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 to teach math, science, or P.E.—something outside of my expertise. My identity is closely tied to my content.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I have become an advocate of the power of disciplinary literacy and the work of Michigan’s GELN Essential Instructional Practices for Disciplinary Literacy in the Secondary Classroom: Grades 6 to 12. I appreciate how Jacy Ippolito and Douglas Fisher introduce disciplinary literacy in their ASCD article, “Instructional Leadership for Disciplinary Literacy: “content-area teachers are best positioned to apprentice their students into discipline-specific ways of reading, writing, and communicating” (emphasis mine).

My grandpa managed an apple orchard for more than 40 years. When he first took the farm over, he had been previously working as a milkman and was not trained as a fruit grower. But by working beside other farmers, learning the language, attending classes and studying trees, varieties, and West Michigan weather, he became a local expert. My dad has followed in his footsteps, and now has his own apple orchard. Like my grandpa, he has no formal horticulture training, but worked day after day beside an expert in the orchard. He is now a passionate—and fussy—fruit grower because his childhood was an apprenticeship that taught him the skills and habits that running an orchard demands.

When teachers embrace disciplinary literacy, they are not abandoning their content nor their passion for that content, but embracing it tighter—they are apprenticing students into their ways of thinking, communicating, reading, and writing inside that content. They ask, “What does it take to become a skilled historian, scientist, mathematician, musician, artist, business person, or CAD designer?”  They are not asked to push aside their content in order to focus on disciplinary literacy, but instead to dig in deeper and think carefully about the kinds of relevant skills and critical thinking that their work demands. 

Disciplinary Literacy doesn’t make secondary teachers have to choose between their content or their students: they get to focus on both.