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In this essay, Elizabeth Birr Moje argues that educators can make radical change in student learning and well-being if they reframe teachers' work with youth as less about meeting standards and more about teaching youth to navigate the multiple literacy contexts in which they live, learn, and work. To that end, Moje offers a take on disciplinary literacy instruction that puts the process of inquiry at its center. In contrast to a frame that ignores or removes value, purpose, affect, emotion, imagination, social interaction, and the learning and challenging of cultural conventions from the work of adolescent literacy teaching, she presents a teaching heuristic designed to capitalize on the social and cultural nature of disciplinary inquiry and support students in navigating multiple literacy contexts as part of the teaching of disciplinary literacy, characterized by what she terms the 4Es: engage, elicit/engineer, examine, and evaluate.
After almost fifty years of scholars urging teachers to support adolescents' content-area reading by using various teaching strategies (see Alvermann & Moore, 1991; Herber, 1978; Phelps, 2005), policy makers, school leaders, and secondary school teachers are showing interest in the literacy learning needs of adolescents. Perhaps spurred by the new Common Core State Standards (CCSSO, 2010) or by the failure of early reading policies for the early grades designed to "inoculate" children adequately against literacy struggle (Snow & Moje, 2010), policy makers and school leaders have identified adolescents as particularly in need of development, with disciplinary literacy teaching as one solution to developing the skills youth need.
In this essay, I offer a conceptual framework to advance the development of teaching practices and school structures that support youth in deep disciplinary literacy learning. I begin with the question of what we are forgetting as we rush to improve adolescent learners' skills as outlined in the Common Core and other standards documents, such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013). If literacy learning and practice are about more than the accumulation of skills, if disciplines are human constructions replete with social purpose and cultural conventions, then where and when is that social and cultural learning done, especially for young people who are not apprenticed into the disciplinary domains from an early age? How do we support the development...