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According to the authors in the article Developing children’s understanding of the rational numbers: A new model and an experimental curriculum, many students struggle with comprehension in the discipline of math; specifically when it comes to rational numbers and decimals in general.  They did some research of their own and found several strategies that proved to be useful and made these a part of the article. After reading through these proposed suggestions, only one really stuck out to me as disciplinary literacy. This suggestions was “Adult- versus child-centered instruction. A second explanation is that teach- ers take no account of children’s spontaneous attempts to make sense of the rational numbers, thus discouraging children from attempting to understand these numbers on their own and encouraging them to adopt an approach”.  To me, it sounds like Moss is not giving teachers credit who have a student centered classroom. I know I didn’t always have a student centered classroom either, but I was in fourth grade back in 2007. It is 2019 people!  

Being a part of duquesne’s education program, I have been given the opportunity to observe in many different classrooms and most of them were student centered and inquiry based.  Teachers are merely there to ask guiding questions, to support the needs of students who might be struggling and to offer advanced work for students who might zoom through the initial instruction.  Students are allowed to explore mathematics and to have fun doing so.  

This is the teacher’s job to ensure that their students are engaged by creating an engaging curriculum.  As a pre-service teacher, this is a goal of mine. I know that not every lesson of mine will be perfect the first time around and this requires reflection on my part based on how the students did and how they were engaged.  However, I have so many resources to help me, including my courses that have taught me how to create a student centered classroom, because this is now the expectation. The expectation is for exploration, discussion and overall, disciplinary literacy where students are placed in the shoes of mathematicians.  Sharing and discussing how you got what you got as a students can help your peers make connections. There is plenty of research including this article that proves students learn so much more and comprehend more when there is sharing out involved. Math is a tricky subject because there are so many entry points that can give you the same answer and students having different preferences, are likely to use several of these approaches.  The more approaches a struggling learner can see, the more likely they are to make the necessary connections.

Reference

Moss, J., & Case, R. (1999). Developing children’s understanding of the rational numbers: A new model and an experimental curriculum. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 30, 122-147.

I read “We Real Cool” by Kirkland, D. E., & Jackson, A,  for my main article this week. It was about more than disciplinary literacy, my takeaway was inclusion.  Being able to apply different teaching strategies in my class so that it can connect with all students. This specific article did research on black students in a school and looked at how literacy and music of their own race affected their self image in school.  It was really neat to read the things that affected these students. I had never thought about how a genre of music affected people in general. I’ve always thought of it as your own likes and interests affected the music you listen to, but this article opened my eyes to quite the opposite.  One of the big things in lessons that I have learned I need to include over the last 4 years in this education program is anticipatory sets. Normally this is just an attention grabber, but music and music videos can definitely be attention grabbers. Something I am intrigued by now, is finding manipulatives and anticipatory sets that can reach more than one type of student.  For the black students in this study, it was hip hop, for my friends at home when I was in high school, it was country or funny rap music. I know I will have diverse learners and I don’t want to play 3-4 different songs for one lesson to reach all my learners, but I don’t want to disregard any of them either. I am going to be doing more research of my own on this as I am intrigued.  Im hoping my answer is more than just “read your classroom” because I think that would just be generalizing.

Kirkland, D. E., & Jackson, A. (2009). “We real cool”: Toward a theory of black masculine literacies. Reading Research Quarterly, 44(3), 278-297.

As we have discussed in our class, many of us didn’t learn disciplinary literacy skills in our own education.  Slowly, we have been talking about different strategies and how it is easily implemented and you don’t have to verbally say “alright class, we are going to be learning through disciplinary literacy today”.  One question I am pondering is should the students know why we teach this, or should they just be taught this to enhance their comprehension skills? However, this isn’t the main point of this blog, as you may have suspected from the title.  I want to talk about math. How teaching math through disciplinary literacy can change the way students feel about learning math.

I feel I am one of the few people I know that actually enjoys doing math.  Math is the reason I went into education actually. I want to keep learning more and to help others learn more about math, but more than that, I want to make it enjoyable for my students. I am always hearing people say how they despise math or how awful math was to them.  Perhaps it would have been different had they learned through the lense of a mathematician. Someone who is confident but also curious and knows how to explore the content. I think something that turns a lot of my peers off to the idea of mathematics is that they weren’t allowed the opportunity to explore math.  They were given an algorithm, and they had to solve it the way the teacher said and if they didn’t? They would lose points on assignments.  

