Week 5: Content Without Context is a Con

If someone were to tell you that the Declaration of Independence is a document about freedom, it probably wouldn't be very much of a surprise. But would you be content to know only that piece of information about one of the foundational documents of the United States? If so, where did your childhood curiosity run off to? When did you stop asking why? just to make the person you were asking have to continue to give you answers deeper into the subject?

Our students don't need to lose that habit of asking questions, but it almost seems inevitable that they will if the only information that teachers are presenting them with is the content without any context. I often think that history is the biggest soap opera drama out there, and when thought about in that light, every event builds upon every other event; nothing happens in a vacuum. Why, then, would it be beneficial to not give the students the background information to draw from? Why would we ask students to analyze the importance and content of an historical document based solely on the language used therein?

Disciplinary literacy allows for the in-depth dive of why and who and when and where and how questions. It allows for the contextualization of documents and events and people and the student themselves. Where do they fall into the greater scheme? What did the Declaration of Independence mean to the people who signed it? Did it just mean freedom or did it also mean a life of uncertainty and a fear or failure? What does the document mean to the student today? Does it even still matter to them anymore since freedom has been secured for hundreds of years? Is freedom still guaranteed for them going forward? -- These are the questions that disciplinary literacy allows for. It allows for depth of thought and asking questions of the content beyond just what the words are literally saying. The students are analyzing and synthesizing the content they are exposed to, not just recalling it.

Wineburg, S., & Reisman, A. (2015). Disciplinary literacy in history: A toolkit for digital citizenship. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 58(8), 636-639.