human during slavery, had their rights stripped as Reconstruction ended, and suffered through the oppression and dehumanization of the Jim Crow Era. Even in the Civil Rights Movement, as Black people fought for their rights, they were subsequently dehumanized by various arms of the government, including being assaulted with firehoses and dogs and losing their jobs for joining the NAACP amongst other things.
When students only see Black people appear in curriculum while being dehumanized, they come to associate Blackness with dehumanization. For Black students, there is the possibility that they internalize this association, but it is important to note that non-Black students may also begin to associate Blackness with dehumanization after seeing this reflected in social studies curricula year after year.
This is why Black joy is a necessity. Black joy is a form of resistance, as finding joy in the midst of oppression and dehumanization is, as Bettina Love has noted, the ultimate form of resistance. Black people have been able to find and create joy amidst some of the worst circumstances the U.S. has ever created, and it is that joy that has sustained Black people through oppression and dehumanization. Although Black joy has been present as long as Black people have been on North America soil, it remains largely absent from K-12 classrooms.
Teaching about and with Black joy requires an understanding of context and nuance. If we are to teach students about Black joy, we must position it as an act of resistance. We don’t want students to think that historical Black actors did not understand the pain of the oppression they endured. They absolutely understood their circumstances and sought joy despite their despair—that is what we need our students to see.
How do we go about this? We begin this work by incorporating Black joy in the curriculum in any place where there is Black pain. Enslaved people found ways to steal away and create joy away from the oppressive gaze of their enslavers. Black people in the Jim Crow South found numerous ways to experience joy in their segregated communities. And even when fighting for freedom, Black people found ways to create some joy for themselves, away from the arms of the state that sought to harm them for believing themselves equal to white people. Including Black joy in the curricular locations where Black pain is centered is a critical starting point.
We need students to understand that Black people are more than vessels of pain. Incorporating Black joy in classrooms helps students, both Black and non-Black understand the full range of Black humanity.
By Sarah Ryan-Purcell
“I teach in an all-white classroom and so I don’t have any of your books in my classroom”
(Brooklyn Academy of Music Organisation, 2017).
As I listened to author Jacqueline Woodson share this quote from an unnamed educator during an interview on “difficult” subjects in young people’s literature, I felt exposed. I taught in an all-white classroom in Ireland last year. I don’t recall placing or using a single book by a Black author in my classroom. At the time, I might have reasoned – subconsciously – that such texts are more relevant in the American context. Suffice to say, I’ve come a long way.
My reading list is not the only thing that has changed since I commenced my Masters in Literacy Education at West Chester University, Pennsylvania. I have developed a whole new perspective on how knowledge is constructed, whose voices are represented, and what it means to prepare our students to participate in a diverse, yet unequal, world.
I discovered Woodson’s picture books in the first semester of my Master’s program as Dr. Daris McInnis challenged us to select a ‘risky text’ which we could use as a read-aloud opportunity to engage in critical literacy with our students. I chose Mason’s (2010) These Hands, an intergenerational book in which a young boy named Joseph learns how his grandfather united with fellow Black labourers to protest racism in the workplace. Thanks to their actions, Joseph’s hands – and other hands the same colour as his – can do “anything in this whole wide world”! The choice felt risky, particularly for me. Since arriving to America, I have felt discomfort when discussing race with BIPOC students. I imagine that the students might be thinking, “Who does she think she is, teaching us about something she knows nothing about?”. However, over the past few months, I have learned to embrace this vulnerability. By allowing the students to see me learning alongside them, I shift the classroom dynamic. Authority becomes shared and knowledge becomes co-constructed. Enter: critical literacy.
I started the read-aloud with a guided discussion of the front cover, using visual thinking strategies (VTS, 2021). One child excitedly exclaimed, “my skin!” as she pointed to the boy on the front cover of the book. Another student remarked that the boy’s skin colour would probably be a significant aspect of the storyline because “it always is”.
That comment lingered with me.
Why is race “always” central when Black characters appear? Why are there so few books where Black children are simply present—neither celebrated nor victimized, but existing as fully realized protagonists? The answer, no doubt, lies in power. Perhaps an increase in publications of such books would mitigate the sense of ‘otherness’ that is still apparent in today’s society. I was particularly uncomfortable discussing the contents of the fifth page, as I wondered aloud why the grandfather had not been allowed to mix the dough in the Wonder Bread factory. The students, though young, were keenly aware that this was a restriction placed on Black people by their white employers. At this point, we began to discuss instances of power in the story. Most of the students participating in this read-aloud were Black, and I felt a sense of guilt on the part of white people for the injustice represented in the story. The students readily noted that white people wouldn’t eat bread baked by a Black person, even if the Black workers were allowed to bake it. I felt almost as though I was further oppressing them as I prompted them to consider why white people wouldn’t eat bread baked by a Black person. They concluded that white people believed Black people ‘had germs’ and would ‘make them sick’. The students were not only offering their opinions. They were engaging in interdisciplinary meaning-making, drawing connections between history, social studies, and personal knowledge. Upon reflection, I realize the impact of that discussion in helping these students to own their history and learn about the oppression of their relatives in the not-so-distant past. However, in the moment, I felt as though I was unearthing generational trauma.
