Week 2: Wolsey, Lapp, and Moje

Content has to do with what the words being read, written, said, etc. are about; it is what the author is trying to convey to their reader. Content area has to do with subject areas and is simply a way to organize content; if content is what, then content area is how. Disciplinary literacy is something that happens throughout children's lives that involves learning the content within a specific discipline (subject) as well as producing content within that discipline. Moje, in her article Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change, cites Lee and Bain when she says that it is “a form of critical literacy because it builds an understanding of how knowledge is produced in the disciplines, rather than just building knowledge in the disciplines” (Moje, p. 97).

Metadiscursivity has to do with engaging in different discourse communities, knowing how and why one is engaging, and what it means for that person and the outside world. Metadiscursivity is important in disciplinary literacy because students need to be able to differentiate between different content areas using metadiscursivity. This means that while studying a certain content area, they are able to situate themselves in that mindset and approach it in the way most beneficial to that content. Still, this isn’t to say that they should be blocking out every other skill they have, since knowing what they are doing and why allows room for students to use skills they have learned from outside subjects to help them with others. It is like how Gee found that knowing how to read or use language for one scenario might not equate exactly to another scenario, but the same skills that helped in the first might still be useful for the second, even if they don’t cover it exactly.

Moje states that the different content areas can be likened to discourse communities, a term used by Gee, in that they exist alongside each other though they have their own cultural practices. Students must navigate these different communities/disciplines using the  tools that they have garnered through literacy strategies and instruction. However, just as Moje says, each discipline has their own cultural practices and therefore, the general literacy instruction and strategies that are supposed to be taught and used throughout all of the disciplines might not give the students the necessary tools they need to both learn the material as well as produce new material in a specific discipline. Gee talks about this in a different way when he states that there are many different types of reading (ex. reading social cues, reading body language, reading a book, etc.). All of these can be seen as disciplines, and thus, there are different reading strategies that are involved with all of them. No one reading strategy will be able to fully instruct a person on how to read, understand, and create their own social cue, body language, book, etc. and instead, there are different learning strategies for each of them. There might be a general strategy that helps, say for instance, watching someone else and replicating, but this doesn’t fully cover the entire learning process. Moje uses this same idea for disciplinary literacy. There are many different disciplines (ex. history, science, math, etc.) and all students who study those subjects may benefit from certain literacy strategies, but as well as those general literacy strategies, teachers should also be incorporating disciplinary learning strategies, because there is a specific language to their subjects that they are best equipped to explain to and instruct their students in.

Wolsey and Lapp laid out an interesting diagram in their article Literacy in the Disciplines: A Teacher's Guide for Grades 5-12 (Chapter 1, page 9). This diagram depicts the time line of when and how much basic literacy skills, intermediate and general literacy skills, and disciplinary literacy are used in schooling. When the child starts their schooling, the main focus is on the basic literacy skills. Then, as the child progresses through their schooling, the amount of focus on the basic literacy skills decreases while that of the intermediate and general literacies and the disciplinary literacies increases. It is interesting to note, however, that even while the student is just starting their schooling career, the diagram shows that there should still be some attention paid to the literacies outside of the "basic" realm. In other words, it is possible to introduce concepts specific to the disciplines to young children while they are perhaps still being taught the literacy skills that are necessary for their understanding of more difficult concepts down the road.