Would you read Anna Karenina the same way you’d digest a new article on respiratory illnesses in “Science”? The answer feels obvious, even if the concept used to describe that difference—"disciplinary literacy"—sounds wonky.
Disciplinary literacy goes beyond the idea of reading widely in the content areas and their own vocabularies. It underscores that the tools one uses when conducting a literary analysis of Levin’s character development is different from those one would use to peruse a technical study on COVID-19. But the connection to the general goal of skilled reading is clear: Learning how to read in different disciplines can enhance the content knowledge that underlies reading comprehension.
Timothy Shanahan, who sat on the 2000 National Reading Panel and later helped develop the concept of disciplinary literacy, took questions from EdWeek on how it fits into K-12 schools’ larger aims on reading.
His responses have been edited for length and clarity.
How would you distinguish between content-area literacy and disciplinary literacy?
Content-area literacy is an older idea, and it basically came about in the 1940s and kind of evolved from there. But, the basic idea of it was that you could teach kids to read their textbooks in the various fields if you just taught general reading ability, if you built their vocabulary, if you taught them to use a dictionary, if you taught them to summarize text and so on and so forth. The whole point of it was how do you improve kids’ reading achievement when they’re no longer getting reading classes. So the social studies teacher could teach reading, which basically just meant they’d have them read text and comprehend it, and you’d teach them some study skills and things like that. It got a lot of pushback on that from math teachers and science teachers and history teachers who went, you know, my job is to teach math and science and history.
Disciplinary literacy is a newer idea, and it doesn’t come out of the reading field specifically. It originally came out of science and social studies, and essentially it’s a recognition that each field has a different body of text and different types of text that readers have to read, and that readers really have to have a different stance. Reading history is very different than reading literature, [which] is very different than reading science, and so on. And so the notion is if you actually want to learn science and understand science, then you have to read more like a scientist.
You have to approach the text in the way that a historian would, the way that a mathematician would, or a literary critic. And that means you have to have some understanding of how research is done in those fields, how knowledge is created. You have to have some of how it’s communicated and how that differs from how other fields do it. And you have to have a set of strategies and approaches that actually allow you to successfully take on the books in your field, the books and articles and all the kinds of texts in your field.
How has the research about disciplinary literacy advanced over the last 20 years?
You know, there’d been people doing research on this really since the late 1980s. But some work that my wife and I did really kind of crystallized it, it pulled it together. We had actually looked at how people read science and history and mathematics, how the experts do it and the notion was that you needed to build curricula out of that. And what’s happened since that time is there certainly have been attempts to build such curricula, especially in history, but also in some of the other fields. And there have been a handful of studies now that are really instructional studies: Can you teach that? Does it make any difference? Does it change anything for the kids?
And in fact, the studies that have been done so far are hopeful, they suggest that kids really do take it on. That kids are really interested in knowing what it is adults are doing; you know, it’s all kind of secret, and so instruction that lets teenagers in on it, they eat that up and it does improve their reading ability and their ability to acquire knowledge in those fields.
And so not surprisingly, you don’t get the same kind of pushback from teachers. [If] you tell a social studies teacher, “Your job is to teach reading and to teach history,” they’re out. If the notion is, “You guys read texts differently than other people, and you’ve got to let kids in on that,” ... they buy into that pretty easily. … That person who’s really committed to science or history, the notion of letting kids in and letting them apprentice in their field, that’s exciting to them; that’s a real turn on.
How would you describe what happens in elementary and lower secondary as contributing to disciplinary literacy?
First of all, there’s just the basic kinds of reading skills that everybody needs. You have to be able to decode, you have to be able to read text, you have to have basic comprehension skills. And certainly elementary schools, that’s an important part of what they do. And we don’t want to lose sight of that. A second aspect of what’s important is knowledge. Reading comprehension is at least partially using what you know to make sense of the information. And it’s really never too early. Even preschoolers are interested in scientific concepts, [like] why does that ball fall on the floor. And so we don’t want to lose those social studies lessons and science lessons and arts lessons in the elementary school, because that gives kids a base.
When should they start actually looking at text as being disciplinary? Certainly not at the beginning. We know that because anyone who takes a 2nd grade content text and compares them, they’re very similar: The formats, the layouts, the kind of information they share, the way they share the information is very consistent. But that starts to change as you move through the grades.
And some programs and some bodies of texts do that more quickly, but by the time you’re in middle school, frankly, a science text and a social studies text are really different, they’re presenting very different information. They’re using tables and charts very differently and so on and so forth. … When you actually have texts that reflect how people think in the field, you can start doing it. And so it really can begin in certainly by the upper elementary grades.
If you have history text that isn’t just a series of facts, but is starting to deal with issues that there are historical disagreements on, that gets really interesting. And that could be in 5th grade.
