CHAPTER II: THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL PERSPECTIVES

In this chapter, I review what is known about the conventions and literacy practices of predominant
academic disciplines, and I argue that more research must be conducted to deeply understand what
it means to participate in the discipline of literary studies. I then review what is known about teacher
knowledge, beliefs, and literacies, and I argue that more research must be conducted to understand
secondary teachers’ disciplinary literacy practices and approaches to instruction. Let me begin by
briefly situating disciplinary literacy within the field of literacy research. Situating Disciplinary Literacy
Within the Broader Field of Literacy Education Readers should understand the disciplinary literacy
movement within the broader evolution of literacy research and theory. In this section, I will trace
two key lines of scholarship that have informed disciplinary literacy to this point, including
contributions and limitations of each: cognitive literacy processes and content area literacy
instruction. Reading and Cognition Beginning in the 1970s, scholars began to consider the cognitive
processes that people use to make meaning from texts. Cognitive researchers examined the strategic
processing of readers and found that successful readers regularly demonstrated patterns of strategy
use when making meaning (Baker & Brown, 1984; Paris, Wasik, & Turner, 1991). The types of
strategies employed by readers include determining importance, summarizing or retelling, drawing
inferences, generating questions, visualizing, predicting, and monitoring comprehension (Dole, 14
Duffy, Roehler & Pearson, 1991; Biancarosa & Snow, 2004; National Institute of Child Health and
Human Development, 2000). Cognitive writing strategies include outlining, drafting, revising, and
editing (Flower & Hayes, 1977; 1981). One important part of strategic reading involves metacognitive
awareness, or the ability to think about one’s own thinking (Paris & Jacobs, 1984). Metacognitive
readers are those who know about themselves as readers, have a toolkit of reading strategies, know
how to use strategies, and know when and why to use strategies (Paris, Lipson & Wixson, 1983).
Metacognitively aware readers were found to be both more strategic and better meaning-makers
than students with less developed metacognitive awareness (Garner & Alexander, 1989; Pressley &
Ghatala, 1990). Over time, studies have demonstrated the benefits of teaching students to be
strategic and metacognitive. The benefits of strategy-based comprehension instruction led
Biancarosa & Snow (2004), in a landmark report on adolescent literacy instruction, to recommend,
among other things, that students receive “[d]irect, explicit comprehension instruction, which is
instruction in the strategies and processes that proficient readers use to understand what they read,
including summarizing [and] keeping track of one’s own understanding” (p. 4). This cognitive line of
scholarship has been very important for the field and it has been widely taken up in K-12 instruction.
Strategy-based comprehension instruction, particularly for students who are not yet consistently
strategic or metacognitive in their reading, has an important place in secondary school classrooms.
However, a chief concern of sociocultural scholars is that many cognitive-based research studies treat
texts as somewhat interchangeable and often do not offer details about the texts used in the studies
at all; they also do not take up the social or cultural aspects of meaning making. Due to the highly
specialized nature of disciplinary reading, 15 writing, and reasoning, approaches designed to support
students’ comprehension alone are unlikely to “add up” to instruction that supports students to
participate in those specialized disciplinary discourse communities (Lee & Spratley, 2010; Shanahan
& Shanahan, 2008). Further, one team of authors recently cautioned that although comprehension
strategy instruction is best understood as “intertwined” with content learning, “it seems that many
scholars and teachers increasingly discuss, research, and employ reading strategies as if they were a
means unto themselves” (Learned, Stockdill, & Moje, 2011, p. 160). Content Area Literacy Alongside
this cognitive work, other scholars developed content area literacy, which explores how teachers
should be using what is known about cognition, motivation, and interest to guide their teaching of
literacy in various content areas. Content area literacy instruction foregrounds generalizable literacy
processes and study skills that are used across secondary content area classrooms (Moore,
Readence, & Rickelman, 1983). At the center of content area literacy is a commitment to helping
students “read to learn” subject content by supporting their comprehension of challenging school
texts. Literacy educators working from a content area literacy approach have advocated instructional
methods like using graphic organizers, anticipation guides, vocabulary games, and summary writing
to help students develop knowledge, interest, and comprehension strategies (Alvermann & Moore,
1991). Specific routines like Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984), Questioning the Author
(Beck & McKeown, 2006), and K-W-L charts (What I know, what I want to know, what I learned…)
(Ogle, 1986) may also be situated within content area literacy instruction. In his seminal book
Teaching Reading in Content Areas, Herber (1970) first examined questions of how to teach content
area literacy in secondary school classrooms. He encouraged 16 teachers to help their students learn
from texts using approaches like those listed above. His work was based on the understanding that
students in secondary school needed to continue to learn skills for reading increasingly complicated
subject-area texts, which he understood to be very different in nature from the texts of elementary
school. Since the publication of Herber’s (1970) book, a vast body of work has been conducted on
content area literacy (for reviews of this literature, see: Phelps, 2005; Alvermann & Moore, 1991).
