Audrey Ingersoll

Philosophy of Disciplinary Literacy

In my original paper answering the question, “What is disciplinary literacy?” the answer

was something along the lines of “the ability of a person to analyze and theorize as someone in

a different discipline would”. Although this statement is true, there is a lot more to disciplinary

literacy that I missed. The phrase digital literacy encompasses many different components that

ensure students ability to be successful in each discipline.

Some components include differentiation and creating motivating learning

environments. Differentiation is so important to ensure students are retaining what they are

learning because we will be teaching a diverse group of students each with their own strengths

and weaknesses. Motivation is also a major component as it is very hard for students to learn

when they can’t engage in the content. Once I start teaching I plan on making my lessons as

engaging as possible by giving students options when producing projects, Including both hands

on activities in groups and individually and bringing in my students interests to my lessons.

Through making engaging lessons and differentiating for my students who need it, there will be

a significant increase in students retention and understanding of my content.

Some other components that make up a students literacy in each content area is

activation of prior knowledge, collaboration with peers, and content specific vocabulary. I have

learned from the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College how amazing collaboration with peers is. In

my schooling leading up to college I had some experience with group work but not nearly as

much as I received in college. Through collaboration with peers, students will hear different

viewpoints, will learn to respect opinions that differ from their own, and will improve

communication skills especially when having to create a collaborative project with these peers.
There have also been many times where my peers have re-explained topics to me that I was

confused on and that made me understand much better. On top of collaboration, it is crucial

that teachers are able to gage what prior knowledge students already have on a topic so that

they don’t repeat content they already know or teach too advanced material making the

students completely lost. Lastly, strengthening students knowledge of the vocabulary used in

your content area is very important. Having the content area of science I feel like this pertains

to me even more than other content areas since we have a lot of difficult terminology within

our content area. Something I’d love to try when I start teaching vocabulary is breaking down

words based off of their Greek and latin prefixes and suffixes. I always wished this was

something taught to me growing up since you can often determine the meaning of many words

through the use of this skill even if you have no prior knowledge on the term.

As you can see there are so many components that make up literacy in a content area.

There is not one skill that is the end all be all for being digitally literate but rather a ton of skills

that should be each utilized at the same time. I feel like this class greatly prepared me for my

future teaching profession by telling me while also having me practice different components

that overall make a student understand content deeper than pure memorization.