Digital Literacies are crucial for the development of all students’ learning in the 21^stcentury classroom. Today, digital literacies include resources such as gathering information as a part of inquiry, visualizing data, generating visual representations, and communication. In order to be successful with this skill, you must be able to adequately read, write, and express ideas in multiple forms. Within the article, Integrating Digital Literacies for Disciplinary Learning, the authors Jill Castek and Michael Manderino used several examples of technology tools to show how beneficial they were to teach disciplinary literacy. An example included using the app Audacity for podcasts. This allowed students to conduct interviews within the community which was an asset of learning disciplinary literacy. This made students collaborate with others and create a product using technology to help them reach an educational goal. It is incredibly easy to find credible and up-to-date information for our students to use because of the internet and technology resources we have, especially in 2019. Castek did bring up an interesting claim that, yes, technology is very beneficial to have in the schools and have shown significant improvement and understanding of content, not all schools have the money and resources to provide their students with technology tools. According to the study, only “some students have the experience and skills needed to efficiently find information online” (698). Students who have access are capable of being given the foundation to learn, but it is also important to note that “you can lead an animal to the water, but you can’t make them drink it”. You can give all of this information to the students to use and focus on, but they may not know how to use it, or they will not be able to analyze it properly and efficiently for research purposes. Students need to read and engage with the texts in order to gain a better understanding of the content instead of just look for key words and phrases that may help their research or questions they are asking. It is the teacher’s responsibility to investigate the sites the students are using and view its ideological, political, and historical content to make sure it is deemed appropriate and sufficient for the students’ learning. An example of using digital literacies for disciplinary learning may be beneficial in a history class as students create a Facebook “looking” page for a historical figure they are learning about within modern-day United States history. Students are very experienced with social media applications, and giving them this fun opportunity to become creative and express the content they learned in a non-traditional manner may increase engagement and help scaffold their learning earlier on within the unit. Blogs are another form of using technology tools within the classroom, but it is important for teachers to set expectations and regularly and consistently monitor them to make sure students are staying on tasks, but still expressing their perspective and creativity. Overall, technology is crucial for students to incorporate it into their learning as it will benefit them and their futures in this always-changing technology evolution within society.

Not once, throughout this entire course, did I ever think of how religion and spiritual studies are taught and learned through a disciplinary literacy lens. It is ironic, being that I attend a spiritual university where its core values are surrounded by a religious scope. Religion is its own discipline where many researchers, for thousands of years, have excavated many answers and more questions about the origin of life and how our world intertwines with the universe around it. The article, “Religious Literacies in a Secular Literacy Classroom”, showcases an interesting concept of culturally diverse students in a secular classroom, and how their own religion and the religion of others may impact their literacy and learning. The research article is set up in a very interesting way that I particularly would not have chosen if it was my work. First, Skerrett does a decent job of introducing the topic to the reader and explaining the questions they had within their research that would later reveal themselves as answers within the results section. It is important to give background information into the topic you are studying, especially if it is one that isn’t as relevant as others, however, it should not be as long and in depth as this was when providing information. I feel as though there was information within this research report that were fillers and not relevant to the questions that were being researched such as the “Contemporary Scholarship on Religious Literacy Education in Diverse Secular Schools” section. Skerrett could have easily said within one or two sentences how this particular topic has not been researched very often by scholars, therefore, there isn’t much information to provide about this argument. It was a winded section, in terms of length and overall quality of work. A methods sections is an important piece of a research report since it describes the actions and steps that are to be taken to investigate the research questions and it provides a rationale for applying the specific steps and procedures to accomplish the goal and create answers to the problems being investigated. Skerrett believes that literacy, especially within religious history, is a form of power that people had over others. It was described as being a moral tradition to yourself and society for an individual to be literate and comprehend the words around them. According to Skerrett, the United States was founded “in pursuit of religious freedom bound up with strong attitudes toward reading and writing” (Skerrett, 235). The researcher, Skerrett, observed not just instructional points of a lecture, but also the informal conversations that occurred between students and the teacher as well as becoming hands-on within the learning environment where it was deemed appropriate. The researcher was able to gain information not just for scholastic purposes, but also supplemental behavior that would benefit her understanding of where students’ religious backgrounds may become relevant in their learning. I never thought to consider religious backgrounds into my classroom, and I am thrilled to take this information back to my future classroom and be a better culturally-responsive educator that looks at a person with the full lens of ideas. If you are being a responsive teacher, you are able to look at a child from multiple perspectives and take everything about them into consideration when creating content and lectures for the classes. If you are a Social Studies teacher and you have a student of Native American descent, it is imperative for you to incorporate their cultural within the content you teach so you can be a responsible, culturally-responsive educator that values all backgrounds, ethnicities, and the history behind them and how important they are to our social identity. Overall, religion was not a discipline I took into consideration when learning and talking about disciplinary literacy, however, I am happy that I was exposed to this information so I can make culturally responsible decisions to assist my students and their learning. 

