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Description
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The starting point for this project is the simple, but crucial observation that learning is a literacy practice, which exhibits different features and patterns in different school disciplines. Understanding learning as a literacy practice raises a number of new research questions extremely relevant for explaining learning processes and promoting their effectiveness in a deeper and connected way, and constructing authentic engagement in disciplinary discourses. Such questions concern i) student’s interactions with texts, to determine, on one hand, how they construct meaning, and on the other hand, what kind of textual and communication challenges do the texts of the disciplines put them, and ii) teachers whose views and practices regarding texts and their use in conducting teaching are probably the most important factor for promotion effective learning. Being aware of the fundamental heterogeneity of such literacy practices and, specially, of the ways of constructing, organizing and producing meaning from specific text genres in different disciplines, forces a crucial research question: to what extent and how literacy practices, their features and the way they challenge the learning processes really vary? This knowledge will allow organizing teaching opportunities to support students’ engagement in discipline-based practices and to use those practices to develop understanding of content concepts of the discipline, as it is being pointed out in the most recent polemic around content area literacy teaching [AdPe12; BrMoMeTr13; Co12; Dr10; FaSch10; Wi11]. Literacy practices and disciplinary content, and two stances, students and teachers, inform the research design of this project. For the members of the team that just concentrated in one or other of the stances, this systematic articulation is being essayed for the first time. Therefore, at the teacher’s level, the research aims are: what kind of literacy activities are being incorporated in content classrooms; are teachers aware of the roles of this incorporation? how is literacy embedded in their disciplinary content learning? which strategies seem to be useful to promote learning through language? what do teachers know about such strategies? how do they perceive, assess and take advantage of student’s developing literacy practices? From the student’s side: what are the literacy practices in which they are involved for learning content? in what way these practices deepen their learning processes? which textual features are recognised as disciplinary specific and challenge students? Finally, how do these two dimensions interact and mutually constraint each other? In particular, what similarities are there between the language and textual features that students identify as proper of the discipline and the ones identified by teachers? Given its exploratory nature and limited temporal scope, the project had to designed in a very straightforward manner. First of all, the disciplines to focus will be just Mathematics and History. The choice is not arbitrary: both are challenging areas in the national curriculum, in which investigating the role of literacy in effective learning will certainly pay off. On the other hand, those are sufficiently different areas to provide relevant insights, making comparisons, enlightening and paving the grounds for further generalizations. Methodological procedures for collecting and analysing data will be of a mixed type. Mainly of a qualitative nature, quantitative methods for patterns descriptions and correlations will also be used, mainly during the content analysis of teachers and students interviews. But the innovative nature of the research, even regarding previous work done by the team, is now the systematic and direct observation of students group work around the different texts they have to read to learn the content. Jointly, these two approaches to the phenomenon are expected to be able to guide more ambitious and broad investigations, rather than pretending to achieve definitive answers or recommendations. The relevance of such a research agenda for the years to come cannot be understated. Language is the “hidden curriculum” [FaSch10] of schooling, putting learning into risk and explaining why learning at school is often not meaningful for students. On the other hand, these practices are fundamental to create opportunities for each student to deepen her/his understanding and extend learning interacting through, with and about texts, thinking, reasoning, generating meaning, which are, moreover, the current curricular goals of any discipline. The expected outcomes will extend and confront points of view that started to emerge, during the development of the Comenius Project BaCuLit. Particularly, how can ouside-in literacy strategies and inside-out disciplinary ones be balanced on behalf of students? This is the ultimate goal of the project attempting to contribute to the latest discussion in the field.
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