RM Winter 2016 FLIP

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Reading Matters
Commentary
| 76| Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 |
writing processes, common curricular and literacy instructional
approaches, tools for assessing adolescent literacies, ways of
supporting cultural and linguistic diversity, means of sustaining
a literate environment, and awareness of life-long professional
learning (South Carolina Department of Education, 2014).
While the competencies overlap with the International Reading
Association’s policy statement on adolescent literacy (International
Reading Association, 2012), and despite the welcome fiscal and
political attention provided to the complexity of adolescent
literacy, two key problems arise from R2S legislative policy.
Limitations of Read to Succeed
Legislation
First, since conceptions of literacy impact the official curriculum,
what counts as learning, and ultimately, the sorting and labeling
of students (Alvermann, 2001; Franzak, 2006; Ivey, 1999), R2S,
unfortunately, deemphasizes disciplinary literacies and risks
depriving adolescents of literate membership in the discipline.
Sociocultural notions of literacy, with an emphasis on literacy
practices in specific contexts and using situated discourses (Gee,
1996, 2007; Street, 1985) suggest adolescent communication with
and across discourse communities is a richer marker of literacy
than the discrete ability to pronounce words on a page or infer or
summarize or synthesize a text separate from authentic inquiry
and the production of knowledge. Making sense of an article on
mitosis requires an ability to recognize words in the text, connect
concepts to prior knowledge, or deduce the writer’s thesis, but
true scientific literacy would involve building on the crosscutting
concepts in the text as you assess, validate or critique the chemist’s
implications in light of your own recently collected data.
Seeing this literate complexity within a discipline, literacy
researchers have called for a reconceptualization of the content of
secondary school disciplines to afford students opportunities to
learn and critique the literacy practices used by disciplinary experts
to produce knowledge (Jetton & Shanahan, 2012; Lee & Spratley,
2006; Moje, 2008). While a content area literacy approach advocates
teaching students generalized processes for reading and writing
in order to help students access any text, a disciplinary literacy
approach views literacy practices (including reading practices)
as unique to each discipline and inseparable from disciplinary
knowledge (Draper et al., 2005; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). In
other words, students can develop deep conceptual knowledge in
a discipline only by using the habits of reading, writing, talking, and
thinking valued and used by the specific discipline (McConachie &
Petrosky, 2010, p. 8). Teaching for disciplinary literacies is a matter
of social justice. As Moje (2007) argued, “Teaching in 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”
(p. 1). More than just equitable opportunities to learn, socially just
disciplinary literacy teaching provides access to and opportunities
to question, challenge, and reconstruct mainstream knowledge
and practices (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). When students are
apprenticed into the dominant literacy practices in a discipline
and provided with opportunities to critically read, write, reason,
and participate in the discipline, they gain access and knowledge.
In contradiction, however, we are also in the midst of a rapid
national escalation and dependence upon the competency
testing of adolescents (and teachers) focused on traditional,
narrowed conceptions of literacy. South Carolina is not the first -
nor will it be the last- state to adopt more comprehensive literacy
preparation coursework for teachers aimed at improving literacy
instruction. Yet, the legislation’s narrow focus—as witnessed by
the required coursework and literacy standards for secondary
students—foregrounds content area literacy, thereby treating
perceived student literacy deficiencies with strategy instruction
with traditional print texts. In fact, teacher resistance to content
area literacy instruction is well established (O’Brien & Steward,
1990; O’Brien, Stewart & Moje, 1995). Secondary school teachers,
holding pre-conceived notions about teaching and learning
in their discipline (Holt & Reynolds, 1992), have often viewed
content area literacy instruction—with the cognitivist view of
a pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading instructional
process—as time consuming and inappropriate for learning in
their discipline (O’Brien & Stewart, 1990) while perceiving literacy
to be separate from disciplinary content (Livingston-Nourie &
Davis-Lenski, 1998). These beliefs and conceptions stem from their
own educational and life experiences (Clandinin, 1985 & Knowles,
1992) and influence literacy instructional decision making in the
classroom (Sturtevant, 1993). Barriers to literacy instruction in
content area classes may be more attitudinal than pedagogical
in nature as PSTs may not just lack an understanding of how to
scaffold student thinking with text but may altogether fail to see
the importance of doing so as a disciplinary teacher or have a
limited understanding of their own literate thinking with text (Hall,
2005). By requiring a three hour content area reading course and
not prioritizing disciplinary literacy, R2S deprives adolescents of
dominant disciplinary literacy knowledge and relegates literacy
to a set of content area skills steeped in teacher resistance.
A second problem lies in the legislation’s assumption that
traditional coursework in literacy creates highly qualified literacy
teachers despite research concerning the ways teachers create
“theories in practice” (Schon, 1983) altering views of students,
subject matter, and pedagogical appropriateness (Whitton,
Sinclair, Barker, Nanlohy, & Nosworthy, 2004, p. 219). Since
much of what a teacher learns occurs in practice rather than
in preparing to practice, PSTs must learn how to learn about
disciplinary literacy and literacy pedagogy in practice (Cohen &
Ball, 1999, p. 8). Unlike knowledge for practice that represents a
formal body of knowledge garnered through empirical research
or knowledge in practice that builds “practical knowledge”
through expert teachers, knowledge of practice occurs within
inquiry communities as teachers “treat their classrooms as sites
for intentional investigation” and “theorize and construct their
work and connect it to larger social, cultural and political issues”
(Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999, p. 3). When teacher learning is
understood as an apprenticeship where teachers appropriate the
language and stances of other teachers’ ongoing discourse around
literacy, teaching becomes agentive. R2S assumes PSTs will transfer
learning from teacher education courses to secondary school
classrooms while ignoring how teachers learn to teach in practice.