Building Knowledge of Disciplinary Discourse and Practices

As students progress through the grades, the disciplinary discourse and practices they encounter become increasingly specialized. They are expected to read and use disciplinary language in ways that are closer and closer approximations of the ways that particular academic communities use text. Yet these discipline-particular reasons to read and ways with words are rarely explicit for students. What would it mean for teachers to apprentice students to the disciplinary practices they value—the texts, tasks, reasoning practices, and motivations for working in particular ways? In academic disciplines and in virtually any area of learning, practitioners of the discipline read and reason and communicate with colleagues by speaking and writing about their work. How can teachers design students’ academic experiences to support them to begin to engage in the discipline, use texts for disciplinary purposes, and learn ways of thinking, speaking, and writing about texts that reflect disciplinary practices and values?

Reasoning processes, interpretive practices, ways of engaging, and the terrain of ideas, activities, literacy tasks, texts, and genres—all vary across and within disciplinary traditions. As students encounter these new forms, purposes, and processing demands, their teachers must make visible to students how literacy operates within their particular academic disciplines. Teachers will need to demystify discipline-based literacy practices, making explicit the tacit reasoning processes, strategies, and discourse rules that shape successful readers’ and writers’ work in a discipline.

The inquiry stance that develops in Reading Apprenticeship classrooms can be applied specifically to engage students in the nature of a discipline: Why do people study history or science or literature or mathematics? What beliefs and values are embodied? How can these be explored, argued, tested, or proved? How is knowledge, or questions about knowledge, communicated in a disciplinary community? How does knowledge develop?

Understanding that disciplines have particular beliefs, values, and practices, students can appreciate why they might be interested in learning how a discipline works. Understanding that members of a disciplinary community have developed particular strategies to explore and test those beliefs, students can appreciate these as tools that improve their success. Knowing that disciplinary texts take a range of particular forms, students can identify and use those forms to organize their thinking as literate members of a disciplinary community.

The tasks students engage in while reading course materials shape their understanding and appreciation of the discipline they are learning. When teachers regularly ask students to answer questions at the end of a chapter from a textbook in history, students learn that history is a body of information about particular people and events, rather than an interpretive effort to build a continually evolving understanding of the past. In science, depending on the tasks students are assigned, they may learn that science is a body of already established knowledge rather than an ongoing process of gathering and interpreting evidence to explain the natural and designed or technical worlds. When teachers play the movie version of a piece of literature without engaging students in reading the literary language, students learn that literary study is about getting the plot of a story rather than understanding the artful construction and aesthetic impact of literary texts. And when teachers limit their use of math texts to problem sets for students to work, students learn that math is about fluent computation and algorithms. They are unlikely to gain an appreciation of the broader enterprise of mathematics as a conceptual system with internal consistency and rules of reasoning, nor of its utility in the world for identifying patterns, modeling complex interactions, and providing insight or predictions.

The tasks that teachers ask students to do with disciplinary texts therefore should be focused to help students uncover and engage in disciplinary practices and ways of communicating. Some texts may be especially well suited for one disciplinary purpose but not another, so in addition to the deep knowledge teachers need about the content of a text, they need to understand how to scaffold students’ understanding of a text’s features as discipline-based communication.

To help students recognize their progress in learning about disciplinary practices and discourse, teachers can orient them to goals designed to make explicit how the disciplinary community carries out and communicates about its academic work. Such goals give students a way to reflect on what they are learning and to monitor their apprenticeship. In the following section of this chapter (and in the Assessment Appendix), we include examples of such goals and what they may look like in practice.

From Reading for Understanding, pp 272-275