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…

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…

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expository texts commonly found in history textbooks, but it is unclear which specific skills contribute to students' historical content knowledge and historical reasoning abilities.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…

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…

Teachers in the US are increasingly required to use scripted curricula. Such instructional materials often reflect the overwhelming whiteness of the publishing industry through a lack of representation of authors and protagonists outside of white, middle-class normative characters. Implementation of such curricula stands in direct contrast to…

There are significant apertures between the history told within historians' scholarship and teachers' curricular resources. The Civil Rights Movement (hereafter, CRM) of the 1950s and 1960s did not start with Rosa Parks' arrest in Montgomery, though it was a spark that inflamed a long-smoldering fire. Nor did it end with Dr. King's dream in…

However influential the interdependence hypothesis has become in bilingual research, it still lacks full empirical support. This longitudinal study explores the parallels in the biliteracy development (L1 Spanish and L2 English) of 20 students in a European immersion programme (i.e. CLIL) over a two-year period. A bilingual learner corpus of…

Many students in middle and secondary school face challenges in understanding complex content expressed in disciplinary-specific discourses. Disciplinary literacy (DL) has emerged as a viable approach to these challenges. Yet, to date, the assessment of disciplinary literacy remains relatively underdeveloped. The current paper examines the…

This article describes Common Core State Standards (CCSS) that teach literacy strategies to all content teachers in the U.S. It describes how three Social Studies teachers from three middle schools incorporated literacy strategies into their content areas and exposed their reading strategies. These teachers were asked to identify and write down…

In recent years, educators in the USA have emphasized disciplinary literacy as an essential path forward in cultivating adolescents' understanding of subject matter in tandem with literacy practices. Yet, this agenda poses challenges to teachers who have been tasked with its implementation. Here, we examine two expert US history teachers' efforts…

This qualitative case study explored preservice teachers' (PSTs) beliefs about disciplinary literacy as they engaged in a blog project with middle-school students to discuss historical texts. Twenty-eight PSTs, enrolled in a semester-long social studies methods course and participating in the blog project as a course assignment, constituted the…

Developing disciplinary literacy in history requires that classrooms become an environment where students can engage in discursive practices typical of the profession. Disciplinary literacy refers to the specialized ways of reading and writing used in history to construct historical arguments and ways of reasoning. Learning history includes using…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested in the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) as one strategy to support teachers' and students' transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in English language arts. This report provides an early look at the implementation of LDC in eighth-grade history/social studies and science classes in two…

Kentucky has been a leader in the movement to more rigorous college and career ready standards to support their students' success in the 21st century. Kentucky was the first state to adopt new college and career ready standards (CCRS)--termed the Kentucky Core Academic Standards. Many of Kentucky's districts have moved proactively and…

Many K-12 teachers struggle to meet the needs of diverse learners as school reforms promote new disciplinary literacy requirements. In response, language education scholars have argued that teachers must develop "disciplinary linguistic knowledge" (DLK), or an understanding of language in their content area and an ability to design…