Disciplinary Literacy: A Call to Reform How Students Read and Write at School

“Thus, the purpose of disciplinary literacy is less about trying to give students the tools (e.g. study skills) to be better students generally, and more about inducting them into the disciplines. That’s the idea of reading like a scientist or writing like a historian or literary critic. Instead of having students study these subjects as outsiders, disciplinary literacy tries to engage them in exploring content the way that insiders would. That means treating content as more than information to be memorized for a test. In other words, the point of teaching disciplinary literacy is to engage students in the same kind of analysis, argument and literacy that would be common in the fields”

Timothy Shanahan