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Research Connections

Inviting Outsiders Inside Disciplinary

Literacies: An Interview With

Cynthia Greenleaf, Gayle Cribb, and Heather Howlett

Cynthia Greenleaf Gayle Cribb

Heather Howlett David W. Moore

Cynthia Greenleaf serves as codirector of the Strategic Literacy Initiative lo-cated in WestEd’s Oakland, California, office. Gayle Cribb teaches history and Spanish at Dixon High School in Dixon, California. A video of her class can be viewed on WestEd’s website (www.wested.org/cs/ra/print/docs/ra/success .htm). Heather Howlett teaches science at Three Fires Middle School in Howell, Michigan, and is featured on the What Works Clearinghouse website (dww .ed.gov/see/?T_ID=23&P_ID=61).

DWM: How have you approached disciplinary literacy instruction?

CG: Many years ago, Donald Graves (1989) invited educators to explore their own literacies to build insights for instruction. With secondary and community college teachers, my colleagues and I at the Strategic Literacy Initiative have taken up this invitation, exploring how readers make meaning with the var-ied texts of our disciplines. Through collaborative inquiry, we discovered that comprehension strategies are only part of what readers bring to texts. Readers engage in distinct thinking processes, colored by the human enterprises and habits of mind that shape academic disciplines. Readers marshal stamina and control affective responses when texts are tiresome or irritating. Readers bring internal libraries of reading experiences to encounters with unfamiliar texts. We also discovered the barriers to comprehension that arise when authors presume insider knowledge readers don’t have or speak in a discourse readers don’t share. We learned that we could all be outsiders.

This collaborative inquiry led to the design of the Reading Apprenticeship instructional framework focused on turning our own and our students’ literacies into assets for instruction. We designed instructional routines to invite students into literacy inquiries so the invisible processes of engaging with text could surface in classroom conversations. We aimed to build students’ metacognitive control of the reading process as well as dispositions to dig into texts that seem unapproachable. Reading Apprenticeship—in truth apprenticeship into the read-ing and writing and reasoning processes entailed in academic work—is a project of inviting outsiders inside. In the following dialogue, two secondary teachers share what this project has meant for their teaching and their students’ learning.

DWM: What initially convinced you to link literacy with your disciplinary teaching?

GC: As a history teacher, I have always cared most about critical thinking. I teach in a small agricultural town in the Sacramento Valley of California, so my

Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 54(4) Dec 2010 / Jan 2011doi:10.1598/JAAL.54.4.7 © 2010 International Reading Association (pp. 291–293)

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students are the children of farm workers and farmers, blue-collar workers, and professionals. Many of the students have difficulty with text for various reasons: They may be working in their second language, be inexperienced with academic text, have learning dis-abilities, have gotten a slow start in school, or have had a rough life in general. Given that I wanted them to be able to think about important issues, I became better at delivering the content without depending on their comprehension of written material; I taught around the text. Yet, I was dissatisfied with what stu-dents were able to do and sensed that they were ca-pable of much more rigor.

It wasn’t until I began to discover my own read-ing processes and, perhaps more important, those of my colleagues that literacy became a significant part of my course. In professional development, I began to see that making meaning with text is a process and there is a surprising range of ways to do so. Suddenly, I could see a connection to my classroom. If I could make those invisible processes visible to my students, perhaps they could get a handle on reading and begin to use text as a way to understand history. I began to experiment in my classroom, and nascent successes encouraged me to persist. Working with text engaged my students. As I became more competent in facili-tating their conversations, they began to read more closely, reference text spontaneously, and present evidence to support or discredit claims. The voices of people of long ago began to resound in my class-room. Conversations became much deeper, alive, and rigorous.

HH: I always thought of myself as a dynamic science teacher. My students liked me. I was excited about my content, and I did my best to infect my students with this same love of science. But for some reason, no matter what I tried, I had a hard time reaching at-risk students who didn’t receive special services and tended to fall through the cracks. These students re-ally struggled with getting their work in and under-standing basic concepts in class.

During my initial training in Reading Apprenticeship, it dawned on me: If I can show these at-risk students how to better understand the text, I can help them unlock the secrets of science! Why hadn’t I thought of this sooner? My previous methods

of trying different science activities hadn’t seemed to help these students much, so what would happen if I tried different reading activities centered around sci-ence? I became excited about the possibility of reach-ing the kids I thought were unreachable! That day, I started gaining a new perspective about teaching and adolescent literacy. I had no idea how the instruc-tional changes I was about to make would impact my students.

