From literacy strategies to disciplined inquiry: My journey with pre-service teachers in a content area reading course

Recent calls have been made for content area literacy instruction to extend beyond the teaching of general literacy strategies as tools to use with any content text to a more disciplinary literacy approach that would support students in learning literacy practices specific to a discipline. This practitioner inquiry is my investigation into what happened when I took a more disciplinary literacy approach in the content area reading course for social studies I taught by implementing a Web-based disciplined inquiry project. The research and teaching were framed by an understanding of literacy as socially situated practices, including new literacy practices needed for successful participation in a technological society. The project students engaged in was framed as a disciplined inquiry, a purposeful investigation guided by community standards. I utilized qualitative research methods to construct understandings of the experiences of the classroom community. Data collection and analysis were intentional and systematic of classroom data. My findings show the inquiry project provided the pre-service teachers the opportunity to use literacy practices to evaluate and produce information that extended beyond the use of general literacy strategies I had traditionally taught in the course; specifically in the way they developed inquiry questions that were answerable with evidence from multiple sources and the ways they evaluated bias in sources. These findings lead to recommendations to content literacy teacher educators to expand the instruction of general literacy strategies to include literacy practices needed for specific content area reading tasks.