Implementing a disciplinary-literacy curriculum for US history: learning from expert middle school teachers in diverse classrooms

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents’ understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history teachers’ efforts to implement curriculum that integrates reading, writing and thinking in history with academically diverse eighth graders. We conduct qualitative analyses of teacher observations and interviews as well as student work. This analysis provides insight into several issues that emerge in efforts to teach disciplinary literacy in history classrooms: the nuances of teachers’ use of curriculum materials created by people other than themselves, teachers’ appropriation and adaptation of curriculum materials and teachers’ understanding of curriculum materials and disciplinary literacy goals. We find that teachers’ knowledge of the discipline and attention to students’ ideas allowed them to skillfully adapt the curriculum to better meet students’ needs and push students’ thinking. Orienting teachers toward disciplinary learning, ensuring a foundational understanding of their discipline and providing teachers with tools to teach disciplinary literacy are important steps to help students meet the demands of the disciplinary literacy agenda.     

How does completing a dissertation transform undergraduate students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge?

Dissertations are positioned as the capstone of an undergraduate degree, bringing together what students have previously learned from their programmes through a piece of independent research. However, there is limited research into the ways in which engaging in a dissertation has an impact on students’ understandings of disciplinary knowledge. In this article, we explore the relations between students’ accounts of sociological knowledge in their second and third years and how they engage with sociological knowledge in their dissertations. We argue that for the work of the dissertation to have an impact on students’ understanding of sociological knowledge, students need to see their discipline as providing a way of answering their research questions. We explore the implications of this argument for both our understanding of the role of dissertations and research-based learning in universities more generally.     

何以为师？——实习生的知识转化与身份获得

实习生专业成长过程中的知识转化与身份获得之间是什么关系？本文通过两个案例讨论实习生对教师知识、身份和两者关系的认识,及其对他们知识转化和身份认同的影响。研究发现,对实习生而言,知识与身份相互嵌套、紧密关联。他们对教师工作核心知识的认识在很大程度上决定了他们对教师身份的理解和认同,反之亦然。这表明,教师教育既要注重师范生学科知识的学习,也要注重他们教育性知识的发展。过于狭隘地将教师的学科知识作为其专业活动与教师身份的惟一合法基础,可能阻碍实习生的教师身份认同,误导他们对教育教学的理解。     

Elementary teachers’ use of content knowledge to evaluate students’ thinking in the life sciences

Science learning environments should provide opportunities for students to make sense of and enhance their understanding of disciplinary concepts. Teachers can support students’ sense-making by engaging and responding to their ideas through high-leverage instructional practices such as formative assessment (FA). However, past research has shown that teachers may not understand FA, how to implement it, or have sufficient content knowledge to use it effectively. Few studies have investigated how teachers gather information to evaluate students’ ideas or how content knowledge factors into those decisions, particularly within the life science discipline. We designed a study embedded in a multi-year professional development program that supported elementary teachers’ development of disciplinary knowledge and FA practices within science instruction. Study findings illustrate how elementary teachers’ life science content knowledge influences their evaluation of students’ ideas. Teachers with higher levels of life science content knowledge more effectively evaluated students’ ideas than teachers with lower levels of content knowledge. Teachers with higher content exam scores discussed both content and student understanding to a greater extent, and their analyses of students’ ideas were more scientifically accurate compared to teachers with lower scores. These findings contribute to theory and practice around science teacher education, professional development, and curriculum development.     

Prospective Elementary Teachers’ Analysis of Children’s Science Talk in an Undergraduate Physics Course

We investigated how prospective teachers used physics content knowledge when analyzing the talk of elementary children during special activities in an undergraduate physics content course designed for prospective teachers. We found that prospective teachers used content knowledge to reflect on their own learning and to identify students’ science ideas and restate these ideas in scientific terms. Based on this research, we inferred that analyzing children’s ideas through videos provides a meaningful context for applying conceptual physics knowledge in physics courses. Activities that are embedded within a disciplinary curriculum, such as those studied here, may help prospective teachers learn to use disciplinary knowledge in exactly the type of activity in which their content knowledge will be most useful: listening to and interpreting children’s science ideas.     

Engaging Minds in the Common Core: Integrating Standards for Student Engagement

With the implementation of Common Core State Standards (CCSS) many teachers continue to search for ways to engage students in the learning process while meeting the rigorous demands of the standards. Researchers suggest that by providing opportunities for higher order thinking, student choice, and creative ways to showcase knowledge, students will find engagement and motivation in the classroom. Many teachers of adolescent students struggle with ways to integrate these approaches while meeting the standards. The purpose of this article is to provide examples of engaging literacy strategies that focus on the Common Core State Standards for middle and high school students.     