Content area literacy has become increasingly prominent in teacher education and district
professional development programs. Yet, teachers have commonly resisted content area literacy
approaches (e.g., Konopak, Wilson & Readence, 1994; Bean, 1997; O’Brien, 1988; O’Brien & Stewart,
1990; Phelps, 2005), understanding them as “add-ons” to the curriculum rather than central to the
work of teaching the subject areas. In a review that served to launch disciplinary literacy research
and instruction, O’Brien, Stewart & Moje (1995) argued that content-area literacy approaches can
actually conflict with the values and practices of some subject areas, as they tend to serve the
traditional goals of secondary schooling instead of the goals of disciplinary discourse communities.
The Importance of Disciplinary Literacy Instruction As summarized in Chapter 1, some more recent
literacy scholars have argued for K-12 disciplinary literacy instruction, which has evolved out of
cognitive and content area literacy instruction and sociocultural theory. Over the past 20 to 30 years,
scholars have sought to both identify the discipline-specific literacy practices of various disciplines
and translate them for K12 student learning, though work on both fronts is still underway. As such,
disciplinary literacy instruction is not widespread in K-12 schools (Phelps, 2005). Commonly, students
are explicitly taught “basic literacy” skills like decoding and word 17 knowledge when they are early
readers, and then “intermediate literacy” skills like “generic comprehension strategies” (e.g.,
determining importance, drawing inferences) (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, p. 45). Although the text
challenges dramatically increase in secondary school, as one research team put it, “literacy
instruction often has evaporated altogether or has degenerated into a reiteration of general reading
strategies” that are not well matched to students’ needs (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, p. 45). Put
differently, although teaching cognitive reading and writing strategies may in fact support lower-
achieving students, particularly on school assessments, it is unlikely that such instruction will provide
students with the opportunities they need to develop more specialized, disciplinary approaches to
texts (Lee & Spratley, 2010; Snow & Moje, 2010). Recently, Moje (2015) advanced a four-“E” heuristic
that may be used to guide disciplinary literacy teaching in secondary schools. The four “Es” represent
necessary components of disciplinary literacy instruction: engaging students in the inquiry practices
of the discipline, examining with students words and ways with words, evaluating with students
when, why, and how disciplinary language is useful, and eliciting/engineering students’ necessary
knowledge, skills, and practices of engaging in the inquiry. For Moje, engineering includes explicitly
teaching students an action that they can deliberately use until that action becomes automatic and
teaching students to engage in disciplinary inquiry. She names approaches to strategy and
comprehension instruction as helpful tools that teachers might use to engage students in cycles of
disciplinary inquiry. The Importance of Understanding Disciplinarians’ Literacies Moje’s (2015)
heuristic for disciplinary literacy instruction, along with most other disciplinary literacy scholarship, is
rooted in theoretical and empirical work on “expert” 18 disciplinarians’ practices with texts. In order
to learn more about literacy in the disciplines, researchers have carefully analyzed and documented
the practices of participants with expertise in various fields. This work has largely been conducted
within history, but similar studies have also been conducted in the natural sciences and mathematics.
Although powerful in many ways, it is important to note that there have not been studies to
document disciplinary literacy patterns over large groups of experts. Studies generally seem to range
between two and eight participants each; as such, individual sets of findings are not generalizable to
an entire discipline. Other studies that inform disciplinary literacy have taken a student-centered
approach, studying students’ disciplinary literacy practices and disciplinary literacy development
through instruction. Taken together, studies that explore expert practice and novice practice provide
compelling and new ways of understanding possibilities for teaching and learning the disciplines.
They underscore the argument that learning to participate in a disciplinary discourse community is
more than “simply acquiring a certain body of established knowledge, skills, and abilities…[it is],
more importantly, taking on a set of beliefs, norms, world views and practices characteristic of the
[disciplinary] community” (Siegel & Borasi, 1994, p. 208), and they signal opportunities for better
aligning K-12 instruction with ways of participating in the disciplines. Disciplinary Participation in
History and the Social Sciences Wineburg’s (1991a) seminal work with historians contributes much to
our understanding of the disciplinary literacy practices of history. In his study, Wineburg documents
the read aloud practices of eight historians from various areas of specialization as they review a set
of texts about the American Revolution. He finds that historians are driven by historical inquiry.
When historians read, they do so to answer historical questions. Regardless of the extent of their
factual knowledge of the particular time period, the shared and discipline-specific nature of their 19
questions leads them to consistently employ several literacy practices when reading historical texts.
