You don’t have to choose: Disciplinary Literacy as Path to Cultivating Passion
By Dana VanderLugt, Ottawa ISD Literacy Consultant and Disciplinary Literacy Task Force Member I remember the staff meeting well. I was early in my career as a middle school English teacher when my principal made a flippant comment, something like, “We’re not here for our content, but for kids. We love our students more than what we teach.” I instantly felt a pang of guilt. I did care about my students. I loved reading with and beside students, helping them to think deeper about texts, pushing their writing skills beyond what they believed was possible. I secretly even loved when they rolled their eyes about my passion around morphology or when I introduced the magic of the dash—my favorite punctuation mark. When it comes to teaching, I can’t separate kids and content: what I love is teaching students English. I, like possibly many other secondary teachers, have woken up more than once in a cold sweat from a nightmare: it’s the beginning of the school year and I have been assigned