Teaching Dilemmas and Solutions in Content-Area Literacy, Grades 6-12

Peter Smagorinsky

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781483332840
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Because literacy is not just the English teacher’s job Think literacy is just for English teachers? Not anymore. Nor should it be when you consider that each discipline has its own unique values and means of expression. These days, it’s up to all teachers to communicate what it means to be literate in their disciplines. Here, finally, is a book ambitious enough to tackle the topic across all major subject areas. Smagorinsky and his colleagues provide an insider’s lens on both the states of their fields and their specific literacy requirements, including:

• Reviews of the latest issues and research
• Scenario-based activities for reflection and discussion
• Considerations of the textual forms and conventions required in all major disciplines

2 Toward Disciplinary Reading and Writing in History

Chauncey Monte-Sano

Denise Miles

The Common Core State Standards (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010) directly integrate reading and writing into history and social studies. Students are expected to write informative text, narratives, and arguments, and to comprehend, analyze, and evaluate information while reading. The latest social studies document, the College, Career, and Civic Life C3 Framework for Social Studies State Standards (National Council for the Social Studies [NCSS], 2013), frames social studies as an inquiry process in which reading and analysis of historical sources, argumentation, constructing conclusions, and communicating them, are paramount. Yet, based on results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 29 percent of eighth graders have appropriate grade-level skills in reading and writing (National Center for Educational Statistics [NCES], 2007, 2008). Only 2 percent of eighth graders tested in reading could interpret an author’s purpose as expressed in a text or use examples to explain their conclusions about a text (NCES, 2007). As for writing, only 2 percent of twelfth graders tested could claim a position and consistently support it with well-chosen reasons and examples (NCES, 2008). Further, most states require teachers to cover the information included in dense state standards documents and test students on their knowledge of this array of information. How is literacy to be taught in history and social studies given such challenges? This chapter will review research on students’ reading, thinking, and writing in history and approaches to teaching that help students develop literacy practices rooted in the discipline as they also learn content knowledge.

What Is the Role of Literacy in History?

This chapter approaches history as evidence-based interpretation in which inquiry is central. The inquiry process involves working with and interrogating historical artifacts in an effort to understand and explain the past. Such a process includes analyzing evidence, interpreting the meaning of evidence, and using evidence to construct and explain historically plausible accounts of the past. Historians typically express these accounts as written arguments. Historical ways of thinking (referred to as “disciplinary concepts and tools” in the C3 Framework) are embedded in the processes of reading, analysis, and interpretation; in other words, historical thinking facilitates historical literacy practices. For example, the C3 Framework highlights concepts and tools such as change, continuity, context, perspective, sources, evidence, and causation (NCSS, 2013).

Because a disciplinary approach to history privileges analysis and interpretation of historical texts, it naturally emphasizes reading, writing, and thinking. For example, historians analyze evidence, weigh conflicting accounts, consider the influence of bias, and develop evidence-based arguments. All of this thinking is embedded in reading and writing practices. Reading is a key to analysis and constructing interpretations of the past. Writing is a key to conveying that interpretation to others in the field and is often integrated into the thinking process that develops the interpretation (e.g., writing marginal notes next to a historical document or writing outlines).

Reading History

Goals for reading history. Because the goal of historical interpretation is to understand the past, historical reasoning involves reading evidence from the perspective of those who created it and putting it into context. Historians can only interrogate artifacts from the past since the events under study cannot be repeated: Typically, historians have not witnessed the events about which they write, and the authors of the documents they use to analyze the past are inaccessible (cf. Hexter, 1971). In order to understand why something happened in the past or what compelled someone to create a particular text (whether written or visual), historians must situate authors and events in the context of contemporary events, peers, and ideas; such an approach to reading highlights the relationships between contiguous events (cf. Mink, 1987).

Particular approaches to reading historical sources facilitate the historical reasoning process. As Wineburg (2001) found, historians source, corroborate, and contextualize evidence as they read and make sense of the past. Sourcing involves noting authors of historical documents as well as their intentions and assumptions. Contextualization includes situating a historical document in the time and place in which it was created. Corroboration involves comparing multiple historical documents to facilitate sense making and determine acceptable facts. Wineburg argued that historical texts are excerpts of social situations; those situations—including the actors and their contexts—must be re-created so that readers more fully understand the texts themselves. Historians’ reading focused on the position, motivation, and potential biases of the author before reading the rest of the text. Knowing the author’s perspective shaped how historians weighed evidence and developed their own interpretations. The iterative process of moving between these kinds of questions and evidence eventually leads historians to make a case for a particular interpretation of the past.

Students’ tendencies in reading history. However, students do not naturally tend to read like historians (Wineburg, 2001). In reading historical texts, they often focus on the literal meaning of documents and miss intertextual reading strategies that would promote interpretive work (e.g., Afflerbach & VanSledright, 2001). In one study of reading multiple texts, students were unlikely to notice source information unless explicitly instructed to do so (Britt & Aglinskas, 2002). Research also confirms that students use their own background knowledge of historical topics to make sense of texts (Perfetti, Britt, & Georgi, 1995; Wolfe & Goldman, 2005), for better or worse.

A powerful example of students’ tendencies in reading history comes from a student’s response to a task from Historical Thinking Matters, a website for history educators. The task contrasts two newspaper articles about the sinking of the USS Maine. Both articles were published on February 17, 1898, one day after the event.¹ One article, posted in Hearst’s New York Journal and Advertiser, is a classic example of yellow journalism in its insistence on blaming Spain as the aggressor for planting a mine in Havana harbor. In contrast, the second article, posted in the New York Times, quotes the secretary of the navy, who says he does not think an enemy is responsible for the explosion and also says he will wait for a full report of the explosion before he lays blame. Another part of the website shares a high school student’s thinking as he read these documents.² The student, Matt, noticed that each said something different, but he assumed that they were by the same writer. He explained the discrepancy by saying, “I guess the next day, they’re like, oh we didn’t say that. Kind of interesting switch.” Matt’s response shows us that he is able to comprehend the documents on a basic level, but he lacks historical reading strategies such as sourcing and contextualization. As a result, he misses important clues to the meaning of the document, such as the publisher of each newspaper article and the dates on which both articles were published. Given these tendencies, how do we support students’ reading?

Practices that help students read historically. Historical literacy research indicates that the kinds of texts students work with influence their reasoning processes. Bain (2006) explains well the difficulties students face when working with authoritative textbooks that don’t support interpretive thinking. Rouet, Britt, Mason, and Perfetti (1996) found that when college students read primary ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Literacy in the English/Language Arts Classroom
• Toward Disciplinary Reading and Writing in History
• Literacy in the Science Classroom
• Literacy in the Mathematics Classroom
• The Visual Space of Literacy in Art Education
• Music and Drama Literacies
• About the Contributors
• Index
• Publisher Note