Throughout my high school career, my social studies classes incorporated a concept known as sourcing which was something that was incredibly challenging to wrap my head around because the directions were never clear and the knowledge was never transferred to us properly within our classes. Sourcing was almost a “bad word” that was said in our classes that were followed by multiple sighs and huffs from my fellow classmates. Now, as a pre-service teacher, I am concerned about how important sourcing is in the classroom if it isn’t taught in a proper, engaging, and informative way. I fear students will grow a strong dislike for this concept and it will never lose its negative connotation of being a pain to do, a “chore”, or a boring strategy that has no importance. According to the article “Disciplinary Literacy in History”, Wineburg and Reisman comment that “Sourcing enjoins readers to engage authors, querying them about their credentials, their interest in the story they are telling, their position… they narrate… sourcing is the touchstone that distinguishes expert from novice practice” (Wineburg & Reisman, 636). Sourcing is vital to decode texts, particularly in social studies, but how can teachers be productive and effective in their teaching of this particular concept?

One very disturbing example that was made relevant in 2014 in California was an assignment that was performed by 8^thgraders pertaining to the Holocaust. Teachers picked “credible” documents that had differing views which included whether or not the Holocaust was fake or not. Based off these provided documents from the teachers, students responded with interesting comments such as “There was no evidence or prove [sic] that there were gas chambers”  and “I believe the event was a fake…” (Wineburg & Reisman, 637). If these students would have sourced these documents and used the strategies of sourcing, they would have found out that these documents came from a website known as the Institute for Historical Review which is a Holocaust denial group aligned with Aryan Supremacists. Of course, Disciplinary Literacy goes deeper than simple sourcing and finding out where a document comes from. Students actually learn through sourcing and discover new themes and ideas that may be in existence in the curricula world of research and history. Students will not only learn basic facts, but they will also begin to learn and understand multiple historical perspectives and the “why” behind people’s thoughts, opinions, and actions. 

One concept linking Disciplinary Literacy to History is this idea that teachers are trying to teach students how to “read like a historian”. This is a very basic understanding of disciplinary literacy, however, teachers disagree with this statement. Unless it was being taught for the sole purpose of career preparation/exploration, teachers do not believe that its sole focus is how to be a historian, but its focus is the “vocation of the citizen”. Our society today, with its media and hearsay, create phony tabloids that do not have enough factual evidence to support their claims. It is up to its citizens to decipher and source the credible facts in contrast to the biased opinions and perspectives. Wineburg and Reisman raise an important concern about the amount of power ill-informed individuals have compared to the well-informed. They have just as much power, and it is up to every generation to teach, learn, educate, and advocate for the true and factual answer, not the biased and opinionated one. An interesting comment that James Madison made, well before the internet was invented, was “information, without a citizenry equipped to evaluate it, was worthless” (cited in Hunt, 1910). History teachers have a responsibility to teach students not how to become a historian, but how to be a strong, independent, well-informed citizen that will incorporate the strategy of sourcing where knowledge and factual evidence will be found, embraced, and advocated for in future discussions, research, and media pieces. 

