What The Hunger Games Can Teach Us about Disciplinary Literacy

This article explores ways to utilize students’ interest in fantasy literature to support critical literacy. Focusing on Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games series (2008, 2009, 2010), the author addresses how elements of the trilogy relate to violent acts in our world, helping student understand that violence and brutality toward children is not fiction, but very real, and that they can play a role in its abolishment, just like Katniss, through social action projects. Issues such as hunger, forced labor, child soldiers, and the sex trade that appear in both the fictional series and our world are discussed, encouraging students to assess their world and advocate for change. Examples of social action projects that utilize multiple literacies are suggested as a way to inspire students take action in the community and to stand up to injustice and brutality in hopes of creating a better world and a better human race. Using popular literature to pique student interest, this article explores how to incorporate the books in the Hunger Games series into the ELA classroom to support literacy and critical goals.

2021

Accessible and engaging, this text provides a comprehensive framework and practical strategies for infusing content-area instruction in math, social studies, and science into literacy instruction for grades K-6. Throughout ten clear thematic chapters, the authors introduce an innovative Content-Driven Integration (CDI) model and a roadmap to apply it in the classroom. Each chapter provides invaluable tools and techniques for pre-service classroom teachers to create a quality integrated thematic unit from start to finish. Features include Chapter Previews, Anticipation Guides, Questions to Ponder, Teacher Spotlights, "Now You Try it" sections, and more. Using authentic examples to highlight actual challenges and teacher experiences, this text illustrates what integrating high-quality, rich contentinfused literacy looks like in the real world. Celebrating student diversity, this book discusses how to meet a wide variety of students' needs, with a focus on English Language Learners, culturally and linguistically diverse students, and students who experience reading and writing difficulties. A thorough guide to disciplinary integration, this book is an essential text for courses on disciplinary literacy, elementary/primary literacy, and English Language Arts (ELA) methods, and is ideal for pre-service and in-service ELA and literacy teachers, as well as consultants, literacy scholars, and curriculum specialists.

2011

Guiding secondary school students to be strategic readers in the disciplines (eg, mathematics, science, social studies) comes with many challenges.

EdCircuit, 2017

In order for disciplinary literacy (DL) instruction to take-hold and improve student learning, school districts would be wise to think of DL along a K-12 continuum. In this article we offer a Responsive Disciplinary Literacy Teaching Framework for all teachers to use as they design DL instruction. We recognize that the instruction designed will look different across disciplinary classrooms because “tasks, texts, and talk” vary by discipline. Finally, we offer two snapshots of DL instruction, one from the earliest grade levels and one from later grade levels to illustrate the power of this work across the K-12 continuum.

Through a Distorted Lens: Media as Curricula and Pedagogy in the 21st Century, 2017

Through this essay, I hope to encourage classroom teachers to engage in conversations about race and class rather than shying away from such controversies. By connecting the literature curriculum—the novels, the films, the marketed movie-tie-in products, and the social media postings—to real life events as a correlative to discussions of literary themes and conflicts, educators can help students become agents of change and stewards of social justice. In this chapter, I illustrate how teachers might employ such critique to Suzanne Collins’ novel, The Hunger Games (2008), by discussing the film adaptation (2012), interrogating the subsequent Twitter-storm regarding the cast, and connecting all the parts to foster a genuine and critical discussion about race in our society today. Taken as a whole, the entire media event related to The Hunger Games highlights the tension-wrought nature of race as a sociocultural, political, and power construct, and its interrogation can unmask how power and privilege operate in the “reading” of such texts.

2008

In this article, Timothy and Cynthia Shanahan argue that" disciplinary literacy"—advanced literacy instruction embedded within content-area classes such as math, science, and social studies—should be a focus of middle and secondary school settings.

A Disciplinary Literacy Approach to Improving Student Learning, 2009

Despite many calls for K-12 disciplinary literacy instruction-instruction that teaches students the specialized ways of reading, writing, and reasoning of the academic disciplines-there are questions about what disciplinary literacy instruction means for the prominent school domain of English language arts. This article investigates the disciplinary literacy practices and teaching approaches of 10 university-based literary scholars who participated in semistructured interviews and verbal protocols with literary fiction. Findings point to the fundamentally social and problem-based nature of academic work with literature and to a set of six shared literary literacy practices that scholars use in their work with literature. These findings were generated as part of a larger study that compared literacy practices and teaching approaches of 10 university-based scholars and 12 high school English language arts teachers (Rainey, 2015). R ecent years have seen multiple calls for K-12 disciplinary literacy instruction (Lee & Spratley, 2010; Moje, 2008; Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). Disciplinary literacy instruction involves teaching students how knowledge is constructed in the academic disciplines (e.g., biology, history), including the specialized ways that members of those disciplines read, write, and reason (Moje, 2007). Such a vision of elementary and secondary teaching and learning challenges the status quo, leading some to question whether disciplinary literacy instruction in K-12 classrooms is possible or even ideal (Heller, 2010). Yet, disciplinary literacy scholars have argued that given the highly complex time in which we live, anything less than rigorous instruction that supports all students' participation within and across the disciplines is insufficient and, further, that routine access to such instruction is a matter of social justice (e.g., Lee, 2004; Moje, 2008). Disciplinary literacy goals have been advanced in recent years by policy documents such as the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) and the College, Career, and Civic Life Framework for Social Studies (National Council for the Social Studies, 2013), which describe the disciplinary inquiry and literacy practices that students of various grade bands ought to be learning in the natural and social sciences, respectively. It is thanks in large part to scho larship integrating the study of literate practice with learning in disciplines such as history, chemistry, biology, and mathematics (e.g.,

2017

Writing is crucial to success in high school, college, the workplace, and civic life. Yet, little time is spent on writing in schools, and teachers seldom learn how to teach writing in their preservice or in-service experiences (National Commission on Writing, 2003). Perhaps as a consequence, only one-quarter of adolescents demonstrate proficiency on national writing assessments (National Center for Education Statistics, 2003, 2012). In addition, college instructors report that only half of their students are prepared for college-level writing, business leaders say that 65% of their employees write adequately, and 62%-65% of high school graduates feel they are prepared for either endeavor (Achieve Inc., 2005; National Commission on Writing, 2004). One recent response to this challenge has been to expand literacy instruction beyond English language arts classrooms into other subject areas. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) emphasize disciplinary literacy by making literacy instr...

61st Yearbook of the Literacy Research Association, 2012