Disciplinary Literacy

  Over the past few years, we have seen growth in the numbers of reading programs aimed at a student in the upper grades (including my own AMP program. I believe that, once we get through the presidential election, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will be reauthorized, for the first time including literacy help for older school age students. This week we saw the Department of Education put out requirements that will make it more difficult for states and local districts to continue to hide or disguise horrendous high school dropout levels.

  My wife, Cyndie, and I have been involved in some important work with the support of the Carnegie Corporation. We have been studying what is increasingly referred to as disciplinary literacy. By disciplinary literacy we mean the specialized skills and codes that someone must master to be able to read and write in the various disciplines (science, math, literature, history) and technical fields. Basic reading skills tend to be highly generalizable, but various scholars have shown that increasingly, with development, literacy involves language skills and cognitive processes (and even values) that are specialized. That means that our students, by the time they reach high school, need to start learning unique aspects of literacy.