Teaching disciplinary literacy in the elementary classroom provides rich potential for bridging the literacy-content divide, building background knowledge, extending learning, and deepening student thinking. This article explores how six elementary teachers tried and tested approaches to embedding literacy in three very different subjects:…

Inquiry and disciplinary literacy are approaches in history and social science education that center students as active inquirers who investigate in multiple sources and come to their own conclusions regarding relevant questions and complex issues. These approaches have been gaining momentum in research and practice internationally, but have not…

This volume collects the work of historians, researchers, and classroom teachers to define what it means to be a racially literate educator and citizen. History classes should be spaces in which all students learn about their predecessors' legacies as a context for understanding and decision-making in contemporary society. In reality, the…

We argue that students can understand an historical period by building on the foundations of their existing knowledge. Specifically, popular media can be used to develop students' historical literacies -- that is their ability to engage with past societies vastly different from their own. Our methodology takes inspiration from the ancient Romans'…

Student interest in studying history is in decline in Ghana, as it is in secondary schools in many other parts of the world. Can student interest be stimulated, and can they be better served, by a curriculum that includes a focus on community, belonging and co-creation? This article details a preliminary intervention of just such a learning unit…

Get started with an innovative approach to teaching history that develops literacy and higher-order thinking skills, connects the past to students' lives, and meets state and national standards (grades 7-12). Now in a second edition, this popular book provides an introductory unit to help teachers build a trustful classroom climate; over 70…

This paper explores an arts-based practitioner action research study that explores the artworks made by students from a Grade 11 History of Canada course in response to teaching and learning about the First World War. The practitioner considers the art-things (Bennett, 2015) of his students and the associated thing-power (Bennett, 2004)…

Though discipline-specific approaches to literacy instruction can support adolescents' academic literacy and identity development, scant attention has been paid to ways of targeting such instruction to address individual student needs. Dialogic writing assessment is an approach to conducting writing conferences that foregrounds students' composing…

This qualitative study focuses on Grade 6 students' possibilities to engage in disciplinary writing practices in history teaching in a school located in a socially disadvantaged and linguistically diverse area. The aim is to contribute knowledge about how students negotiate different literacy expectations in the teaching. The researcher used…

This article analyses the concept of political literacy (as introduced in the 1998 Crick Report) in relation to Citizenship in the English National Curriculum. It argues that political literacy has not been sufficiently emphasised or facilitated within this foundation subject and that the concept is particularly important for students at a time of…

Today's teachers seek to address the Holocaust not just as history, but also in relation to current events. Featuring stories from middle school, high school, and university classrooms across the United States, this collection offers a comprehensive argument for the inclusion of purposeful Holocaust pedagogy rooted in literacy practices and…

This paper examines whether model annotations can foster disciplinary literacy in higher education. Using history as a test case, 102 education undergraduates participated in a training and transfer task in which they read two-period documents, and responded to recall and comprehension questions, and to a short essay question requiring historical…

The ability to apply various reading skills is an important prerequisite to comprehend expository texts commonly found in history textbooks, but it is unclear which specific skills contribute to students' historical content knowledge and historical reasoning abilities. This study used a digital learning environment (DLE) to measure and support…

In recent years, disciplinary literacy has offered a promising approach to history instruction in K-12 schools. Disciplinary literacy in history (hereafter, "historical literacy") entails approaching texts with an awareness of the interpretive nature of the field, reading and analyzing a variety of primary and secondary sources in…

A current topic in U.S. public schools is teaching issues of racial discrimination in American history. There are those motivated by political gain for elected office that are trying to shut down conversations about slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws in K-12 schools while others point out the central role that race has played in U.S. history…