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Toward Proficiency
VUE Number 14, Winter 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Integrating Text in Content-Area Classes: Better Supports for Teachers and Students
By Louis Gomez, Phillip Herman, and Kimberley Gomez
Louis Gomez is Aon Professor of Learning Sciences Northwestern University's school of education and social policy.
> Author's biography
Phillip Herman is research assistant professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University's school of education and social policy.
> Author's biography
Kimberley Gomez is assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the college of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
> Author's biography
An effort to help teachers and students link texts to science content demonstrates that young people who are purportedly
far behind in reading ability can demonstrate high levels of knowledge and skill.
It has become commonplace to read in the popular press that in the United States we are living in a knowledge economy — that we have largely left the industrial economy behind. It is easy to find scholars, policy-makers, journalists, and politicians who are willing to make pronouncements like these. Educational pundits quickly follow with exhortations to make schooling different for the knowledge age. The upshot of these claims is that to become proficient and capable adults, today's students need different educational experiences. We need, they say, new approaches to teaching and learning that prepare people for the twenty-first century.
How, concretely, should instruction be different? No doubt, the list is long. In this essay we will discuss how an important classroom practice — reading and the role of text in contentarea instruction — can change to better address these twenty-first-century realities. In what follows, we argue that reading content-area texts is a critical component in the development of twenty-first-century skills. The ability to read complex content text, such as science texts, is an important predictor of college and work readiness (ACT 2006). While the context of our work has been supporting reading in science, we conjecture that what we have learned about reading in science has broad applicability across the content areas (e.g., math, social sciences, history) of middle and high school instruction.
Reading to Learn Science
There is no shortage of attention in current school policy discussions to topics such as "reading in the content areas," "adolescent literacy," or "developing every teacher as a teacher of reading." Though such catchphrases and their associated programs in schools have proliferated, substantially improving reading proficiency remains challenging (ACT 2006).
We believe that many of these efforts fall short because they do not adequately account for the ways in which teachers and students use and learn from texts in content domains. Reading is a highly contextualized activity that is likely to improve only when the purpose of reading is deeply coupled to content-area learning goals. To construct such reading environments in content-area classes will require that students and teachers be supported in novel ways.
Why give texts such a prominent role in content-area instruction? An information society requires highly proficient communicators. A highly proficient communicator is able to negotiate and communicate about rich complexes of rapidly changing ideas (Hargreaves 2003). Reading is central to this activity. Reading, in the sense we wish to discuss it, is more than the simple act of decoding. It is also vastly different than the ability to identify ideas in text and to copy those ideas in answer to some questions about a text. Reading, as described by Reader Response theorists (e.g., Rosenblatt 1978; Fish 1970), is, rather, more like a conversation of discovery, critique, and problem solving.
Archives
Toward Proficiency
VUE Number 14, Winter 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
Integrating Text in Content-Area Classes: Better Supports for Teachers and Students
By Louis Gomez, Phillip Herman, and Kimberley Gomez
Louis Gomez is Aon Professor of Learning Sciences Northwestern University's school of education and social policy.
> Author's biography
Phillip Herman is research assistant professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University's school of education and social policy.
> Author's biography
Kimberley Gomez is assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the college of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
> Author's biography
An effort to help teachers and students link texts to science content demonstrates that young people who are purportedly
far behind in reading ability can demonstrate high levels of knowledge and skill.
It has become commonplace to read in the popular press that in the United States we are living in a knowledge economy — that we have largely left the industrial economy behind. It is easy to find scholars, policy-makers, journalists, and politicians who are willing to make pronouncements like these. Educational pundits quickly follow with exhortations to make schooling different for the knowledge age. The upshot of these claims is that to become proficient and capable adults, today's students need different educational experiences. We need, they say, new approaches to teaching and learning that prepare people for the twenty-first century.
How, concretely, should instruction be different? No doubt, the list is long. In this essay we will discuss how an important classroom practice — reading and the role of text in contentarea instruction — can change to better address these twenty-first-century realities. In what follows, we argue that reading content-area texts is a critical component in the development of twenty-first-century skills. The ability to read complex content text, such as science texts, is an important predictor of college and work readiness (ACT 2006). While the context of our work has been supporting reading in science, we conjecture that what we have learned about reading in science has broad applicability across the content areas (e.g., math, social sciences, history) of middle and high school instruction.
Reading to Learn Science
There is no shortage of attention in current school policy discussions to topics such as "reading in the content areas," "adolescent literacy," or "developing every teacher as a teacher of reading." Though such catchphrases and their associated programs in schools have proliferated, substantially improving reading proficiency remains challenging (ACT 2006).
We believe that many of these efforts fall short because they do not adequately account for the ways in which teachers and students use and learn from texts in content domains. Reading is a highly contextualized activity that is likely to improve only when the purpose of reading is deeply coupled to content-area learning goals. To construct such reading environments in content-area classes will require that students and teachers be supported in novel ways.
Why give texts such a prominent role in content-area instruction? An information society requires highly proficient communicators. A highly proficient communicator is able to negotiate and communicate about rich complexes of rapidly changing ideas (Hargreaves 2003). Reading is central to this activity. Reading, in the sense we wish to discuss it, is more than the simple act of decoding. It is also vastly different than the ability to identify ideas in text and to copy those ideas in answer to some questions about a text. Reading, as described by Reader Response theorists (e.g., Rosenblatt 1978; Fish 1970), is, rather, more like a conversation of discovery, critique, and problem solving.
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