Wineburg documents how the participants systematically considered a text’s author and his/her
biases and the context in which the text was written. They also compared multiple texts to one
another in order to corroborate meaning. Although the historians generally read primary and
secondary sources, they employed these same literacy practices when reading sections of a history
textbook, bringing the shared assumption that all texts are laden with bias and potential
misrepresentation. In his study, Wineburg (1991a) compared the historians’ practices described
above to those of a group of eight high achieving high school students. In his reporting, he
represents patterns in the students’ literacy practices by presenting interview data of one student
named Darrel. Although a good comprehender who used cognitive reading strategies flexibly and
consistently, Darrel did not read historical texts in the same way as the historians in the study. When
Darrel read historical texts, he did not do so in a critical way. He did not identify bias nor did he
attend to the source. He assumed, in fact, that history textbooks were reliable, neutral
representations of events. By comparing experts and novices in this way, Wineburg’s analysis reveals
differences across the groups in both their literacy practices and their ways of thinking about the
discipline of history. These differences are attributable to what Wineburg calls an “epistemology of
text,” or individuals’ beliefs about what it means to read historical texts and conduct historical
inquiry: … For students, reading history was not a process of puzzling about authors’ intentions or
situating texts in a social world but of gathering information, with texts serving as bearers of
information. How could such bright students be oblivious to the subtexts that jumped out at
historians? ... Before students can see subtexts, they must first believe they 20 exist. In the absence
of such beliefs, students simply overlooked or did not know how to seek out features designed to
shape their perceptions or make them view events in a particular way. Students may have processed
texts, but they failed to engage with them. (1991a, p. 510) This excerpt—and the study as a whole—
suggests the interrelationship between disciplinary purposes, disciplinary orientations or
epistemologies, and literacy practices with texts. Without disciplinary purposes and orientations,
students did not make meaning with historical texts in ways that overlapped with the historians,
although they could be said to “comprehend” or “process” the texts generally. Similar patterns of
literacy practices and thinking have been documented in other disciplines in the social sciences. In
her dissertation study of democratic thinking, Shreiner (2009; 2014) studied the thinking of eight
political scientists and eight high school students. Her findings suggest that learning to participate in
the discipline of political science, too, requires learning shared and specialized practices and
assumptions. While reading historical documents and news articles, political scientists engaged in the
work of constructing new knowledge using shared habits of mind, whereas students did not
demonstrate this approach to reading. In an article about the teaching of history, Bain (2000)
explores some of his high school students’ ideas about the discipline. Like Darrel and his peers
(Wineburg, 1991a) and the students in Shreiner’s (2009; 2014) study, Bain’s students largely brought
with them into his class a “static, formulaic vision of history” whereby they assumed that memorizing
facts was the primary goal rather than conducting historical inquiry through textual analysis (p. 337).
By contrasting his students’ thinking and practices with those of historians, Bain (2000) developed an
approach to offer students learning opportunities that would explicitly teach them 21 the ways that
knowledge is created in history. This instruction included offering students a set of heuristics and an
overarching map of the ways that historical accounts are created in the discipline, along with
assigning tasks that would engage students in history-specific activities like having students write
their own historical accounts of the first day of school. He also established a discipline-specific
instructional routine—a disciplinary take on the content area literacy instructional routine of
Reciprocal Teaching (Palincsar & Brown, 1984)—for reading primary sources that included students
posing questions historians might ask, like, “Who made the source, and when was it made?” and
“What is the story line that connects all the sources?” At the end of the school year, Bain
documented students’ understandings of history, finding them more complex and more centered on
thinking and interpretation rather than on memorization. From the student voices he included, it is
clear that students’ interest in history was connected to their deepened understandings of history as
a discipline. In their study of two historians, two chemists, and two mathematicians, Shanahan and
Shanahan (2008) also found that their participants’ reading processes and practices seemed to be
based on the “intellectual values of a discipline and the methods by which scholarship is created in
each of the fields” (p. 50). Due to this suggested relationship, Shanahan and Shanahan argue in favor
of approaches like Bain’s (2000), underscoring the importance of providing instruction to students
that teaches them specialized, discipline-specific ways with texts. Disciplinary Participation in the
Natural Sciences and Mathematics Other disciplines have been similarly analyzed through closely
looking at expert practice and the comparisons to novice practice. As in other academic domains, the
work of natural scientists rests on specialized and shared ways of reading and writing (Norris &
Phillips, 2003). Experimental scientists, particularly, tend to seek objective explanations for natural
events and 22 phenomena (Coburn & Loving, 2001). Important parts of this work often involve
asking questions that may be answered using observable evidence and evaluating the quality and
validity of evidence offered to support claims (Yore, Hand & Florence, 2004). Natural scientists also
tend to consider and represent information in multiple forms. The two chemists that Shanahan &
Shanahan (2008) studied, for example, translated what they read into multiple representations and
did so fluidly. Natural scientists also read and consider the connections between alternative forms
such as graphs and charts. And, they tend to assume that, under similar conditions, the results of
