“…a topic that was further explored in this project as professional learning facilitators aimed to educate teachers about this strategy to integrate the Language Arts strands.”

Teaching Content-Area Literacy and Disciplinary Literacy. SEDL Insights

This SEDL Insights document focuses on context-area and disciplinary literacy; how to approach content instruction that fosters 21st century literacy skills; designing authentic experiences and assessments; allowing students to actively engage in their learning; provide students with opportunities to use academic language, habits of practice, and inquiry; and implementing subject-specific professional development that is on-going and job-embedded (Chauvin & Theodore, 2015). View quarterly publication

Content Area and Disciplinary Literacy: Strategies and Frameworks

This brief focuses on both content area literacy and disciplinary literacy, and how these two can be combined (with examples), while noting that these two literacies “are not mutually exclusive approaches to literacy instruction” (International Literacy Association, ILA, 2017, p. 5). View brief

Make Room for Developing Subject-Specific Vocabulary

Literacy Gains (2014) explains why developing subject-specific vocabulary is important for adolescent learners, and provides readers with examples of how subject-specific vocabulary can be developed in the classroom. View information article

Does Disciplinary Literacy Have a Place in Elementary School?

Shanahan and Shanahan (2014) describe disciplinary literacy and suggest approaches educators can take to implement disciplinary literacy in their classrooms. View journal article

Disciplinary Vocabulary

This blog post by Shanahan (2015) explains disciplinary vocabulary and briefly notes the difference between content literacy and disciplinary literacy. View blog post

Scaffolding Digital Literacies for Disciplinary Learning: Adolescents Collaboratively Composing Multimodal Science Fictions

Smith and Shen (2017) provide details on the scaffolds they developed for Project Imagine the Future (Project IF). This project “supports middle school students in developing disciplinary expertise and identities while working with their peers to create multimodal science fictions” (Smith & Shen, 2017, p. 85). View journal article