The Knowledge-Building Dimension
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Exploring Different Types of Knowledge
Preface
This excerpt is from the preface of Jailed for Freedom, suffragist Doris Stevens’s first-person account of the militant struggle to finally secure passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Cindy Ryan’s grade 9 academic literacy class is about to read a chapter from Stevens’s book, but first they will discuss the preface in a small, student-led seminar. Their teacher has analyzed the preface, considering the schema challenges and opportunities that students will encounter. By sorting these into particular types of knowledge, Cindy can more easily see where she wants to help focus students’ attention:
In Classroom Close-Ups 8.5 and 8.6, Cindy’s students demonstrate what they know and what they grapple with in order to understand this text. In previous lessons they have been building related topic schema about human rights and First Amendment rights and have watched a movie scene of suffragettes picketing the White House. They have studied primary and secondary sources. They use word-learning strategies daily. And they have practiced historical contextualization.
The knowledge categories used by Cindy and presented in this chapter are broad and overlapping (see Box 8.9). For example, some educators might prefer to sort “genre” into the disciplinary category rather than the texts category. Sometimes “words” will seem more salient in the content category than in the language category. These distinctions are not important for our purposes here: analyzing the knowledge challenges and opportunities of a text.
Student Learning Goals in the knowledge-building dimension (see the Assessment Appendix) are organized by the categories in Box 8.9, by discipline. Many Reading Apprenticeship teachers introduce these knowledge-building goals after students have experienced a number of them and can recognize how much they already know about building schema and disci-plinary knowledge. Individual Talking to the Text with the set of knowledge-building goals, along with partner sharing and class discussion, alert students to how much they are accomplishing. At the end of a course, if students return to this list of goals, they should be pleased to recognize how much they have learned. |
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These overlapping categories provide a way to think about the challenges and opportunities a given text provides: What will students know and need to know? How might their learning experiences be focused?
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In the student-led seminar in Cindy Ryan’s grade 9 academic literacy class, Leander leads his classmates in discussing and clarifying the preface to Jailed for Freedom, a first-person account of American women’s fight for the right to vote. One student’s confusion about “political action” is clarified by schema offered by a peer:
Leander: (Reading from the preface) “It is the story of the first organized militant, political action in America to this end.” Keep going?
Sean: Stop right there. I’m confused.
Kevin: It’s the story of the first organization to like take action—
Leander: Towards . . .
Kevin: Yeah, like towards what’s gone wrong. They protested and stuff. It’s like the NAACP or the Black Panthers or something. They just came together to fight against something, to change America, I guess. |
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When students in Cindy Ryan’s academic literacy class reach the last sentence in the book preface, they conclude their student-led discussion by building schema both about the purpose of a preface and the disciplinary practice of sourcing a text.
(In the course of their discussion, they also use language schema to explore the definition of “arguably.” )
Leander: (Reading the last sentence) “This book contains my interpretations, which are of course arguable. But it is a true record of events.” Interpret means to . . .
Kevin: The way you understand something.
Leander: You could say, “This book is my understanding, which of course is arguable.”
Kevin: Everybody got their different opinions—arguable. So it’s not like this is the only truth, it’s like there’s more than one truth.
Sean: It says it’s a true record of events.
Mariah: I think the person who wrote this knows that you will probably argue about what he’s talking about, so that’s why he put—
Tony: It’s a she.
Mariah: She put “arguably” in the sentence.
Sean: Cause you might think different from her.
Mariah: When she started with this thing, she said, “This book contains,” so basically she was saying that somebody might argue about it or it can cause an argument.
Tony: So she wants to argue about it, I guess.
Mariah: No, she knows that what she wrote about—
Kevin: My interpretation. So that’s basically the way she understands. She wrote it up the way she understood it. You might of understood it a different way from the way she understood it.
Sean: So that’s her opinion.
Teacher: But you guys also pointed out “a true record of events,” and no one’s talked about that.
Sean: It say true because it say 1920.
Thomas: That’s when the Nineteenth Amendment—
Kevin: That’s when the story really happened. It wasn’t fictional or made up. It really did happen.
Teacher: I need you all to look at the setting now, that she gives us at the end:
Tony: August, 1920.
Leander: That’s the date when women got the right to vote.
Sean: That’s when they passed the law for women to vote.
Tony: So she’s actually viewing it with her own eyes.
Sean: I think she was there when it all happened.
Tony: She might have been actually one of the people or whatever.
Kevin: Yeah, she was a reporter or something.
Tony: Or one of the people.
Sean: I think she witnessed it and she wrote about it.
Kevin: She was there. It's like she was a first person, so she really knows what happened. |
From Reading for Understanding, pp 250-253
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