one study allow them to predict results in another study. Disciplinary literacy in mathematics involves
still different conventions. Mathematical proofs, by definition, must be error-free. Mathematicians, in
order to produce such error-free work, tend to reread for correctness. The two mathematicians that
Shanahan & Shanahan (2008) studied attended to precise meanings of words like “a” and “the,”
understanding them to carry important and distinct meanings. By necessity, they must know the
specific definitions of technical mathematics vocabulary. Because the variables change from text to
text, mathematicians also often know how to recognize variables and understand them as such
(Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Yet, mathematicians also tend to understand mathematical
knowledge as fallible and as socially constructed within a community of practice (Siegel & Borasi,
1994). Doing mathematics is not just about correct answers; instead, it involves “reasoning about
situations involving quantities,” which includes “bounding and solving problems involving quantities
and relationships between quantities; forming, testing and proving conjectures; and communicating
mathematical ideas and solutions” (Draper & Siebert, 2004, p. 930). 23 Need for Work on Disciplinary
Participation in Literary Studies The ability of researchers and educators to develop approaches for
disciplinary literacy instruction depends on the thoroughness of the existing disciplinary literacy
knowledge base. Those in the field need to know how experts of literature create meaning from
domain-specific texts, what types of inquiry they engage in, what assumptions they make when they
approach such texts, how they make claims and offer evidence and reasoning. In short, educators
need to know how experts of literary studies think with and make meaning from texts. Through an
intensive review of the literature, I have located only two empirical studies that directly contribute to
the need for knowledge about the shared literacy practices of literary studies. The first is an expert-
expert-novice study (Zeitz, 1994). This study included three groups of participants: 13 doctoral
students of engineering, 16 doctoral students of English, and 24 novices, who were all juniors in high
school. Participants each read one unfamiliar poem, one unfamiliar short story, and one unfamiliar
scientific article. Participants were asked to recall what they had read, in order to allow for cross-
group comparisons. The English experts recalled verbatim lines in the poem and the gist of the poem
better than any other group of readers; the engineering experts recalled verbatim lines in the science
article and the gist of the science article better than any other group of readers. These results are
important because they reveal that expertise in one domain does not seem to equate with expertise
writ large. Although the English experts remembered more of the poem than the members of the
other groups, the English experts looked very similar to the high school students when reading the
science article. Participants were also asked to respond in writing to short answer questions about
the texts, such as, “Regarding the short story, ‘A New England Nun,’ does the narrator fundamentally
approve or disapprove of Louisa? How do you know?” (p. 291). Quantifying the 24 responses
revealed that English experts made many more interpretive statements (versus factual or other
statements) regarding the short story and poem than did engineering experts or high school
students. English experts also provided the most evidence to support their claims about the poem
and short story. Zeitz (1994) uses these findings to conclude that the knowledge base of English
experts allowed them to more deeply interpret the literary pieces, and that this knowledge base is
distinct from other disciplines. She also argues that one of the hallmarks of English experts is that
they make two types of meaning when reading literature: basic representation, or understanding
literally what happened, and derived representation, or understanding the more abstract meaning of
a text. Less advanced readers rely heavily on basic representation. What Zeitz’s (1994) methods do
not reveal is a window into the complex nature of the thinking about reading that those in the
discourse community of literature routinely employ. Her work does not show, for instance, how
experts are using interpretation to make meaning from the pieces, how they are asking questions of
the pieces or the types of questions they are considering at the outset (the only questions are the
ones she provides them to respond to in writing), or how they are misunderstanding the work of
reading the science article. By quantifying the number of interpretations, Zeitz shows frequency
between the groups, but her work does not reveal how the engineering experts and high school
students missed the mark when interpreting literature. Perhaps most importantly, Zeitz’s (1994)
study does not approximate the real work of doing literature. Instead, her design more closely
approximates the work of doing English class. Participants were given three texts with no context,
asked to recall the events in each text, and then given a series of comprehension/analysis questions
to answer. Although this approach does not discount Zeitz’s findings, it also does not reveal the ways
that literary disciplinarians 25 approach texts, the types of literary inquiry that guide their work, or
the ways they produce and evaluate knowledge. If educators are to improve literary instruction for
students, Zeitz’s study does not provide all of the information needed. In the second study of literary
reading, Peskin (1998) compares the reading processes of expert poetry readers (i.e., doctoral
candidates in English literature) with novice poetry readers (i.e., undergraduates who had taken only
one college-level poetry course). Participants were asked to think aloud as they read two unfamiliar
poems. Based on these think-aloud data, Peskin found that experts had more literary knowledge and
that their knowledge was important for reading poetry. She also found that experts were more likely
to use “interpretive strategies” in order to comprehend the poems. Peskin’s (1998) study highlights
many differences between experts and novices of poetry. The experts tended to make meaning of
the structural elements of the poem, to use wordplay and language as a cue for meaning, and to find
specific images in the poem pleasing. Experts were also likely to glean meaning and then extend their
engagement with the poem, exploring the significance, the author’s craft, and the use of poetic
