Rooted in Social Justice: Part I

Rooted in Social Justice: Part I

By Dr. Rosalyn Shahid, Wayne RESA, and Melissa Brooks-Yip, Washtenaw ISD

Scales of justice


The first in a series telling the history, purpose, and direction of the Essential Instructional Practices for Disciplinary Literacy: Grades 6-12. 


While the Essential Instructional Practices for Disciplinary Literacy: Grades 6-12 were presented to the educational community in 2016, did you know the roots go back to 2008?  In 2008, Dr. Elizabeth Moje was called as an expert witness in The Right to Read Case in Highland Park, MI. Her testimony addressed two essential questions: What does instruction look like when it’s serving adolescents well? and What must change to produce equal access to literacy?  Answering these questions became the impetus for drafting what would become the Essential Instructional Practices for Disciplinary Literacy: Grades 6-12From its inception, the intent of the 6-12 Essentials has been to provide a roadmap for secondary educators and policy makers to create a more socially just, action-oriented, and literacy-enriched educational experience for youth, especially those who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and underestimated. 


To find out more about the complex history of the 6-12 Essentials, we sat down for an interview with the lead researchers, Drs. Elizabeth Moje and Darin Stockdill. We learned the in-depth history of how the 6-12 Essential Practices came to be, the process and purpose of writing them, what is meant by essential, adolescent literacy vs. disciplinary literacy, and the hopes for future impact of the Essentials on education. These learnings will be featured in upcoming issues of this blog. In this post, we have lifted excerpts from our conversation that provide greater clarity on the history of and context for which the 6-12 Essentials were developed. 


Rosalyn and Melissa: Can you talk a bit about your research in connection to the Detroit Right to Literacy Case?


Dr. Moje: I set out to define the conditions that need to happen (in the classroom) so that all students can access text. What does it mean to share practices for teaching in socially just ways?  Teaching socially just ways, and in ways that produce social justice, requires the recognition that learners need access to the knowledge deemed valuable by the content domains, even as the knowledge they bring to their learning must not only be recognized, but valued (Moje, 2007).  


Rosalyn and Melissa: How did your work on the Detroit Right to Literacy and Highland Park Cases inform the 6-12 Essential Practices? 


Dr. Moje: For me, disciplinary literacy is all about critical literacy, access, and being able to speak back to the disciplines. I feel like the Essentials are about helping children understand that disciplines are human constructions. Entering the disciplines is like entering a new culture, and teachers need to be the Cultural Brokers of the discipline they teach. So much of the Essentials is about understanding the discourse conventions of disciplines and students becoming questioners of text, particularly whose interests are being served. I really appreciate the new direction that this work is taking with making a commitment to being anti-racist and explicitly centering social justice.


Dr. Stockdill: Any good work in education should never be done, so we want to be constantly revisiting our work through new lenses. A really helpful framework for me is education for social justice and socially just education. All students should have access to challenging, academically rich content, and practices. Disciplinary literacy is part of that in a socially just education system. Making sure that students have access to high quality education has been a driving force behind this work from the very beginning. 


Rosalyn: Thank you for sharing this important context and history. It humanizes the work. It takes the words off of the page and replaces it with the faces of children. 


Dr. Moje: I just want to add that we know that literacy doesn’t stop at 3rd grade. Our student’s literacy learning really spans the K-12 career and beyond, and it’s not just in our English Language Arts classrooms. Children are always learning to read and always reading to learn. The Essential Practices are about routines that teachers should be doing across disciplines and grade-bands. 


The Disciplinary Literacy Essentials work is designed to support the cycle of learning to read and reading to learn by committing to context in each classroom and fighting the “skills and process” only mindset when it comes to learning disciplinary content. The 6-12 Essentials are written in each discipline: ELA, Social Studies, Science and Mathematics, in such a way that gets away from a print-dominated idea of text; as Moje states, “we need multiple forms of (text) representation to get access to meaning.” Disciplinary literacy is about navigating these forms and gaining access to the discipline. With additional work in the following years from Dr. Darin Stockdill and Dr. Michelle Kwok, that first list of practices became the Essential Instructional Practices for Disciplinary Literacy: Grades 6-12 that were presented to the educators of Michigan in 2016.


References

Moje, E. B. (2007). Chapter 1: Developing socially just subject-matter instruction: A review of the literature on disciplinary literacy teaching. Review of Research in Education, 31(1), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732X07300046001



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