DWM: How do you teach your students the literacies of your discipline most effectively?

GC: The most important thing I do is begin an ongo-ing, metacognitive conversation about making sense of text. Initially, I model, articulating my own pro-cesses as a reader as I read aloud. My students and I begin looking at specific places in the text where we have problems understanding, where we have to slow down, where we are uncertain. We talk about what we might do to figure things out; we test various strategies. We talk about whether or not a particular strategy worked and, if so, what we understand as a result.

A lighter tone develops as reading becomes less of a mystery and more of a project that we work on together in class. We solve problems of unfamiliar vocabulary or vocabulary used in unfamiliar ways, syntax uncommon in our contemporary context, references we do not yet know, and our own inter-est, motivation, and stamina. Historical conversa-tions about point of view, the occasion and purpose of documents, the reliability of sources, historical con-text, and causality and historiography f low out of this work. As students engage documents, their questions emerge. They notice contradictions, bump into their own sets of moral standards, revisit other texts, won-der about implications for today’s world, and develop historical empathy. Deeper issues and thinking seem to emerge naturally from these text-based conversa-tions. It’s almost as if, when students get close enough to history, they are able to think historically.

HH: The most effective strategy I have used is al-lowing students to collaborate and discuss each other’s understandings of texts. I use a variety of collabora-tive forms on a daily basis to help maintain students’

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now theirs and won’t be dumped from memory after the quiz. For my most inexperienced students, tack-ling difficult text and coming out knowing they un-derstand it are huge contradictions to much of their school experience. I love seeing the whole range of students, from the most inexperienced to the most ac-complished, move on a spectrum toward being com-petent readers, critical thinkers, and engaged citizens.

HH: I am continually amazed at the amount of knowledge my students willingly share with their peers. They are happy to have the opportunity to express their thoughts and understandings of various texts. It’s great when you hear them continue their discussions about something they did in your class when they are out in the hall with their friends! They start to take ownership of the information and are able to conduct very sophisticated conversations about sci-ence topics. I never saw this depth of knowledge and dialogue before I began integrating literacy instruc-tion with my science teaching.

The best parts are seeing youth who have always struggled in science finally being successful, and see-ing how their confidence as readers carries into other subject areas. These students once again become ex-cited about learning. For a teacher, there isn’t any-thing more rewarding!

ReferenceGraves, D.H. (1989). Discover your own literacy. Portsmouth, NH:

Heinemann.

Greenleaf is codirector of the Strategic Literacy Initiative at WestEd, Oakland, California, USA; e-mail cgreenl@wested.org. Cribb teaches at Dixon High School, California, USA; e-mail GCribb@dixonusd.org. Howlett teaches at Three Fires Middle School, Howell, Michigan, USA; e-mail howletth@howellschools.com. Moore teaches at Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA; e-mail david.moore@asu.edu.

The department editor welcomes reader comments. David W. Moore teaches at Arizona State University, Phoenix, USA; e-mail david.moore@asu.edu.

interest. For example, in one class period, we may move from pair sharing to small-group sharing and end the period with whole-group sharing. The key is to create a safe environment in which all students feel comfortable working with any of their classmates.

As for specific strategies, I’ve had great success with metacognitive logs and the 25-word abstract. Metacognitive logs are a form of two-column note-taking that is useful and adaptable across content ar-eas. Students record quotes or generate ideas about a text in one column and make observations, personal connections, and comments about their comprehen-sion processes in the other column. For the 25-word abstract, students work independently to create a short summary as they read a piece of text. Then, in small groups, they discuss any comprehension road-blocks and similarities or differences in their summa-ries. The students’ goal is to first create an individual abstract, then a collaborative one to share with the class. Additionally, we spend much time discussing each others’ connections, questions, and visualizations about texts as a way to share reader expertise.

DWM: What student outcomes encourage you to continue integrating literacy with your disciplinary teaching?

GC: I love the historical conversations. I love the increasing confidence students have in their com-petency as readers, an increased willingness to tack-le text. I love the f lashes of “I actually understand this!”—especially from students for whom under-standing has not come easily. I love the slow shift from dread of text to curious expectancy. I love when struggling students contribute some piece of the puzzle and everyone recognizes the contribu-tion, and I love when students seen as smart are able to articulate how they were able to figure something out and everyone follows along. You can almost hear the relief: “Oh, it’s not magic. They’re not just smart-er than me. They just did x. I could do that!”

I love how the students remember the texts they have examined, their sense that this knowledge is