How can disciplinary literacy practices in social studies help us to cultivate the skills people need for life?

by Stacie Woodward

Disciplinary Literacy and Social Studies Consultant, Oakland Schools


Social studies education should prepare students not just for college and careers, but for life---particularly, civic life.  All students deserve to leave high school with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that enable them to effectively do things like serving on juries, deciphering the platforms of political candidates, spotting fake news, and engaging in problem-solving and informed action to better their own communities.  


Perhaps now, more than ever, the experiences in social studies classrooms need to focus on building the critical thinking, problem-solving, and participatory skills vital to engaged citizenship. Thankfully, after years of marginalization of the social studies and the narrowing of the curriculum as a response to the demands of high-stakes testing, there is an emerging emphasis on shifting toward this type of powerful social studies education.


In 2013, the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies, more commonly known as the C3 Framework, was published. The C3 Framework lays out a powerful vision for social studies education that positions disciplinary literacy front and center.   With disciplined-inquiry grounded in addressing real-world problems at its core, the C3 Framework helps many of us reimagine what a modern social studies education might become--engaging, authentic, and even transformative.  


The C3 Framework is helping to move us in social studies away from an emphasis on the coverage of content or standards and generic literacy strategies and toward really going deep into the content with students as we apprentice them into the specific ways of thinking, speaking, writing, and knowing of our discipline.  


What’s important about this shift is that it is these literacies, disciplinary literacies, that will prepare students for the demands of engaged, informed, and fulfilled lives in the 21st Century.  Truly, the value of disciplinary literacy in our world today cannot be overstated. 


You might think about it like this--basic literacy skills may help a person read and understand a report that, let’s say, assures the public that vaping is not harmful to your health.  However, it is disciplinary literacy skills--the skills that experts in the field use reflexively-- that will compel a person to ask the right questions which might reveal that the report was actually paid for by the vaping industry. It’s those same disciplinary literacy skills that will compel them to seek other credible sources on the topic and not share fake news on social media. (Want to help your students become experts in evaluating claims and evidence online? Check out this research-based and free Civic Online Reasoning curriculum from Stanford)


I know I don’t need to convince you that we should be helping kids hone these skills in our social studies classrooms.  In my experience, social studies educators overwhelmingly support C3 and its shift toward an inquiry-based approach that teaches students to leverage the knowledge, reasoning processes, and dispositions of the disciplines.  


The question teachers ask isn’t should we do this, it’s HOW do we do this? 


This is where Michigan’s Essential Practices for Disciplinary Literacy in the Secondary Classroom can serve as an important tool to guide administrators, teachers, and instructional coaches as they take up the necessary shifts in planning, teaching, and assessing called for by the C3 Framework. The essential practices document clarifies the research-based moves that teachers should implement as they pursue the vision of social studies teaching and learning laid out in the C3 Framework.  


Social studies teachers are best positioned and suited as insiders within their disciplines to apprentice their novice students into developing the critical skills, knowledge and dispositions of their disciplines. If social studies teachers take up the Essential Practices for Disciplinary Literacy AND receive the support and resources they need to do so, our students will not only grow their content knowledge, but will, more importantly, grow their ability to independently create, critique, communicate, and share disciplinary knowledge.  These literacies, honed in their social studies classes, will not only prepare them for college or careers, but for engaged and informed civic life. 


Looking for ideas to take up disciplinary literacy in your social studies classroom? Check these out! 

The Oakland Schools Social Studies Consultants curate resources for educators to use as they navigate teaching during these historic times. Many of the approaches here leverage disciplinary literacy practices in social studies. 


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