Luckily, I was allowed to explore math.  In fact, I often arrived at my answer a different way than the teachers had said, but in a way that made sense for me and made me quicker and more confident in my abilities.  I believe this was disciplinary literacy. The teacher allowing me to explore. I know I keep saying explore, but it takes me back to my professor talking about his son in the skate park.  He kept saying it was disciplinary literacy because he was learning on his own and having fun without dad telling him exactly how he should be doing it. This probably made it a lot more fun for him.  But what about the sons who have to put their right foot in just the correct position and move their knee in the exact way? Would this be fun? I say no. I say that is exactly how it was in most math classes growing up.  I say this has got to be a main reason, if not the reason students hate math and have no interest in it after they have completed their required courses.

The reading I chose to read, spoke about changing math, but I didn’t get too far in reading it before I realized it was written in 1998.  This was long before I took a math class, which makes me wonder why are we still talking about transforming the math class? Has it already been done?  Should it already be done? Is the point of my blog to convince someone of why we should be changing, or just to agree that this change was necessary? I’m not sure at this point in all my research and readings, but I am curious and I intend to continue reading about this in math and to also talk to my host teacher for the semester on their thoughts as well as observe the class to see if it is disciplinary literacy based.  I plan on continuing this search in my blogs to come.

Citation:

Borasi, R., Siegel, M., Fonzi, J., & Smith, C. F. (1998). Using transactional reading strategies to support sense-making and discussion in mathematics classrooms: An exploratory study. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 29(3), 275. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/223501394?accountid=10610

I really liked how in the Ted video we were required to watch, that the teacher gave the students an opportunity to engage with the math problem.  First, she used some scaffolding questions and then she used “wait time”. I think in all subjects wait time is necessary. I think reflecting on what you know and what you are learning are both very important parts of teaching and learning.  

In class, we talked about how it is important to be able to articulate what you are thinking and why you think certain things.  These reasoning skills are typically supporting ideas with factual evidence behind them when it comes to science; but when it comes to mathematics, I think a lot of it is just conceptual understanding.  The way one student comes to an understanding is probably not going to be the way another student comes to the same understanding. In science, you understanding of mitochondria is factual. You know what it is, what it does and where it belongs.  For comparing fractions, you need to conceptualize how big it would be and understand how you got that model, you need to understand how to compare fractions and there are many ways to do this. In fact, I just recently got the opportunity to reflect on this.  I used to think math was math. You were given a question, you responded with an answer that everyone would solve with a specific algorithm and that would be that. The end.

However, this is not the case and as a future educator, I am learning that I need to be ready to anticipate all the different ways a student might engage with the same content.  I have to think about how the textbook might cause some misconceptions in word problems and I have to think about how some words have a double meaning and students might get stuck on that.  This is something that completely fits in with what I understand disciplinary literacy to be.  

Back to the te talk video, she then had students pair and share their thoughts.  I recently learned that it is important for students to not only have original ideas, but for them to listen and think about the ways other students engage with math.  Students are then able to communicate better and also to make connections, which will most likely lead to a better understanding of the content. It’s a win win. Also when students are engaging with their own ideas and other ideas, they are listening, speaking and reading, just in the first minute of the video, which are all different forms of disciplinary literacy within this one content area.  

As I am continuing to reflect on what disciplinary literacy looks like in each of the content areas, I am slowly wrapping my brain around exactly what disciplinary literacy is in my own understanding and this means I am figuring out how I will incorporate it in my own classroom in the future.

“ It’s not enough, for instance, to inventory the names and dates from a history text; a good historical summary would include the relevant social, political, or economic causes and consequences. Similarly, literary summaries need to do more than capture plot elements; they need to include characters’ emotional responses and motivations.”

This quote from Tuesday’s reading, Does disciplinary literacy have a place in elementary school? really spoke to me.  The reason being that in school, I never liked history and its not because I ever felt incompetent or misinterpreted readings and context of the subject.  It was because new dates and names were constantly being jammed into our heads. We would study flashcards and timelines until we went cross eyed, but for what?  We would use these dates for one test and then, guess what. We would learn NEW dates and new names. Again. If someone would have asked me what my definition of a history class in school was, you better believe I would have said just that; that it’s a class where you talk about people and the specific dates they did specific things.

Being in my senior year of this program now, I do have quite a different perspective on social studies and history. I am not dreading the possibility of teaching it.  I think this is because we learned about inquiry, scaffolding, anticipatory sets, student-centered classrooms and so much more. And though I am still currently trying to wrap my brain around disciplinary literacy and exactly what it looks like, I believe the new strategies are important.  I believe they are disciplinary literacy and that means they are engaging the students to think like a historian in the class.  

Now this quote didn’t just speak to me because it said what the summary shouldn’t do, but it spoke to me because of what the summary should do.   “Capturing… emotional responses and motivations”. Yes! How are the students to think like a historian if all they know is what the historians look at?  The students need to know how historians think! Their process of studying the content. This is something I never had the opportunity of in my own elementary, middle school, or high school career.  It’s something that is encouraging me further, as a teacher to be involved with history and social studies. Maybe that’s what I will end up teaching. If so, I hope that I am successful in giving my students a proper class involving disciplinary literacy and teaching them more than just dates and names that they will forget by next term. 