conventions. And, they tended to make stronger allusions to other pieces of literature. They were
more likely to reread the piece multiple times to make additional meaning. In contrast, the novices
did not tend to demonstrate these behaviors. Peskin’s (1998) study helps to answer questions about
the ways that experts of literature read and think. It also leaves questions unanswered. For instance,
what does it mean to read and think about short stories? Novels? Pieces of literature from various
time periods? Texts written by authors with various identities and backgrounds? And, how do experts
employ literary theory 26 in their reading and thinking about text? What are the problems or big
questions that drive their work? How do they understand the social, discursive aspect of the
enterprise? A final limitation of both studies is that there are only doctoral candidates in the “expert”
groups. Although doctoral students certainly hold some degree of disciplinary expertise, they are not
yet truly considered expert in the field. It is curious why these studies would not include individuals
with doctorates, and it begs the question: Would expert practice look different among professors of
literature? Peskin (1998) does point out one important similarity regarding novice/expert
epistemologies of text, which is a somewhat different finding than Wineburg’s (1991a) finding;
novices and experts of literature shared the expectation that the poem would say something
significant, and that it would have thematic unity and metaphorical meaning. This similarity might be
just an artifact of how “novice” is defined in the two studies. Whereas the “novices” of Wineburg’s
study were high school students, the novices of Peskin’s study were undergraduates or high school
students who had all had one introductory level college poetry course. The similarity between
novices’ and experts’ epistemologies of text in Peskin’s study might also be explained by the
possibility that poetry is more available out of school (than historical texts) and, thus, Peskin’s
novices could have had more exposure to the texts under study than Wineburg’s novices. There are
other conceptual, theoretical, and descriptive pieces that relate to the questions of this study. For
example, Fahnestock and Secor (1991) conducted an analysis of published articles of literary criticism
and concluded that five topoi were most evident in the scholarship (e.g., the paradox topos, in which
the writer attempts to reconcile apparent contradictions). These topoi serve as markers of the
specialized community of literary studies; they were found to 27 be largely implicit in one study of an
undergraduate literature course, though students who demonstrated some awareness of these topoi
were more successful in the course than students who did not (Wilder, 2002). A team of educational
psychology researchers has applied Fahnestock and Secor’s topoi framework to explore the
effectiveness of explicitly teaching underachieving high school students both literary topoi and
heuristics for developing warranted literary claims (Lewis & Ferretti, 2011; 2009), finding that the
literary claims of the six student participants in their study improved with the intervention. Recently,
Tim Parks, associate professor of literature and frequent contributor to The New York Review of
Books, posted a blog entitled “How I Read,” in which he sought to respond to “scores of emails” he
had received “from readers lamenting that…they felt the text was passing them by” (2014). More
than simply reading with a pen in hand, Parks described his thoughts as he enters literary texts: “As I
dive into the opening pages,” he writes, “the first question I’m asking is, what are the qualities or
values that matter most to this author, or at least in this novel?” He considers, “What is the
emotional atmosphere behind this narrative?...and what is the consequent debate arising from that
atmosphere?” Later in the blog, he describes that his thinking with the text changes as he continues
to consider it: “Getting a sense of the values around which the story is organizing itself isn’t always
easy; I might change my mind two or three times. But let’s say that the mere attempt to do that gives
me something to look for…How is the writer trying to draw me into the mental world of his
characters through his writing, through his conversation with me?” Although anecdotal, Parks’s
description of his own interactions with texts suggests the potential for synthesizing a set of shared
literary literacy practices by conducting think aloud interviews with a group of literary scholars such
as him. 28 Need for Work on Teaching Students Disciplinary Participation in Literary Studies
Secondary students of literature often look more like the novices in Wineburg’s (1991a) and Bain’s
(2000) studies, initially understanding the work as static or centered on comprehension alone
(Harker, 1994; Janssen, Braaksma, & Rijlaarsdam, 2006; NAEP, 1981), though their capacities for
literary reasoning are evident in early grades (Lehr, 1988). At the beginning of the school year,
adolescents in scholar-teacher Carol Lee’s (2006; 2007) literature classroom, for instance, thought of
reading canonical literature as mostly pointless and out of reach. Lee presents how she drew on
lower-achieving, African American students’ everyday literacy and language practices in order to
develop their academic literacy and language practices in the domain of literature. Her unit goal was
to teach students to interpret symbolism within literature, one type of “interpretive problem.” Lee
considered the alignment between the use of symbolism in African American English and symbolism
in literature. She began instruction by helping students see their current processes for interpreting
symbols with everyday texts like lyrics and video clips and their shared valuing of symbolism, what
she calls the Cultural Modeling Framework. During class, Lee also leveraged familiar everyday modes
of communication like call and response, verbal inventiveness, and the use of proverbs and Biblical
verses to help students participate in discussion about academic content. Students were then able to
better interpret symbolism with canonical literature. Lee’s work is quite important for the field, as it
demonstrates the power of apprenticing students into sophisticated discursive disciplinary practices
and methods for doing so. Moje (2007), in her review of disciplinary literacy and its relationship to
social justice, remarks on Lee’s important contributions to the field and also notes that there is more
work to be done: 29 “[Lee] has begun to develop…a framework for English literature as a discipline.