Out of all of the resources that we have been given to help us understand and comprehend disciplinary literacy, the videos have finally turned a light on in my mind about how to fully grasp the concept and understand why it is important. The first video I watched, the Reading Rockets video, was engaging and intriguing for a pre-service teacher to watch and learn how to implement this concept within an easy and basic lesson. The first video incorporated this new teaching strategy known as List-Group-Label where it allowed students to pick out terms and vocabulary words that were associated with the specific discipline of gardening. The students were able to properly learn how to use these words and actually understand what they meant within its discipline, however, I did not feel comfortable with watching a teacher teach about gardening. I understand that her goal was probably more broad than what we saw, and she just wanted her students to learn how to group words together that are associated with each other as well as create foundational skills of pulling information out while reading and incorporating reading comprehension. Especially for elementary level classrooms, students need to be completely engulfed in the specific content that they must learn and that is appropriate. If a teacher needs to teach specific content, I would much rather see that teacher incorporate disciplinary literacy within its appropriate content instead of doing what the teacher did with gardening. It is hard to see what this teacher is actually trying to do with this specific content. Does she want them to learn how to garden? Does she want them to know how to group words together? 

Specifically, disciplinary literacy, I do not think, was adequately showcased within this activity, however, if you paid close attention, you could see highlights within it that can argue a foundational way to teach disciplinary literacy. This was a lesson on how to teach the concept of disciplinary literacy, but if it isn’t implemented within the actual content that teachers need to facilitate within the classroom, students will not believe there is a point or reason to learn it. There was no point for students to learn about gardening because the teacher is not teaching them how to become master gardeners, so I find it hard to wrap my head around why she chose that content in the first place. There wasn’t a successful end result that students will now be able to be gardeners especially since that is not a traditional discipline that must be mastered/assessed within school districts. If disciplinary literacy is going to be implemented within classrooms, it should be naturally introduced within the appropriate teaching content, otherwise students will not feel as though there is a reason to learn about it in the first place. Too many times students ask “what am I actually going to use this for?”, and now we can be the teachers that create a classroom where students will feel like they have a purpose and reason to complete the work and feel successful while doing it.

Disciplinary Literacy is a concept that all teachers, regardless of content and age level, should support and introduce within their classes. I do believe that more advanced elementary classrooms should implement disciplinary literacy within their curriculum. This may benefit their learning and help students reach the next level of higher cognitive thinking to prepare them for the middle level grades. I do believe that the foundations of each subject must be taught in order for students to understand the basic level of knowledge as well as master its subject and content area. I personally feel as though disciplinary literacy can be taught as a supplement through different readings and texts while uncovering fundamental skills within an elementary classroom. Social languages need to be introduced at a very young age to students, especially in the technological renaissance we are experiencing in the 21^stcentury. Students are losing social skills due to technology and phones/computers, and it is incredibly important for students to gain and master this skill as it will be imperative for success in a future career and profession. Unfortunately, my school did a poor job of incorporating disciplinary literacy within my education. Everything was specifically geared towards its own subject, and we never had the opportunity to use higher order thinking to dive deeper into the context. Everything was typically surface level in terms of my education which is why I wish I was introduced to this concept at such an early age. I personally believe it would have benefitted my learning all throughout my school career, and could have given me more opportunity to tackle higher level thinking at a young age. I had the opportunity to take AP courses within my school that introduced this concept, however, we never created anything out of it. We learned the basics, and moved onto the next concept. I felt as though I was robbed out of a decent education where I could create and engage in more than just subject matter. As a pre-service teacher, I plan on incorporating this concept within my classroom as early as I can, so no child will feel the way I do about my education. They will not be able to question “what if”. They will have the tools and resources they need to prosper within our ever-changing world, and ways to think beyond the basic fundamental ideas they learn as a young child in elementary school. Disciplinary Literacy should be introduced in elementary school to benefit students’ learning and help them reach higher levels of thinking at a younger age.

Now that I have a solid foundation with disciplinary literacy and content area, I am able to distinguish how different these two concepts are as well as utilize different techniques that can enhance my student’s thinking and knowledge they retain in the classroom. Content, content area, and disciplinary literacy have been interwoven in many of my classes in both college as well as the classrooms I have observed over the past few years. Content, “the what”, can be seen in every single lesson as the basics or foundation of the material. An example would include a lesson I taught in a 7^thgrade classroom where I taught them the concept of “Theme” and how it is relevant in written works. I taught them the main idea of what theme is and how to find it within novels and short stories using context clues and evidence from the sources provided. Students could not just give their opinion, but they had to survey the text to prove their theory and give explanations as to why they believed it to be the theme of the story. Content area, which is better understood as the subject area that a teacher teaches, includes social studies, English, mathematics, and science just to name a few. The past few years we have been divided in different class “blocks” that were strictly for ELA, Reading, or Science. Each block we would talk about ways that we can strategically teach our students using the preferred language of that subject area and age level. Disciplinary literacy has been a very interesting concept to learn about so far within my educational endeavors. Disciplinary literacy is finding a way to merge content, subjects, and experiences into a meaningful and productive lesson plan that will enable students to think critically and master a broad range of skillsets that lower level thinking would not achieve. 

