Understanding Disciplinary Literacy in a Kindergarten Classroom

As a Kindergarten teacher in a content area literacy course, I knew I was in for some new learning.  When I first heard the term, disciplinary literacy, I looked over to my tablemates and said “What is that?”  Being as we are all elementary teachers, they shrugged their shoulders and we left it at that, hoping that it would be explained class. Disciplinary literacy is a new concept to me and I am working on getting a deeper understanding and firmer grasp on what it means to me and how I can use it in my classroom.

I believe that my classroom lends itself to the concept of disciplinary literacies.  I teach in a half day classroom which means that I am constantly in the race against time.  After thinking about this, I realize that I am using various types of disciplinary text in my teaching and lessons with my students.  For example, our next science unit concerns taking care of the earth.  Instead of having specific science time, I am using this concept in my literacy time and asking my students to ‘think like a scientist.’  Granted, this is a completely new thought process for them and they may not truly understand what this means yet, but I believe it is so important to introduce these different ways of thinking at a young age. 

This brings me to a huge challenge of disciplinary literacy in a Kindergarten classroom.  Although I am a firm believer in letting students try out new things at a young age, I want to ensure that I am doing it in an appropriate manner and what is developmentally correct for five year olds.  I want to teach my students to think and not to memorize facts.  Although having content knowledge is important, I try to think about what will open the most doors for them as they grow older. I believe that I should take the approach of teaching the students how to read, think, and contextualize the different subject areas, because this will hopefully carry on as they grow up.  I think that my new challenge will be to find a good balance between teaching the kids to be thinkers and teaching them content knowledge.

 I think that Jetton and Shanahan do a great job in their text Adolescent Literacy in the Academic Disciplines of explaining some other challenges of reading interdisciplinary texts.  One of the profound things to me was concerning technical vocabulary in each subject area.  This in general is a very big challenge in Kindergarten because the kids have only been around language for five or six years.  Many times words like above and below which are technical math terms can be a challenge for them to read and comprehend. Jetton and Shanahan said in their text “these words are rarely used in students’ everyday language, they present problems for both decoding and understanding.  I completely agree with this statement in the fact that if I do not use a new technical term over and over again, my students will lose all meaning of the word.  Overall I find that technical language in disciplinary texts can be a huge challenge to students of all ages.

In the future I would like to see the idea of disciplinary literacy utilized in more elementary classrooms.  I believe that as teachers, we can teach students to be critical thinkers of text while building their reading strategies and creating new knowledge.  I think that texts from many different subject areas needs to be utilized in order to achieve these goals for students.  I also believe that we have to educate parents on this new idea as well so that they understand the evidence and practice behind disciplinary literacies.