Education research organization WestEd is holding a series of 30-minute webinars from June through December featuring experts sharing research and evidence-based practices that help bridge opportunity gaps, support positive outcomes for children and adults and help build thriving communities.
The July 31 webinar, “Reading and Writing Across the Content Areas: Helping Students Improve Comprehension in Grades K-5,” focused on disciplinary literacy and how it can be used at the elementary school level.
Katie Grogan, WestEd senior research associate who leads the literacy, research and evaluation team, explained the specifics of disciplinary literacy.
“We’re talking about the specialized ways that reading, writing and oral language are employed in different disciplines,” she said. “Disciplinary literacy recognizes that a scientist might read differently than a historian, or an artist might communicate differently than a mathematician. So, they aren’t just different content areas; they’re different ways of thinking, reasoning and communicating. And those skills that students need to read and write like experts in the field must be taught.”
While disciplinary literacy is more commonly taught in middle and high school, experts note that the concept fits in with the science of reading, which emphasizes how background knowledge is crucial for reading comprehension.
A WestEd blog on the topic stated, “Content knowledge isn’t just facts and vocabulary. It’s also understanding how knowledge is constructed and communicated within different fields. When we teach disciplinary literacy in elementary grades, we’re building both content knowledge and the metacognitive awareness of how different disciplines approach learning.”
WestEd Research Associate in Literacy Robin Sayers gave high-level lesson examples of how these concepts can be taught in an elementary-level classroom. “Bringing disciplinary literacy into elementary classrooms prepares students to understand and apply strategies across different text types and content areas,” she said. “It also introduces them to the concept that different disciplines have different ways if reading, writing, thinking and knowing.”
