Academic Honesty at Oxford College of Emory University: Fall 2011
Subject-Matter Literacy Workshop reduced PDF
1. Oct 13, 2016: Timbersong Academy, Asheville, North Carolina
Subject-Matter Literacy:
Exploring the ways that different disciplines use reading and writing
Teaching Consultant
Robert Burroughs, PhD
2. Introduction
✤ Research has found that struggling learners have poor literacy
skills in discipline-specific classes, such as science, history, or
math (Brozo et al., 2013)
✤ Moving from “learning to read” to “reading to learn” is the crucial
educational pivot. (Klenck & Kibby, 2000)
✤ One factor in the difficulty of “reading to learn” is the implicit
differences in the ways that different subjects organize and
communicate information. (Kelly, Luke, & Green, 2008)
✤ Explicit instruction in implicit subject-matter differences will benefit
struggling students. (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008).
3. What About Bob?
✤ Spent most of my working life in various aspects of education.
✤ High school English teacher in both public and private schools.
✤ Magazine editor and publisher at Scholastic in New York City.
✤ Tenured college professor for 15 years at University of Cincinnati,
working with teacher candidates.
✤ Educational Consultant for 5 years placing over 100 families in
residential programs.
✤ Academic Director at Calo, a trauma-focused RTC in Missouri.
4. What AboutYou?
✤ Where do you teach?
✤ What do you teach?
✤ How long have you been teaching?
✤ Something surprising about yourself?
5. Goals and Objectives
✤ Demonstrate the concept of multiple
literacies through an experiential activity.
✤ Understand the importance of subject-
matter literacies in curriculum and
instruction.
✤ Demonstrate activities to use with students
to strengthen subject-matter literacies.
6. The Road Map
✤ Introductions and Reading Experience
✤ BREAK (Around 9:25)
✤ Analysis of Reading Experience & Schema
✤ BREAK (Around 10:35)
✤ Subject-Matter Literacies
✤ BREAK (Around 11:35)
✤ Applying Subject-Matter Literacies to Class Activities
✤ LUNCH (Around 12:30)
7. ✤ What you are doing is unlike any other kind of teaching.
✤ Emotional growth is priority in treatment.
✤ School in treatment serves as both support and indicator of treatment
progress.
✤ Emotional regulation as pivot behavior.
✤ We offer students options that didn’t have when they came to us.
Thoughts on
ResidentialTeaching
8. A Brief Quiz on “Blue Notes”
✤ 1. What is a “blue note”?
✤ 2. Why does the author consider blue
notes important to harmonies of popular
songs?
✤ 3. How does “blue note” harmony differ
from “classical” harmony?
9. Processing “Blue Notes”
✤ 1. Write down all the words (vocabulary)
you find difficult to understand in this
excerpt.
✤ 2. Underline the “thesis” or main idea of this
excerpt.
✤ 3. Write three questions, the answers to
which would help you understand this
12. Schema
✤ Schema = Web of information and experience surrounding a topic.
✤ Schema Activation:
✤ Looking for organizing concepts
✤ Recalling related information, experiences, attitudes, feelings
✤ Deciding how easy or difficult the text is likely to be
✤ Setting a purpose for reading
✤ Trying to develop a personal interest in the reading.
15. Subject-Matter Literacies
✤ The specialized literacies of academic subjects: “ways of knowing,
thinking and doing” (Applebee, 1996; Burroughs & Smagorinsky, 2009).
✤ Form the boundaries of subject matter, as well as participation criteria;
for example:
✤ Acceptable topics of investigation
✤ Acceptable methods of inquiry
✤ What counts as compelling evidence
✤ What counts as persuasive modes of argument
16. Clown History
✤ Acceptable topic ties clowning
to a significant historical event
or idea in American history.
✤ Acceptable evidence includes
newspapers, posters, diaries as
primary sources.
✤ Solely narrative structure not
enough to tie clowning to other
major forces in American
media.
17. Nominalization
✤ Transformation of one grammatical form into
another; typically actions (verbs) into things (nouns).
