RM Winter 2016 FLIP

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Reading Matters
Commentary
Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 |77|
Transforming pedagogy to support
adolescent literacy
Our hope is that this commentary can offer practical advice
for helping teachers and schools of education use the Read to
Succeed Act to envision and enact responsive disciplinary literacy
teaching. Literacy scholars have started teaching disciplinary
literacies to PSTs who identify with a particular discipline (Park,
2013; Wilder, 2014). Park noted “even if the pre-service teachers
resisted the idea of teaching disciplinary literacy, they accepted
that adolescents, on any given day, are being asked to navigate a
range of disciplinary discourses, knowledge, and even identities”
(p. 381). Those identities, discourses and knowledge extend
throughout and beyond the schooling experiences of students,
and expanded notions of adolescent literacy link literacy practices
with power and the critical literacy movement (Freire, 1986;
Shor, 1992). Coburn et al. remind us “when the policy promotes
instructional approaches that are ambitious or unfamiliar, teachers
are more likely to implement them in superficial ways rather than
making fundamental changes in their instructional approach”
(2011, p.573). Therefore, in order to facilitate this learning for
PSTs (and therefore disciplinary literacies for adolescents), we
offer four recommendations for teacher preparation programs:
1. Provide PSTs with ample opportunities to experience and
deconstruct literacies within their teaching discipline.
Since many PSTs hold limited understanding of the ways
reading, writing, speaking and reasoning are used to construct
disciplinary knowledge, PSTs need ample opportunities to
experience disciplinary literacies and inquiry. Redesigning content
area literacy courses to include disciplinary-specific literacy inquiry
can deepen a PST’s disciplinary literacies and disciplinary literacies
pedagogy. Even when multiple disciplines are represented in
the same course, PSTs can be guided through a three phase
cycle of inquiry into disciplinary literacies. At Clemson, Margaret
and her fellow social studies education PSTs enrolled in Phillip’s
junior year disciplinary literacies course, participated in historical
inquiries, doing what they seldom experienced in high school or
undergraduate history courses—creating and defending historical
arguments. First, PSTs experience disciplinary literacy using
reading, writing, and discourse practices to construct arguments
about unsettled questions hotly debated by historians. For
example, social studies PSTs applied historical reading heuristics
(Wineburg, 1991) to their collaborative reading of “Condemning the
Errors of Martin Luther” by Pope Leo X, “The Ship of Fools” painting
by Jheronimus Bosch, “Against the Robbing and Murdeirng Hordes
of Peasants” by Martin Luther, and a PBS secondary source entitled
“The Reluctant Revolutionary” to debate whether Martin Luther’s
reforms lead to a religious revolution in Europe. Then, PSTs used
reflective writing prompts to deconstruct their use of historical
reading heuristics (sourcing, contextualixing, corroborating, and
close reading) while analyzing the complexity of texts, identifying
requisite background knowledge, and exposing the limits of
their own ability to read, reason, and construct arguments across
multiple texts like historians. Finally, in stage three, Phil guided
PSTS through a disciplinary-specific pedagogical framework to
envision additional scaffolding needs for adolescents and to
design a unit of study extending from the disciplinary inquiry. This
process scaffolded PST understanding of how to create historical
inquiry questions, build text sets, identify text complexities, and
use formative assessment to determine appropriate scaffolds for
students. PSTs expanded notions of literacy teaching by routinely
experiencing the literacies within their teaching discipline.
2. Literacy learning needs to occur within a professional
learning community in collaboration with practicing
teachers-- the preparation of PSTs cannot occur without
apprenticeship and engagement with current teachers.
But, what happens when Margaret encounters the norms of
literacy instructional practice by other social studies teachers
during her field placement and student teaching? How might
the literacy pedagogy of fellow teachers validate or contradict
disciplinary literacy teaching? And, in what ways could a re-
envisioning of the partnership between teacher education
programs and local schools built shared disciplinary literacy
teaching frameworks? In Powerful Teacher Education (2013), Linda
Darling-Hammond catalogues seven preservice preparation
programs that are succeeding with innovative practices. One of
their common practices includes connecting strongly with the
classrooms in which student teachers are placed. It is not enough
to expand the academic grounding in literacy-- new teachers
need to be supported in placements that blur the boundaries
between the development of theoretical knowledge and
the application of that knowledge in classrooms. Clemson
University, where we work, currently integrates methodology
classes with lab settings; however, we need to be more targeted
in those placements, particularly if we are asking students to
both consider disciplinary literacy practices and to understand
literacy practices as complex, situated and fluid. The relationship
with mentor teachers is key in ensuring both that students are
working with a teacher who shares this ideology and who will
help them find spaces to explore literacy, both as practiced in a
classroom and in the actual lived experiences of student lives.
To this end, Clemson’s faculty-in-residence initiative places a
faculty member in a local school for a semester in order to facilitate
collaborative inquiry amongst teachers. As Phillip, acting as an
instructional coach, meets with social studies teachers to support
their disciplinary literacy instruction, Margaret’s placement at
the same school affords her an opportunity to both participate
in the design of responsive disciplinary literacy instruction and
build shared beliefs and practices. PSTs need to see practicing
teachers enact disciplinary literacy teaching practices, yet due to
the relative newness of disciplinary literacy teaching, practicing
teachers also need to develop first hand experience teaching for
disciplinary literacies. With Phillip guiding the group through the
same three stage process of experiencing disciplinary literacies,
deconstructing literacy practices, and designing additional
scaffolds for adolescent learners, all teachers-both preservice
and inservice—can be provided with the professional learning
spaces to inquire into the disciplinary literacy needs of students.
Therefore, schools of education must harness the potential power
of R2S and engender authentic school-university partnerships
where practitioners, PSTs, and literacy professors jointly share