The impact of disciplinary background and teaching experience on the use of evaluative language in teacher feedback

This study was designed to examine secondary teachers’ use of evaluative language resources in their qualitative written feedback on student work and factors shaping the deployment of such resources. Drawing on appraisal theory as an analytic framework for the language of evaluation, the study analyzed 84 teachers’ evaluative reports on their students’ research projects. The teachers’ use of several types of evaluative language was found to differ along the lines of disciplinary background and teaching experience. These results can be explained by disciplinarily valued dispositions, epistemological beliefs, knowledge-making practices, and varying knowledge of (in)effective feedback resulting from cumulative teaching experience. Implications are derived from these findings for developing teachers’ competence in using evaluative language effectively to provide feedback that can support and maximize students’ learning.     

民族地区初中教师惩戒教育现状研究——以广西融水、三江县为例

惩戒是教师依法对学生不合规范的行为进行制裁,并促进其规范行为产生和巩固的一种教育权利。目前,由于国家在惩戒教育方面尚没有明确的法律法规,导致教师在实施惩戒的过程中面临诸多的挑战和困难。对于民族地区的初中教师而言,如何对民族地区的学生进行合理有效的惩戒教育显得尤为重要。文章在问卷调查的基础上探究民族地区惩戒教育的现状、教师在惩戒教育上的性别及年龄特点,同时在研究的基础上为民族地区初中教师教育教学提出合理的建议。     

摭谈思想政治课学生资源的开发

学生资源的开发是新课程改革深入推进中的一项新课题,政治教师必须遵循“取之于学生,用之于学生”的原则,善于从理论和实践两个层面,经营好学生资源,其开发策略包括：挖掘学生动力资源,激发学习兴趣;引入生活素材,激活学生的生活经验;抓住生成性的东西再创造,收获更多的精彩;坚持因材施教,用好学生的差异资源;彰显学生的闪光点,为学生潜在优势的发挥提供舞台;经营好学生的错误资源,让错误成为学生成长的跳板;利用学生环境资源熏陶,提升学科素养;调动学生的情绪资源,帮助学生“破茧成蝶”;开发学生的家庭资源,增强理论教学的感染力;同时不断拓展教师的专业知识和能力,提升教师的生命价值。     

What lies beneath: exploring the deeper purposes of feedback on student writing through considering disciplinary knowledge and knowers

Feedback plays an integral role in students’ learning and development, as it is often the only personal communication that students have with tutors or lecturers about their own work. Yet, in spite of its integral role in student learning, there is disagreement between how students and tutors or lecturers perceive the pedagogic purpose of feedback. Central to this disagreement is the role that feedback has to play in ensuring that students produce the ‘right’ kinds of knowledge, and become the ‘right’ kinds of knowers within their disciplines. This paper argues that, in order to find common ground between students and tutors or lecturers on what feedback is for, and how to both give and use it effectively, we need to conceptualise disciplinary knowledge and knowers anew. We offer, as a useful starting point, the Specialisation dimension of Legitimation Code Theory as both practical theory and methodological tool for exploring knowledge and knowers in English Studies and Law as two illustrative cases. The paper concludes that this analysis offers lecturers and tutors a fresh understanding of the disciplinary knowledge and knower structures they work within and, relatedly, a clearer view of the work their feedback needs to do within these.     

Curriculum integration in the senior secondary school: a case study in a national assessment context

This paper considers curriculum integration in the secondary school context and investigates the claims made that it can enhance learning outcomes for students. I argue that curriculum integration should be utilized not as a main means of curricular delivery but as a supplementary opportunity to put disciplinary knowledge to use in certain, well-planned contexts. In other words, disciplinary learning comes first and is then deepened through application in an interdisciplinary context. This argument is illustrated through a case study of a new ‘21st Century’ secondary school where interdisciplinarity is a cornerstone of the school’s philosophy. Methods for the study included weekly observations, interviews, focus groups and a survey. I conclude by suggesting that teachers require further time and assistance to develop programmes and evaluative criteria to ensure learning moves beyond thematically generated common sense knowledge, towards interdisciplinary insights.     

Evaluating writing instruction through an investigation of students’ experiences of learning through writing

Learning through writing is a way of learning not only the appropriate written expression of disciplinary knowledge, but also the knowledge itself through reflection and revision. This study investigates the quality of a writing experience provided to university students in a first-year biology subject. The writing instruction methodology used is Genre-based literacy pedagogy, designed to help both with learning disciplinary knowledge and its appropriate written presentation. Evaluative research methodologies from Student Learning Research are used and include the use of three closed-ended questionnaires and an open-ended questionnaire. The results of the research suggest ways of improving the writing instruction by better understanding the previous writing experiences of the students, improving the instructional materials, clarifying goals of the writing tasks at key stages in the writing process, and helping students to improve their approach to the writing experience.in final form: 23 August 2004     

学科探究教学的基本特质

学科探究教学的基本特质有：交互主体性、合作创造性、情境性、开放性、体验性和生成性等。交互主体性是指教师和学生都是主体,二者是交互主体的关系;合作创造性是指教师与学生共同合作进行探究学科,从而创造新知;情境性是指由外界、事物和师生关系等因素构成的具体课堂教学情境;开放性具有多维的、非线性的、动态的、灵活性、多样性和发展性等特点;体验性是师生内在的历时性的知、情、意、行的亲历、体认和验证;生成性是现时动态地、螺旋式、渐进地创造、产生的超出师生预设之外的新教育经验和师生个性。     

Writing at university: are we on the same page? / Escribir en la universidad: ¿nos entendemos?