However, the scope of such an enterprise suggests that this is not work for one scholar alone” (p.
36). Since Moje’s review in 2007, a newer scholar has joined the effort to develop instructional
approaches that allow all students access to rigorous disciplinary practices with literary works. Sarah
Levine, a former student of Lee’s and co-collaborator on the reasoning with literature work of Project
READi, studies affective-based approaches for engaging students in literary reasoning and
interpretation. In 2013, Levine, together with co-author Horton, published the student learning
outcomes of an instructional intervention in which high school students were taught an “affective
appraisal strategy—i.e., identifying the valence of words and phrases, and the moods and tones of
whole texts, and then supporting those interpretations—…[as] an accessible first step for students in
constructing thematic interpretations of poetry” (p. 106). In this study, the researchers gave two
groups of students a pre- and post-test of literary interpretation that asked them to make a thematic
interpretation of a poem. Between the pre- and post-tests, the treatment group received a four-
week-long sequence of instruction in which they learned and practiced the affective appraisal
strategy, which focused on supporting students to: 1. Appraise the valence of the text, considering
whether the overall impact is positive, negative, or both. 2. Look for details in the text that led to the
affective appraisals. 3. Explain why each detail seemed negative, positive, or both. (p. 114) Students
in the intervention group practiced using sentence stems like “The author condemns a world in
which…” The researchers coded student responses on the pre- and post-test using a 6- point scale,
which ranged from “literal descriptive unsupported” responses that include only summary without
interpretation to “thematic supported” responses that include a “universal 30 statement about the
main ideas, messages, or central meanings in the text” (p. 118). They found significant growth in the
thematic interpretations of the treatment group after receiving instruction based on affective
appraisal. Levine adds to the field by naming practices of literary reasoning that are important for
students to learn and then providing instructional approaches that have the potential to scaffold
students’ move from literal to thematic meaning making with literary works. With clearer knowledge
about the markers of expert participation in the field of literature, the work of Lee, Levine, and
others seeking to develop instructional approaches that support all students’ uptake of literary
literacy practices might be furthered. One particular area that might be informed is problem framing
in literature. It is apparent to many readers that literary texts contain layers of meaning, but how do
experts think about the problems of literature? How might educators then present these problems to
students so as to give authentic purpose to the work and provide access to the discourse
community? Questions of how to best engage students in the practices of literary studies have also
been posed by humanities-based scholars, who are some of the first to acknowledge the need to
make more explicit their often tacit ways of reading, writing, and reasoning with literary works when
teaching (e.g., Graff, 2002). Hutchings and O’Rourke (2002), for instance, in their piece “Problem-
based learning in literary studies,” share a conceptual framework for teaching undergraduate
students to participate in the discipline of literary studies. They begin the article by stating that
literary studies involves: • Exploratory research into the nature and constitution of texts, their
presentation within the time of their creation and their reception through time, their language, style,
meaning, intention and interpretation(s). 31 • A recognition that the interpretive context within
which the act of criticism takes place may be historical, contextual, philosophical, linguistic, semiotic.
• Above all, the active, creative engagement of the reader to meet the creative power of the
literature… (p. 75) Based in the understanding that “[w]e should teach as we research,” Hutchings
and O’Rourke (2002) offer a matching check-list of questions for instructors to assess the alignment
between their own problem-based practice and their teaching: 1. Has [the teacher] encouraged
exploratory research? 2. Has [the teacher] encouraged students to explore a variety of interpretative
contexts in order to allow them to develop their own sense of which is appropriate? 3. Has [the
teacher] encouraged an active and creative engagement of students with the creative power of the
literature? (p. 76) Finally, Hutchings and O’Rourke (2002) offer an approach to problem-based
teaching and learning in literary studies that actively involves the students themselves (with support
from the teacher) in constructing literary problems and methods of inquiry, working together or
independently to conduct research, and presenting their results. The studies reviewed above point to
the need for empirical work that articulates specific patterns of literary literacy practices and
instructional approaches for engaging secondary and undergraduate students in constructing,
pursuing, and communicating about literary problems. Such empirical work would complement
ongoing efforts based in literacy education, educational psychology, and the humanities to
meaningfully relate the work of literary critics to secondary and post-secondary students. 32 The
Importance of Understanding Teachers’ Own Disciplinary Literacies As the scholarship of Bain (2000,
2005), Lee (2006, 2007), and Levine (2014; Levine & Horton, 2013) reveals, teachers are central to
efforts that seek to provide students with more opportunities for rigorous learning. It is at the site of
the classroom that disciplinary literacy practices are or are not taught. Indeed, as Bain (2000) writes,
teachers occupy the space “between the novice and the expert, within the breach between the
school and the academy” (p. 336). It is due to teachers’ planning and instruction that students
consistently receive or do not receive opportunities to learn to participate in the disciplines, which
underscores the importance of teachers’ own disciplinary understandings and ways with texts. What
are the relationships between teachers’ own ways of making meaning with literary works and their
approaches to teaching with literary works? The current scholarship on this topic is incomplete. In
reviewing the literature, I could not locate studies examining the relationships between secondary
teachers’ or post-secondary teachers’ own ways of making meaning with domain-specific texts and
their approaches to teaching disciplinary literacy practices. There are, however, lines of research that
may inform such a study. Teacher Knowledge There is a branching line of scholarship that has
documented the types of knowledge that highly effective teachers seem to hold. Highly effective
teachers, Shulman (1987) argues, need multiple types of knowledge, including content knowledge
(i.e., “the knowledge, understanding, skill, and disposition that are to be learned by school children,”
pp. 8-9), pedagogical knowledge (e.g., classroom management, how students learn), pedagogical
content knowledge (i.e., how to best teach students within particular content areas), knowledge of
students (e.g., their interests, their background knowledge), knowledge of educational contexts (e.g.,
community resources, 33 school norms), and knowledge of “educational ends, purposes and values”
(p. 9). For Shulman, the way teachers think about their subject area is central to effective teaching.