✤ Example:
✤ “The production of rock waste by mechanical
processes and chemical changes is called
weathering.”
✤ Producing rock waste (an action) =
“weathering” (a thing).
20. Nominalization: Science vs History
✤ Both texts use nominalization, but in
different ways
✤ Science text uses it to further technical
vocabulary of science
✤ History texts use it to create
abstractions.
21. Text Structure: Science vs History
✤ Science argument often begins with hypothesis
✤ Implicit structure based on “scientific method”
✤ Focus on procedure, process, and methods
✤ Evidence stresses observations, data, experiments
✤ History often structured as narrative
✤ Focus on sequence of events and chronology
✤ Trends or generalizations highlighted from narrative
✤ Evidence stresses documents and artifacts
22. Disciplinary Patterns ofThought and Langage
Function Biology Physics History
Orienting
attention
Used guiding questions to
focus students on bio
functions, their labels, and
place within systems
Focused students on
observing and
investigating
Contextualized
historical info; focused
on cultural perspectives
Refining
Understanding
Encouraged review of
terms and patterns
Examined possible
explanations based on
related scientific
knowledge
Explored content from
multiple social and
cultural perspectives
Selecting
Evidence
Used proper labels for
parts and related them
to systems
Made direct links
between observed
phenomenon and
principles of physics
Explained
interpretations through
references to
documents and
artifacts
Adapted from:
Langer, J.A. (1992). Speaking of knowing: Conceptions of understanding in the academic disciplines. In J. Mangieri & K. Collins (Eds.), Teaching
thinking: An agenda for the twenty-first century (pp. 69-85). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
23. SoWhat?
✤ “Ways of knowing” are so internalized by
teachers that it is automatic and
unexpressed.
✤ Yet, students are often stumped by
vocabulary and limited background
knowledge.
✤ For many texts they read and write,
24. Reading Algebra
“Difficulties that students encounter in algebra
are often the results of difficulties in reading”
“Diagrams and other visual aids often
accompany the exposition and the examples.”
“Many familiar words--for example power, variable,
simplify--take on specialized meanings in algebra.”
“Identifying and interpreting the information
provided by diagrams, graphs, and tables is a skill
that has to be learned”
26. Sample Activities & Approaches
✤ Explicitly orienting attention, refining
understanding, and citing evidence in texts
that students read.
✤ Explicitly addressing text structures as a
way to improve reading and writing.
✤ “Doing” history and science.
27. Orienting Students’Attention
✤ What is this phenomenon (bomb shelters) an
example of?
✤ Cold War paranoia?
✤ Nuclear warfare naivete?
✤ Government show?
✤ Explicit rationales and connections to previous
material give students context for instruction.
28. Refining Understanding
✤ Questions that are related to how you frame
the passage have the most coherence for
students.
✤ What questions would you want your
students to ask about this passage?
✤ Explicitly telling students the purpose of
your questions will help clarify your
questions for students.
31. OtherText Structures
✤ Armbruster (1989) identifies several
other text structures and provides
frames and templates:
✤ Cause/effect text structure
✤ Sequence text structure
✤ Compare/contrast text structure
32. Footprints Instructions
✤ 1. With a partner, read your copy of the case below and
study the footprint patterns on the back page.
✤ 2. On the data sheet, use the prompts to note what you
observe in the footprints.
✤ 3. Write down all the hypotheses you can think of that
could explain these footprints.
✤ 4. Discuss the different hypotheses you have generated,
think about what information you would need to test or
explain your hypotheses.
33. Footprints Scenarios
You and a few close friends have taken a trip to Hawaii for the winter
break. You really felt you needed to get away from the gloom of the
mid-western winters to feel the warm sunshine and get out of those
dreary winter clothes. Each day you and your friend have explored a
new beach along the coastline. The edges by the water have new
shell finds each day, the interiors of the beach have sand patterns and
ripples where it is exposed to the wind, and interesting little sheltered
spots that seem unchanged over time.
One day when you and your friend are walking along a new stretch
of beach you see the most unusual footprint patterns in the sand.
