After spending a couple weeks reading about disciplinary literacy, I have gained multiple viewpoints on disciplinary literacy. Although many of the past articles mentioned in my blog are praising disciplinary literacy practices, some educators argue against these practices. For example, many teachers already feel overwhelmed with integrating standards into lessons, making sure students meet national benchmarks and keeping students engaged in learning.
When used correctly, disciplinary literacy can enhance a classroom and provide students with tools they can carry across disciplines. An article by Shanahan et al. provides arguments for disciplinary literacy; offering ways elementary school teachers can prepare and integrate students for disciplinary literacy. The article suggest that teachers prepare elementary students for disciplinary literacy by “ensuring that students read and understand the often nuanced differences among a wide range of text types, helping students make sense of information and ideas across multiple texts, and teaching vocabulary in every subject area.” Although this may seem like an overwhelming task, implementing disciplinary literacy can be as simple as thinking about these components while creating a lesson.
When planning for an ELA lesson, an elementary teacher may consider providing various types of texts (fiction, non-fiction, picture books, data), giving students an opportunity to explore the disciplines through these texts. The teacher may also use texts with different biases and opinions. This allows students to see the different opinions held by different disciplines and establishments. Attention to vocabulary is also a disciplinary tool that the elementary teacher can use in her ELA lesson. Using higher level vocabulary and words that are specific to disciplines can help elementary students begin to see through disciplinary lenses.
Rather than an argument against disciplinary literacy, I would like to propose the question: what does disciplinary literacy look like in the classroom when a student has a learning disability or even an IEP? In the elementary grades, students begin to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and emotional disorders. These diagnoses often effect students individually in the classroom and require modifications to their curriculum, classroom environments’ and personal lives. I struggle to imagine an effective way to execute disciplinary literacy for students with learning disabilities. Furthermore, how do you make disciplinary literacy worthwhile, or useful for students with disabilities?
meatballs&marinara 
I was immediately intrigued by the title of your blog post, and I wish you would have spent some more time working through this thought. Perhaps you are unsure of the answer as I am as a future educator, but I think you raise a very important and valid point – what about students with disabilities? When I think of disciplinary literacy, I see it as a challenge to the students. I do not mean challenge with a negative connotation, but rather a challenge from a positive viewpoint. When teachers incorporate disciplinary literacy strategies to their teaching, they are encouraging students to take their reading and writing one step further within the content area. This means rather than reading and taking notes in a Science textbook, students are instead investigating and experimenting their own ideas (within the content) and are sharing their results through reading and writing. In other words, rather than simply learning the content through the lecture, students are truly working like a scientist to fully understand the content. While this is just a very quick example, I think that truth of the matter is that some disciplinary literacy strategies in any content area can be challenging to some students. This then leads me to wonder how challenging these strategies can especially be for our ELL students, our students with an IEP, and students with any disability. Are disciplinary strategies too challenging for these students. With this in mind, we, as teachers, cannot help but think, “how can I make adaptations, accommodations, and modifications to my disciplinary literacy strategies to support my students with disabilities?” While I am still learning about disciplinary literacy, I would like to think that adaptations, accommodations, and modifications can be made to a disciplinary literacy lesson plan just as they can be made in any lesson plan. Again, my answer is solely from opinion and is not backed up by any facts or research – just an aspiring teacher thinking out loud! Some examples that come to mind in regards to this can be something as simple as giving the students extra time to work through the readings, allowing the students to type or use speech-to-text softwares to share ideas rather than writing, giving students larger font texts, or pairing ELL students with bilingual students to give them assistance working through the texts. I truly think that disciplinary literacy strategies can be worthwhile for students with disabilities. I just think that it is extremely important for the teacher apply all accommodations, modifications, and adaptations from the IEP’s. A professor of mine has encouraged us to always ask our ourselves, “who did I leave out?” after creating a lesson plan to assure that the needs of every student is met in the lesson. I think this a great way to double-check yourself, especially with students with disabilities, to assure that your disciplinary literacy strategies support every student. Therefore, my answer to your question is “yes, disciplinary literacy can be used for students with disabilities,” and I thank you for raising this important question!
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I like how you began your post by mentioning how teachers are already overwhelmed from implementing standards into their curriculum. I’ve thought of this issue myself, and following and integrating ALL standards does freak me out a bit! Teachers have a lot on their plate, especially with the stress of state standards, standardized testing, and the Common Core. Although it is very overwhelming, I think teachers sign up for a job that requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks at once. Not only are you an educator, but you may also be a therapist, an authority figure, a manager, a role model, and a leader…..all at once. Say you have 20 kids in a class. That is 20 lives that you want to impact, to educate, and to protect. That is a BIG job! Being a teacher is kind of like being a superhero, in my opinion. I think apart of our job is to implement as many methods, theories, and practices into our classroom as possible to give out students the widest range of opportunities and maximum education.
Your argument you suggested in the last paragraph is very insightful and a great question. we have not talked about students with IEPs and 504s in our content area reading class quite yet, and it is a very important thing to consider! My idea is to scaffold these disciplinary literacies by changing lexile level, reading with a teacher or partner, or only reading chunks at a time. Although I do have my ideas, I would be interested to hear and research more about this topic.
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