• How does disciplinary teaching look across the different school subjects?

According to Disciplinary literacy through the lens of the Next Generation Science Standards, all the different school subjects apply the same types of knowledge, but their practices vary.  This article had a really good table for comparing the different practices across the school subjects. One example of this includes using computational thinking (math) and across the subjects they vary.  In science, “mathematics and computation are fundamental tools for representing physical variables and their relationships”. In literature and composition “analyzing poetic meter and rhyme patterns”. In mathematics, “Reasoning abstractly and quantitatively (MP2) is important. As large data sets that require computers for analysis become more commonplace, students need to understand and explain their reasoning”.  In social studies, “Using geospatial technologies to create maps that show and explain spatial patterns of cultural and environmental characteristics”. So, just comparing this one objective across the subjects, you can see the disciplinary teaching differs in what is applicable to their own content. A couple paragraphs after this chart, it seemed to me, this article was saying that literacy/writing focuses on just that for the main part, but the other subjects not only focus on their content, but how the other contents, such as reading are important for being successful in the other subjects.

According to “But What Does It Look Like? Illustrations of Disciplinary Literacy Teaching in Two Content Areas, “Disciplinary literacy practices are a shared language and symbolic tools that members of academic disciplines use to construct knowledge alongside others”.  I think this sums up what I was trying to say. By this, I mean they all have similarities andre able to engage with each other in their own ways. Just like for english, they are able to use math for poetry when learning meters and rhyme.

Works cited

Rainey, E. C., Maher, B. L., Coupland, D., Franchi, R., & Moje, E. B. (2018).  But what does it look like? Illustrations of disciplinary literacy teaching in two content areas.  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 61(4), 371-379.

Houseal, A., Gillis, V., Helmsing, M., & Hutchison, L. (2016). Disciplinary literacy through the lens of the Next Generation Science Standards.  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 59(4), 377-384.

Also, “they don’t know that we know they know we know”

https://media.giphy.com/media/h3nkaMjTKduSJ1PEYF/giphy.gif

What is the difference between Content, Content area and Disciplinary Literacy? 

Content Area is the content we teach; whether that be science, or math, or history.  Students will have to analyze how we read and write differently in that subject than we would in another class.  

Disciplinary Literacy focuses on improving student reading.  Their reading styles and how one reader may need to slow down, while another reader may need to repeat the paragraph to comprehend the words on the page.  So, this is what the student needs to do, in order to be successful at reading and remembering.

Content is able to engage the students with the world.  Specifically with the nature of the subject. Students are able to understand what types of writing and research and other variables that are what make up the subject area text.  How this text differs from another area’s text.

An example my friend used was that the content may be the parts of a cell. The content area would be science because thats what the content fell into. The disciplinary literacy would be engaging students with writing, speaking, reading and communicating the way the experts would. Who are the experts who are making the content up?

What does “metadiscursivity” have to do with disciplinary literacy? Why is it important?

“To be metadiscursive means that people not only engage in many different discourse communities but also know how and why they are engaging, and what those engagements mean for them and others in terms of social positioning and larger power relations”.  To answer this question, im going to break down this quote from the Moje reading.  

The first thing that sticks out to me is that it says people have to engage in different discourses.  According to Gee, this means they have to engage with different identity kits. All the pieces and reasonings involved in new or different social languages.  This includes different subjects and classrooms at school for a student, which relates directly to what I stated disciplinary literacy is.  

The second thing is they have to know how and why they are engaging.  The “how” part is what content area is. How are these students engaging? Are they successfully engaged?

The third and last thing is social positioning and power.  Knowing your content, means understanding and engaging with it.  It means to understand the kinds of variables, such as the author’s social positioning or power and analyze how this affects what the content is.

How does Moje’s disciplinary theory compare and contrast to Gee’s perspectives on reading and language                                                                                                                                                           

The simplest way I can think of to answer this question, is Gee stated what was known about learning.  The different properties of discourses and social languages, so on, so forth. Moje has stated several times in his article that his theory is in fact different from the typical theories of the topic.He thinks he has challenged what it means to learn the subject areas or disciplines.  He says the key premise is that the disciplines are constituted by the discourse.

Gee, J. (2001). Reading as situated language: A sociocognitive perspective. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 44(8), 714-725.

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.

Wosley, T.D., & Lapp, D. (2017). Literacy in the disciplines: A teacher’s guide for grades 5-12. Chapter 1. New York, NY: Guilford