Not only are teachers “member[s] of a scholarly community,” but they also must understand and be
able to teach students “the principles of inquiry that help answer two kinds of questions in each
field: What are the important ideas and skills in this domain? And How are new ideas added and
deficient ones dropped by those who produce knowledge in this area? That is, what are the rules and
procedures of good scholarship or inquiry?” (Shulman, 1987, p. 9). The teacher’s responsibility, as
someone who communicates what “truth” is in a field and the orientations and enthusiasm of those
who seek to determine truth, cannot be underestimated. In one empirical study, veteran history
teachers demonstrated many of these types of knowledge (Wilson & Wineburg, 2001). They knew
not only discrete historical facts like dates, but they also held a conceptual understanding of how the
facts were related to each other within the discipline of history. Drawing upon their multiple forms of
knowledge, teachers organized and enacted instruction that focused on students learning to
participate in the discourse community of history. Ms. Landy, the chemistry teacher in Moje’s (1994)
ethnography of literacy events and practices in one high school classroom, offers another example of
the relationship between teachers’ views of their disciplines and their approaches to literacy
instruction. Ms. Landy held quite strong perspectives about literacy and chemistry. She thought of
chemistry knowledge as authority rather than viewing it as ever-changing and based in discovery.
This orientation was closely related to her instructional approaches. Ms. Landy spent a great deal of
instructional time teaching students vocabulary words, organizational strategies, and chemical
processes, believing that these skills and knowledge would help them to be successful in chemistry,
as 34 opposed to focusing her instruction on the syntactic knowledge of chemistry (i.e., Shulman’s
(1987) questions: “How are new ideas added and deficient ones dropped by those who produce
knowledge in this area? …[W]hat are the rules and procedures of good scholarship or inquiry?”).
Other studies of content area teachers have revealed similar connections between teachers’ views of
their disciplines and their instructional decisions and priorities (e.g., Sturtevant, Duling & Hall, 2001).
Teachers and Literacy A second set of scholars has studied teachers, their reading habits, and their
beliefs about literacy. The work on teachers as readers focuses on what teachers—especially those
working in elementary grades—read, how they read, and the relationship of their personal habits to
their instructional decisions. The research has almost entirely focused on elementary teachers
because elementary classrooms have been considered (until quite recently) the primary site of
reading and literacy instruction. This work is based on the argument that in order for teachers to
teach reading and writing they must be skilled readers and writers themselves (e.g. Atwell, 1991;
Bridge & Hiebert, 1985; Mour, 1977). Along with mastery over their own literacy processes and
practices, the awareness of what can be difficult about reading makes teachers better at the job:
“Just as teachers who write are best able to act as guides for less experienced writers, teachers who
see themselves as readers—who are aware of the requirements and strategies of the reader’s role—
are best able to guide young readers” (Andrews-Beck & Rycik, 1992, p. 121). As might be predicted,
studies of teachers’ reading habits and practices have followed the larger arc of literacy research.
When efforts were underway to encourage elementary teachers to use full-length literature in their
classrooms instead of language-controlled text or collections of excerpted texts in basal readers,
studies were designed to investigate whether teachers read 35 multiple literary genres out of school.
