Research School Network: Disciplinary Literacy – Blog by Joe McCrudden Joe McCrudden’s takeaways from our webinar with Tim Shanahan and Phil Stock

I was lucky enough to attend Tim Shanahan’s webinar on Disciplinary Literacy, hosted by Greenshaw Research – thank you to them for their generosity in making their CPD public. Here is a summary of my takeaways from the webinar.

How different subject experts read. For example, expert historians read history texts as an argument, and they are constantly thinking about sourcing (who wrote this, who did they write it for, why did they write it etc.). Novices read history texts as (often boring) lists of facts to be understood and memorised.

How you write in different subject disciplines and why you write that way. For example, scientists use the passive voice and nominalisation more. Presumably because writing in science is interested in objective fact and observation (therefore the subject in the active voice is irrelevant) and measurable entities (hence the nominalisation).

Shanahan described literacy as a pyramid with disciplinary literacy at the top. However, he said the main way of reading this diagram was that disciplinary literacy dealt with rarer, more specialised aspects of literacy. For example, disciplinary literacy would be interested in the specific use of colons in scientific writing, or the differences in structure between a maths text and a science text.

Shanahan discussed the ​‘epistemological source of cultural differences’ between subject disciplines. These derive from what practitioners of these subjects want to do, and how they do these things. So for example, scientists want to make observations and draw conclusions about the world, and they use measurement, experimentation etc. to do it. Literary critics want to explain the nuances, effects and influences of literary texts, and they use discussion of analysis, critical theory and comparison (for example) to do it. (Of course these are vast over-simplifications of these subject disciplines, but you get the point!). Therefore, disciplinary literacy is often about breaking down the function of the texts in the context of the discipline’s goals and processes.

For example, Shanahan discussed the reaction of expert chemists to the suggestion that students learn to summarise in Chemistry lessons. They politely suggested this would be a waste of time. However, when they were then presented with a structure for summarising which focused on the things they said they looked for when they read texts (the substances, properties, processes and interactions being discussed), they were all for the idea! He suggested that literacy processes like summarising need to be made specific to the ways you read texts in different disciplines.

He gave another example of reading history: one way of focusing on the function of a history text is to highlight the aspects of it which are what historians look for as they read. For example, students could make a key and highlight the time things happened, the place things happened, the actors involved, the causes of actions etc.

In terms of writing, Shanahan gave an example of nominalisation in science, charting the development of a sentence most novices could understand to the same sentence being expressed using the nominalisation typical of science:

He traced these things back to why subject experts used language the way they did. For example, for scientists, language is inadequate in expressing the objective reality they are seeking to explain. Hence why scientists use text, graphics and equations to explain the same idea, triangulating their systems of communication. This requires students to learn how to jump between these different aspects of the text the way scientists do to gain the understanding of what is being discussed (and therefore achieve the aim of the text).

Shanahan suggested that all subjects should have about two periods a week working with subject texts. He emphasised that even though this is difficult, it is our role to help students learn how to do this rather than try to avoid doing it, or making reading subject texts optional. He pointed out that at university, the problem students have is often not with reading per se, but with the discipline-specific reading that they have not learnt to do.

He discussed Primary, and emphasised that the Primary curriculum should be focused on basic literacy and then reading about different subjects to build the knowledge required for the later subject-specific texts.

Shanahan made a distinction between Primary and Secondary teaching development. He said that research and his experience showed that the best option for Primary is to carry out teacher training across the staff body. However, in Secondary, teachers prefer to work with other teachers of their subject and so, logistics allowing, providing opportunities for teachers to work with other teachers of their subjects, including across schools, is potentially more useful than all teachers in a Secondary school working together. Disciplinary literacy, of course, lends itself to this because it focuses on the specific reading habits that subject experts use when reading texts from their own subject.

He emphasised that one of the most useful things for Secondary teachers to do is to break down exactly how texts in their discipline are structured and written, how they read these texts, and how they can then teach their students to read these texts in their lessons. Prioritising the expertise subject experts have in reading their own disciplines is much more important than trying to have them adopt strategies from other disciplines (like English) which historically have taught reading more.

• Teachers should spend time thinking about the goals and processes of their subjects, and how these are expressed in the literature their subjects produces.
• Teachers should spend time breaking down exactly how texts are structured, written and read in their own disciplines.
• Teachers should be given the opportunity to develop subject-specific versions of reading processes (e.g. summarising) for their own subject and then teach these to their students.
• Teachers should regularly use texts from their disciplines in their teaching and persevere with this in order that students learn how to read these texts properly.

My notes are copied below if they are at all useful, I hope this summary was useful! Please let me know if I have misunderstood anything or been inaccurate in any of my summaries.