Education Week - November 6, 2024 - 15

language arts class. And it's a key example of how
literacy skills operate in social studies.
Students need these discipline-specific literacy
skills to do well in history, government, civics, and
economics classes. But they also need them for life
after school, said Sam Wineburg, the co-founder of
the Digital Inquiry Group, a nonprofit social studies
curriculum organization, and an emeritus professor
of education at Stanford University.
They teach young adults how to " contend between
the cacophonous voices of a democracy, " he said.
" You don't just look at something at face value. You
say, 'Wait a second, who wrote that?' "
What 'literacy' means in social studies
This distinction is important now as districts nationwide
consider how best to structure their overall
literacy programs.
One idea that's slowly gained traction is the notion
of building students' general content knowledge
about science, social studies, the arts, and culture
through what's known as " knowledge building "
reading programs-ELA curricula that incorporate
those topics, often through groups of paired fiction
and nonfiction texts. Research shows that when
students know more about the world around them,
their reading-comprehension abilities benefit from
this background knowledge.
But these reading programs can't take the place of
dedicated history or civics instruction, experts caution.
In part, that's because they don't always teach
the ways of reading, thinking, and writing that are
unique to social studies.
" There are important disciplinary literacy skills
and practices that aren't going to show up in your
ELA program, " said Nell Duke, the executive director
of the Center for Early Literacy Success at Stand
for Children, an education advocacy organization.
Literacy is an umbrella term, Duke said. It can
refer to reading and writing skills in a reading class,
but it's not restricted to that subject. Students use
literacy skills throughout the school day.
At a basic level, students need to be able to read
and write well to access content in other subjects,
Duke said. To read a textbook in history class, for
instance, requires general reading-comprehension
skills and an understanding of academic vocabulary.
Students might use skills like summarizing text or
using evidence to support their claims in written
responses to questions.
But there are literacy skills that are specific to
the social studies subject students are studying,
said Duke. In economics, students need to be able
to make sense of different graphical representations
of data. In geography, they need to be able to
read a map.
And in history, students need to be able to identify
a text's source and explain why that provenance
matters.
downloadable: See how
other social studies educators,
in geography and economics,
teach students to read and
write in their disciplines.
> edw.link/DisciplinaryLiteracy
Different Subjects, Different Reading | 15
" There's a very specific way that historians read
documents, " said Joel Breakstone, the executive
director of the Digital Inquiry Group.
Historians want to know who wrote a primarysource
document, and for what purpose, because
those factors shape how the reader would interpret
the information. They triangulate information presented
in one text with others, " seeking out points of
similarity and departure, " Breakstone said.
And they want to place text within a moment in
time, he said. To analyze the Gettysburg Address,
for example, students need to understand what was
happening during the Civil War when President
Abraham Lincoln delivered it.
Placing documents in context is essential to
reading in history, Breakstone said, and the way a
student might approach it in that class differs from
how they might approach it in another class.
Students could analyze the Gettysburg Address
" as a piece of rhetoric " in an English classroom, he
said. (In fact, the Common Core State Standards
suggest it as a sample informational text that 9th and
10th graders could work with in ELA.)
But, he said, " it's a different thing to read it as a
particular document delivered by a particular politician
at a particular moment in time. "
Fostering early reading and writing
in social studies
The distinction between general literacy and
discipline-specific literacy skills can be murky, and,
in general, teachers say that students should master
the former in elementary school, while work on the
latter becomes increasingly intentional in middle
and high school.
To prepare students to think this way in social
studies, they need to get comfortable reading and
writing in the subject-and teachers need to expliciStock/Getty
http://edw.link/DisciplinaryLiteracy
Education Week - November 6, 2024

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