This week, given the freedom to choose what I read in class, I found an enlightening article about reading across the disciplines. In this article by Lee (2014), the author discusses factors that teachers and scholars are ignoring when considering the implementation and student progress in disciplinary learning across content areas.
In the introduction of her research, Lee (2014) makes a broad claim about the goals set for students and how it is “crucial” for certain socioeconomic groups to achieve these goals in order to excel in life. She claims that the skills developed through disciplinary reading “are especially crucial for young people who are living in poverty and are positioned in our society in political, social, and economic statuses that require resistance in order to not remain in non-dominant hierarchies,” (2014). In simpler terms, the author is claiming that we are trying to teacher disciplinary literacy and while the goals we set for students will prepare them for their future academic/personal careeres, not all students are benefiting from instruction because their backgrounds are being ignored.
This being said, the students who will benefit most from the outcomes of disciplinary reading are not receiving the supports they need to have a chance to be successful. As a pre-service teacher, we are taught about inclusive classrooms, how to include all students in our lessons and how to modify lessons to enhance student learning. However, in course articles about disciplinary readings, authors don’t propose solutions that consider the socioeconomic background of students. In fact, I would go as far to say that most of the research in disciplinary reading has been with students from affluent areas with, who are from “dominant hierarchies.”
All students bring their own background knowledge and experiences to learning. We are taught to consider these backgrounds when planning lessons, including disciplinary reading across texts. Rarely are we asked to consider how students backgrounds can negatively effect their learning, specifically when the goals we set benefit a particular group of students the most.
Lee, C. D. (2014). The multi-dimensional demands of reading in the disciplines. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(1), 9-15.
meatballs&marinara 
Thanks for sharing Carol Lee’s criticisms of disciplinary literacy. I think they pose challenging and important questions for all teachers to consider as we think about teaching our students in the most ethical and effective ways possible. You mentioned that “most of the research in disciplinary reading has been with students from affluent areas with, who are from ‘dominant hierarchies.'” Do you have any evidence to support this claim? It’s easily testable– simply looking back at the articles and seeing how the cited evidence collected their data. I remember Rainey et al. (2018) arguing:
“we have seen disciplinary literacy teaching like that we have described occurring in many Clinical Rounds attending teachers’ classrooms— in middle schools and high schools, in honors and regular classes, in suburban and urban communities, and across all major academic domains. We do not mean to say that this type of teaching is happening everywhere. In our experience, this does not yet seem to be the case. However, we mean to say that we do not believe that this type of teaching is meant only for certain already privileged groups of students. In fact, the most school-reliant students are probably the ones who most desperately need regular opportunities for disciplinary literacy learning and who could most dramatically benefit from it.”
I guess she doesn’t say specifically anything about socio-economic status of students observed, though if they’ve sampled correctly, you could expect a wide array of economic statuses to be in the students they’ve observed. What this paragraph does suggest, though, is that students observed in the literature are not all from “dominant hierarchies” but in fact from an array of backgrounds.
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