Our read-aloud session was an embodiment of critical literacy as the students interrogated historical social practices and analyzed dynamics of power in society (Lewison et al., 2008). However, one important aspect was absent from our discussion: taking initial actions to promote social justice. Consequently, my next step is to consider how I might develop this standalone read-aloud lesson into a critical literacy unit plan on racism and workplace discrimination. Racism is not simply a topic to be covered, but rather anti-racism and inclusion are values to be instilled across the curriculum, values which the students can uphold beyond their formal education. In reflecting upon this read-aloud, I am prompted to identify ways through which I could support my students to “disrupt the commonplace” and promote social justice in small but meaningful ways (Lewison et al., 2008, p.9). This is a question I do not yet have an answer to, but I shall pursue the answer across my career.
In conclusion, engagement with this risky text read-aloud challenged me to step out of my comfort zone as a teacher. By leaning into discomfort and allowing students’ voices to guide our discussion, I witnessed the power of risky texts to illuminate social injustices, leading students to connect historical oppression with contemporary realities. This experience has demonstrated that teaching about race and inequality is not simply a “nice to have” in the curriculum but is rather a moral necessity. As a result, I am committed to creating spaces where all students, particularly those from marginalized communities, feel valued and empowered to challenge the status quo.
I have come to understand that what is not in the classroom library can often tell you more about the classroom environment than what is available for reading. Furthermore, when educators embed dimensions of critical literacy into their classroom practice, they not only nurture critical thinkers but rather empower both themselves and their students to be agents of change.
References
Brooklyn Academy of Music Organisation (2017, June 21). Jacqueline Woodson on “difficult” subjects in young people’s literature. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcRwYLHcyzc
Lewison, M., Leland, C., & Harste, J. C. (2008). Creating critical classrooms: K-8 reading and writing with an edge. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Mason, M. (2010) These hands. Haughton Mifflin Harcourt.
Visual Thinking Strategies (2021) VTS, available: https://vtshome.org [accessed 03 May 2021].
by Dr. Shari Revels-Davis
Growing up, history class always felt like a timeline of dates, names, and events to memorize. Textbooks presented historical accounts as settled truth—rarely revealing that history is constructed through sources, perspectives, and power.
When Black history is taught this way, students often receive a simplified version of complex struggles and resistance movements, stripped of grassroots voices and community leadership. History books also record only the story of the oppressor, not that of the oppressed. For example, Ron DeSantis, the current governor of Florida, stated in his defense of the presentation of slavery in the history books, as well as annexing the AP Black History high school courses and eliminating other courses that are considered “DEI” by the white population.
DeSantis defended Florida’s 2023 Black history standards, which included a requirement to teach that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit”. He argued that this clause, which suggests some enslaved people used their skills to their advantage, was intended to highlight the “resiliency” of Black Americans and was written by scholars.
Instead of taking the oppressor’s word on how historical events occurred, disciplinary literacy shifts history instruction from memorization to investigation.
By engaging in the authentic practices of historians, students learn to question narratives, analyze evidence, and uncover stories that have long been marginalized or erased.
The Discipline Lens: How Historians Build Knowledge
Historians do not simply read for information. They:
These skills are essential for understanding Black history purposefully and honestly.
The Problem with Textbook Narratives
Traditional historical texts often:
For example, the Civil Rights Movement is often portrayed as a few peaceful protests led by famous figures, while ignoring decades of organizing, youth activism, and local leadership.
So what does this look like in practice? Instead of replacing the textbook, we can place it in conversation with other voices. A primary source counterstory investigation allows students to analyze whose perspectives are centered—and whose are absent.
Classroom Strategy: Primary Source Counterstory Investigation
Step 1: Provide a textbook account of a historical event (e.g., voting rights, desegregation, Reconstruction)
Step 2: Pair it with primary sources such as:
Step 3: Students analyze using inquiry prompts:
Step 4: Students construct a revised historical account that includes multiple voices.
Student Impact
Teachers I work with report that inquiry-based history instruction leads to:
Students move from passive consumers of information to critical interpreters of the past.
Concluding Thoughts
History is not neutral. It is shaped by the voices we amplify and the ones we overlook. When we present historical struggles like the Civil Rights Movement as a handful of peaceful protests led by a few famous figures, we unintentionally flatten decades of organizing, youth activism, and local leadership into a simplified storyline. Our students deserve more than a highlight reel.
As educators, we have the opportunity—and responsibility—to complicate the narrative. By inviting students to examine primary sources, question dominant accounts, and seek out counterstories, we teach them that history is not something to read and forget but something to investigate and explore. We help them see that change is collective, contested, and ongoing.
Doing history in this way builds more than content knowledge. It builds critical thinkers who understand that whose story is told matters—and that they, too, are part of the historical record in the making.
By Dr. Kavin Ming, Winthrop University