I found Disciplinary Literacy to be incredibly successful within Rainey’s article and the History and Physics classroom. In the History classroom, students were presented a protocol on how to read historical sources. There was a guide included that had a set of historical literacy practices that students were able to draw on when reading primary and secondary sources and historical accounts, including sourcing, identifying the author’s argument, and potential biases, and generating new questions of the text. There were different forms of text the students could use that also made them become different historical figures that would have their own perspective on the main question of the lesson. Different forms of text included letters and transcribed political speeches. This type of Disciplinary Literacy fostered and promoted debate and discussion within the classroom, and allowed the teacher to sit back and watch his students learn through collaboration, analyzing sources, and talking about their figure’s perspective with their peers. Students had to look at different perspectives in sources to answer a crafted question while looking at patterns through writing. This included a meta-conversation at the end of the lesson that allowed students to think more broadly about when, why, and how to use historical literacy practices such as sourcing. Also, if some practices are useful or not. This type of lesson also taught students about historical bias which was relevant within this type of literacy taught. This was a strong and beneficial way for students to incorporate Disciplinary Literacy within a classroom. Disciplinary Literacy was successful within a Physics classroom as well, according to Rainey. Initially, the teacher gave the students sentence frames to use to start writing their experimental questions. Even within the science class I observed, I noticed how important inquiry was to understand and how this concept was being taught across all grades, at various levels. Students were also required to make theoretical and empirical arguments that further advance the idea of incorporating disciplinary literacy within lesson plans and curriculum. Students are further engaged in constructing, investigating, and communicating about questions of science, particularly in physics for this scenario. During the Physics lesson, students worked together to draft precise and testable questions, to collect, record, and analyze data, and to represent their findings in multiple ways (graphs, equations, written). Disciplinary Literacy is a vital part of a teacher’s lesson and should be implemented throughout all disciplines, subjects, and classrooms.

The difference between content area literacy and discipline literacy caused me to dive deeper into the meanings of both terms and to understand how I, a preservice teacher, can try and tackle these two important concepts within my classroom with the resources I may or may not have and the time I am allotted. Wolsey and Lapp made very interesting points about what content literacy was and how many people try to use the two terms interchangeably without understanding how different and important they are separate from one another. These authors bring up an excellent point about how many teachers in the classroom may ask their students to “Think like a scientist” or “Think like a mathematician”, however, it is extremely difficult for a child to be well-versed in many disciplines and to think like an individual who has multiple degrees and years of experience in a specific field. Although teachers try and implement many disciplines into a child’s mind while they are in school, it is merely just surface level since the student may not have the content literacy strategies and skills mastered by this time. Moje brought up a very interesting thought that teachers feel “that the strategies place an unfair burden of teaching on [teachers] when they should be teaching content [within their classrooms]” (Moje 98). On the other side of this issue, many English/Language Arts teachers, particularly at the high school level, claim their subject area/discipline revolves around understanding themes in literature or rhetorical devices in composition, not around acts of reading and writing in other disciplines (Moje 98). I completely understand how there may be either a lack of communication between different grade levels on what is expected of each teacher to teach if a student does not already have the foundation they need to not only understand the reading they are given, but now the content and specific subject they are reading about. I agree that there needs to be implementation of some sort of disciplinary literacy program with strategies to help teachers, especially at the younger grade levels, teach their students how to scope out specific language per each subject so they can be prepared when they must try to master the discipline during their high school and beyond years. Too many times are teachers “responsible” for re-teaching a student the fundamental concepts of reading and understanding, do they miss out on the content learning and mastering of a specific field or subject. This disables students’ learning and hinders them from accomplishing goals they can be achieving by going to college and continuing their education. These readings, challenging as they were to wrap my head around initially, helped open my eyes to the difference between the two concepts and how important it is for teachers to recognize the difference between content literacy and discipline literacy, and how they can successfully integrate the two within their own classrooms.