One such study of 178 teachers found self-reported high levels of personal reading across genres and
with varied purposes (Williamson, 1991). Another study examined whether there was a relationship
between elementary teachers’ self-identification as readers and their implementation of
recommended literacy teaching methods (e.g., reading aloud regularly, facilitating daily sustained
silent reading, facilitating small group discussions of literature), finding a strong linear relationship
between teachers who considered themselves readers and their implementation of recommended
literacy teaching methods in their classrooms (Morrison, Jacobs, & Swinyard, 1999). Presumably,
teachers who read and value reading also believe literacy instruction is important and worthwhile.
Other studies more directly examined teacher values and beliefs related to literacy. If teachers were
to incorporate literacy instruction into their classrooms, how much did their beliefs about literacy
and the teaching of literacy matter? One study of this type was conducted by Richardson, Anders,
Tidwell & Lloyd (1991). In this study, the team interviewed 39 fourth through sixth grade teachers
and used teachers’ responses to chart their beliefs about how children learn to read (e.g., sub-skills
of reading must be taught first before comprehension can occur; reading a lot is how one learns to
read). The team then used this grid to make predictions about elements of teacher instruction (e.g.,
whether the teacher would ask students to read silently or aloud; whether the teacher would teach
vocabulary out of context; whether the teacher would use a basal reader during instruction), and
then they observed teacher practice to test their predictions. The team found a high level of
alignment between teacher beliefs about literacy and instructional approaches, so they were able to
predict quite accurately how teachers would teach given their interview data. Collectively, these
studies point to new questions about the ways that literature teachers’ 36 sets of knowledge,
including deep content knowledge and knowledge of disciplinary purposes, relate to or are reflected
by their disciplinary literacy practices and their approaches to teaching with literary works. Studies
examining the disciplinary literacy practices and conceptual understandings of teachers across the
disciplines in relation to their instructional decisions and school contexts would be quite instructive
for those seeking to train new teachers. The Literacy Education Landscape and Directions for Future
Research, In Sum To conclude this chapter: disciplinary literacy scholarship and teaching marks a shift
in conceptualizing literacy and literacy education. Disciplinary literacy scholarship focuses on shared
sets of literacy practices that are used as tools for pursuing questions of interest to a broader
community. These shared sets of literacy practices are specialized in nature; they do not describe the
mental processes that readers use across all reading events. Disciplinary literacy instruction, although
it might include explicit instruction on cognitive strategy use, ultimately seeks to introduce students
to the shared ways of reading, writing, and reasoning of particular disciplinary communities.
Whereas content area literacy instructional approaches could be “adapted to disciplinary needs and
ways of building knowledge,” (Learned, Stockdill & Moje, 2011, p. 180), and Bain’s (2000) history-
specific version of Reciprocal Teaching serves as an excellent example of such an innovation, initially
they were largely designed to teach cognitive comprehension strategies and metacognition. Given
this landscape, Moje (2007), at the end of her review of disciplinary literacy, articulates a call to
action for literacy education researchers: The work of a number of literacy and disciplinary scholars
reviewed here has paved the way for thinking about the literacy processes and practices of the
disciplines; however, we need a more carefully detailed archaeology of the disciplinary practices, one
that mines 37 both the cognitive processes and the cultural practices that mediate those processes…
The work that needs to be done is not only theoretical; empirical studies of how members of the
disciplines communicate and think about their communication…would do much to advance this field
for developing work related to pre-service teacher education…[Some] questions to consider posing
to members of the disciplines in such studies might include how language is used in the work of the
disciplines (e.g. as a mathematician, a historian, a literary theorist or writer, a chemist), the types of
texts used or produced as part of their work, and the purposes for using or producing such texts.
Questions also should examine audiences for disciplinary work; standards for warrant; and taboo
words, phrases, or writing styles. Finally, it would be useful to ask what disciplinarians consider
critical for novices to learn about the discipline. Another valuable direction in empirical studies
would revolve around how secondary subject-matter teachers…conceive of literate processes and
practices in the subject-matter areas they teach. Similar questions to those offered for members of
the discipline could guide survey, interview, or observational studies of what teachers…think about
when they think of literacy teaching and learning in the discipline. In particular, it would be
important to probe teachers regarding the kinds of texts they turn to or produce when teaching in
their content areas and regarding their purpose for turning to or producing such texts. Such
interviews could raise questions about establishing purposes for disciplinary reading or writing for
students and discussion of the teacher’s role and responsibility, as well as challenges, in supporting
student learning about disciplinary literacy and in developing students’ literacy skills. (p. 36) As is
articulated in Moje’s call to action above, the scholarship reviewed in this chapter points to 38 the
need for studies such as this one: studies that investigate disciplinarians’ purposes for meaning
making with texts and studies that investigate secondary subject-matter teachers’ own ways of
meaning making and their teaching practices. The empirical scholarship on literary disciplinary
literacy practices and disciplinary literacy instruction is especially minimal. This dissertation is
designed to contribute to relatively open questions about the literacy practices and instructional
approaches of those who study literary works and the secondary ELA teachers who teach with
literary works. In the following chapter, I present the methodological decisions I made when
designing and conducting the study.