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As students enter middle grades, they are faced with navigating multiple subject-specific courses that require attention to the texts, tasks, habits of thinking, and language practices unique to each discipline. Likewise, the expected range, complexity, and genres of texts have significantly increased with the Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010).
Similarly, new technologies have amplified the types of texts (e.g., video, infographics, flash animation) and ways to communicate subject-area knowledge, making learning in the disciplines all the more complex. These recent shifts have created new challenges to content instruction. As such, it has become increasingly necessary to integrate digital literacy and disciplinary literacy instruction so that students can develop the reasoning skills required of the varied disciplines. Moreover, to develop as critical readers and writers in the disciplines, students must be able to effectively navigate the multiple ways disciplinary knowledge is created, communicated, and critiqued in the 21st century.
In this article, we describe Elsa Glover's efforts to bridge digital literacies with disciplinary literacy. We demonstrate how classroom blogging activities can facilitate the development of disciplinary thinking and reasoning: literature served as the foundation in a seventh-grade English language arts (ELA) class, while historical texts were used in four social studies classes. To this end, we illustrate how Elsa engages her students in teacher-framed inquiry, supports their reading of disciplinary texts, and encourages student interpretation and writing through their classroom blog.
Disciplinary Literacy
Noting longstanding resistance from teachers to integrating literacy into the content areas (Alvermann, O'Brien, & Dillon, 1990; O'Brien, Stewart, & Moje, 1995; Pressley, 2004), adolescent literacy researchers have called for a different framing of literacy integration in secondary grades, that of "disciplinary literacy." Whereas content area literacy treats reading comprehension as a generalized set of skills that can be used regardless of discipline, disciplinary literacy recognizes the specialized nature of learning in varied disciplines and the differentiated literacy needs that support that learning (Moje, 2008; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008, 2012). In other words, disciplinary literacy foregrounds the discipline itself-the nature of the questions that are asked, the problems intrinsic to those different disciplines, and the approaches to solving those problems.
The "intellectual problems" inherent in different disciplines then give...