Abstract

This study seeks to analyse the characteristics and functions that students and faculty attribute to written genres in Spanish universities, to what extent these representations are shared by both groups, and how they contribute to the construction of disciplinary knowledge in Spanish higher education. Accordingly, we classified students’ and teachers’ responses into 12 genre families grouped into five functions: Disciplinary Knowledge (DK), Critical Analysis (AC), Personal Reflection (PR), Research (R) and Professional Practice (PP). In terms of functions, demonstration of disciplinary knowledge appeared as the most frequently mentioned goal for both groups, whereas the genres targeted at research were the least frequent ones, along with the genres used for personal reflection. The most common genre family for both groups was Explanation, which was linked to demonstration of knowledge acquired in the discipline.     

Understanding student resistance as a communicative act

In the current era of ‘zero tolerance’, disciplinary practices including punishment, expulsion, physical and psychological surveillance, and confinement are a major part of resistant students’ lived experiences. This article is an ethnographic study of student resistance that is observed in an alternative high school in the USA, which serves students expelled from regular schools for their acts of resistance. The purpose of this study is to explore how understanding of the meaning of student resistance can be used as a theoretical and pedagogical medium with which teachers can create an equitable educational milieu that upholds views and experiences of the marginalised students. The study also offers a new insight into resistance theory drawing upon Dewey's transactional theory of resistance as a communicative act to further suggest what might be possible for the teachers and students to transcend conflicts in order to establish a more meaningful teacher–student relationship moving beyond zero-tolerance policies.     

Complexities of Identity Formation: A Critical Discourse Analysis of a Novice EFL Teacher's Identity Construction

This thesis intends to explore the process of identity construction of an ELF teacher. After analysis of his words, the following three findings are summarized: First, middle school teachers can enjoy high social reputation but low economic status. Second, teachers should treat students equally and become their friends and guiders. Third, to be responsible for students, teachers need to keep charging themselves and strive to teach students some knowledge beyond the textbook.     

Higher education in recessionary times: a UK colloquium

Reflective practice in practice settings can enhance practice knowledge, self-assessment and lifelong learning, develop future practice capability and professional identity, and critically appraise practice traditions rather than reproduce them. The inherent power imbalance between student and educator runs the risk for the reflective practice potential not being realised. This study explored final year physiotherapy students' perceptions of clinical educators as teachers of reflection and what role students assigned themselves in learning reflective practice. We found that only assertive students enforced reflection. Others waited for their educators to guide them and some were openly discouraged to reflect. As long as educators neglect the opportunity to deeply explore reflective practice moments with students, opportunities for students to develop autonomy and responsibility may continue to be missed or, at worst, inappropriately developed. Key dilemmas of teaching reflective practice are discussed including its implicit and tacit nature and non-conducive work environments.     

小学青年教师学科教学知识需求与发展途径——基于西安市部分小学青年教师的调查分析

通过对西安市部分小学青年教师的学科教学知识需求与发展途径的调查,发现小学青年教师在特定主题教学表征、解释、隐喻、类比的知识以及诊断学生错误概念的教学策略方面有迫切的需求,同时,不同阶段教师的发展需求也有明显的差异;调查显示,自身的教学实践与反思、与同事的日常交流、专业性活动、教科书与其他参考书对发展小学青年教师的学科教学知识作用很大,但对不同阶段教师的作用程度又存在差异,从而建议采取特定主题资料库、课堂事件解剖法、多元化培训模式的对策促使其学科教学知识的发展。     

Slow Research Time and Fast Teaching Time: A collaborative self-study of a teacher educator's unexamined assumptions

This paper examines the processes whereby two researchers developed their knowledge in teaching a course for preservice teachers. We sought to explore the ways in which class assignments encouraged preservice teachers to develop their abilities to see classrooms from the point of view of nascent teachers rather than that of successful students. After analyzing student work from 2 years in which the assignments were used, the researchers taught together and continued their analyses and their own development as teacher educators. We explore the interplay between teaching and research and the role of the critical friend in self-study. Our research generated several insights that inspired changes in assignments, and we document how student work changed as a result. Our major realization involves the centrality of ethical concerns in our work as teacher educators and the possibility of holding these concerns tacitly rather than explicitly.