Insert Student Here: Why Content Area Constructions of Literacy Matter for Pre-service Teachers

Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts Volume 50 Issue 3 September/October 2010 Article 3 9-1-2010 Insert Student Here: Why Content Area Constructions of Literacy Matter for Pre-service Teachers Kristine Gritter Seattle Pacific University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons Part of the Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons Recommended Citation Gritter, K. (2010). Insert Student Here: Why Content Area Constructions of Literacy Matter for Pre-service Teachers. Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts, 50 (3). Retrieved from https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/reading_horizons/vol50/ iss3/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Special Education and Literacy Studies at ScholarWorks at WMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Reading Horizons: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks at WMU. For more information, please contact . Insert Student Here: Why Content Area Constructions of Literacy Matter • 147 Insert Student Here: Why Content Area Constructions of Literacy Matter for Pre-service Teachers Kristine Gritter, Ph.D. Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, WA Abstract This article explores content area pre-service teacher beliefs about disciplinary knowledge, perceptions of effective content area teaching, and existing beliefs about how to integrate literacy into the content areas. Ten pre-service teachers across ten secondary content areas were asked to describe three important variables in secondary teaching: 1) the knowledge of their content area, 2) characteristics of a successful content area teacher, and 3) literacy activities that would optimally convey disciplinary knowledge to students. Content area responses to the first two prompts yielded comparatively static, teacher-centered notions of knowledge and teaching. However, responses to the third prompt indicated at least partial resistance to transmission-style teaching and more student-centered pedagogies. The author asserts that content area literacy courses can be a contact zone in which pre-service teachers consider and reconsider how disciplinary epistemology maps onto effective content area literacy instruction. Introduction Teaching content area literacy courses to pre-service secondary teachers is a messy and difficult business. First, although presumably secondary pre-service teachers already have some of expertise with the subject matter(s) they are training to teach, most have limited experience communicating that knowledge to adolescents who may not have an intrinsic interest in the subject. Second, a problematic 148 • Reading Horizons • V50.3 • 2010 situation occurs when interdisciplinary pre-service teachers come into a content area course expecting a bag of one-size-fits-all reading and writing strategies. Reading, writing, and critical literacy strategies are not necessarily exportable across disciplines because content area texts and tasks vary widely (Draper, 2008). Content area experts may use literacy (often dissimilar than traditional school-taught reading and writing) in different ways than do content area literacy instructors modeling a particular literacy strategy (Seibert & Draper, 2008). Third, content area literacy coursework may rest on pedagogical frameworks invisible and alien to pre-service teacher’s experiences in content area classrooms. Literacy courses, in contrast to many mathematics courses, for example, tend to endorse constructivist pedagogies not generally embraced in actual secondary classrooms (Draper, 2002). When content area literacy instructors do not understand valued disciplinary literacy practices, they do not prepare teachers of specialized subjects to meet the needs of students who will likely struggle with the reading and writing required in particular content areas (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). This article is an attempt to understand the role that highly divergent content area literacy practices plays in the formation of pedagogy for pre-service secondary teachers. In this article, I begin by situating important variables of effective content area literacy instruction within three classification systems for knowledge, teaching, and literacy. Next, I examine how metaphors for teaching and literacy often collide and contradict each other using by way of example the voices of ten pre-service secondary teachers training in ten different content areas. Finally, I discuss how content area literacy courses can become a contact zone for future secondary teachers to reexamine content area literacy tasks and texts. This reexamination can aid pre-service teachers in challenging static notions of knowledge and teaching. Constructs of Knowledge, Teaching, and Literacy Labaree (1996) describes how knowledge is classified as a series of binary opposites. He makes distinctions in “hard versus soft and pure versus applied” knowledge (Becher, 1989; Labaree, 1996, p. 8-9). Labaree (1996) observes, Hard disciplines (which claim to produce findings that are verifiable, definitive, and cumulative) outrank soft disciplines where interpretation is the central problem and where findings are always subject to debate and reinterpretation by others. Likewise, pure intellectual pursuits (which are theoretically-oriented and abstracted from particular contexts) outrank those that are applied (where work is more practical and more closely connected to context-bound needs). (pp. 8-9) Insert Student Here: Why Content Area Constructions of Literacy Matter • 149 Mathematical properties and scientific laws could be labeled as “harder” knowledge, as would any knowledge that would have to be replicated, whereas reader response theories could be labeled “softer” knowledge because interpretation would be more important than arriving at a correct answer. In addition, a national curriculum could be labeled “pure” knowledge, whereas a curriculum dependent on local concerns could be labeled “applied” knowledge. Labaree (1996) also asserts that the content of teacher education courses is generally soft and applied knowledge giving schools of education a double whammy of low status in the Academy. However, secondary education majors also possess the knowledge that composes their major(s) and/or minor(s). Secondary pre-service teachers may coexist in two (or more) worlds of knowledge and may not be consciously aware of how their knowledge frameworks affect views of good teaching or content area literacy instruction. Subject matter knowledge may shape notions of job performance and assessment activities, creating stereotypes of “the art teacher” or “the math teacher.” In their work on disciplinary boundaries situating teaching practices, for example, McLaughlin and Talbert (2001) noted that “math teachers are significantly more likely than are teachers of English, social studies, or science to see their subject matter as static a (...truncated)