To your point, I have seen some really great history materials from maybe grade five and up. But do we have those materials for science? I mean, you’re not going give kids “The Lancet.”
There’s a little bit, but not as much as there has been in social studies. The scientific community has certainly embraced these ideas, but more slowly. There are things that we could be easily doing in upper elementary grades with some of the graphic information that’s provided in a science book and the charts and tables.
One of the things I learned in doing the work [was] when you’re dealing with chemists and hard science folks, I think they’re much more aware of how this stuff works, to tell you the truth. They’ve got a longer history of it. And one of the things that they shared with us was that in science, you’re not dealing with points of view like you are in history; you’re trying to describe something about the natural world. It’s something real. It’s not a fiction. This isn’t the creation you do in literature and in mathematics. This is a real thing, and language is inadequate for describing it. And so you try to put it into words, but you also try to do it graphically.
Now, we don’t get a lot of the mathematical representation in elementary [science], but you definitely get the graphic, you definitely get the verbal. And so even just teaching kids how to put together this chart with what the paragraph says is really a big deal. And you don’t do that in literature and, and you really don’t do much of it in social studies, but it’s central in science.
Something that’s been slightly odd to me is that despite all of the talk about the science of reading, the field hasn’t really talked a lot about disciplinary literacy as an element. How would you describe how it fits in?
[The term] has largely been about phonics and decoding and things like that—that’s the way the public has heard it. That’s what the policymakers and the media folks have talked about. And that’s legitimate [though] you will get continuous pushback from the field saying, no, no, no, there’s a lot more to it.
I’d say we’re at a fairly early stage in disciplinary literacy when it comes to, do you have a lot of studies showing that if you teach this, kids achieve more? And I can say we have some. Twenty years ago, I couldn’t say that. Now I can say we have some, and we still need more. We still even need more of the kind of curricular study that [my wife and co-researcher Cynthia Shanahan] and I were doing of figuring out what constitutes how a historian reads or how somebody reads in any of the fields. But the fact is we need more of that. … I’d be a lot more comfortable if there was a lot more of it. So it’s a continuum, I guess we could say.
The reading tools that are used by experts in one discipline do not always translate well to others. In literature, for example, considering the author is often important, but not in scientific analysis. Can you say a little bit more about these differences?
It’s a nice reflection of, gee, here’s a skill set of skills you never use when you read science. And you always use it when you read history, and you sometimes use it when you read literature, but it depends which college you went to and when you studied there and which professor you worked with.
And what it suggests, of course, is if I used some of those strategies that are about getting at the author’s perspective, that could improve my reading of history, but it might actually do bad things to my reading of mathematics or science.
General strategies can help kids to remember the text. But the fact is kids can learn those things pretty quickly, those kinds of skills. And there are a lot of other things that go on in reading comprehension that we don’t spend much time on; language would be one. You mentioned vocabulary. That’s the one where we do invest a little bit. Not always well, but we do invest there. But showing kids how to break down a complicated sentence so that they can understand it, teaching kids how to make cohesive connections across a text, that’s really important. Teaching kids how to use structure to understand what the author’s getting at, and so on.
So we definitely want to teach some of those language skills that are really not linked to a particular discipline. And we want to teach kids some of those general study skills kind of strategies because they do help you to remember the information. And that’s not unimportant, but certainly by middle school and possibly upper elementary, we should be teaching kids that different kinds of texts are written for a different purpose, and they carry meaning in a different way.
Do you have suggestions about how a principal or a school team might approach this problem?
In elementary, you want to get all the teachers together. In secondary, when it comes to disciplinary literacy, you want to get departments together. And the issue [to ask] about is: When did you start to find science hard to read? And what did you do?
What you’re going find out is a lot of times, in any field, people are not necessarily super conscious of how they’re reading because they read the way they do. … They don’t have any sense that somebody else is doing it differently. And so the first thing that I want them to do is think about how they actually read what it is that they do.
I actually got to co-teach a high school class with a [laboratory] scientist. And we did a lesson together where, we had the kids actually looking at the graphic and, there were six or seven graphics in this chapter, and trying to put them together with the facts that were stated in the text. And man, the kids were just blown away that nobody had ever shown them how to do that kind of thing.
In fields like English, where the literature teacher really might know the difference between New Criticism and more author-centered reading you can get that discussion going in the teacher’s lounge and, and then ask, what do the kids know about that?
Teachers are generous. Teachers care about kids. They want to share that kind of stuff so that’s really where you can win that.
[The core question is]: When those texts were hard, what did you do? And then the follow up question is: Have you ever shared that with your students? And the answer is almost always, say 90-some-percent of the time, ‘well, no, should I?’
[And then]: Would you be willing to show these kids how they could get into it?
