LLRC Meeting: Susan De La Paz (CHSE)

Writing as a means to promote learning in history and science

Abstract: Writing is crucial to success in high school, college, the workplace, and civic life. Although some debate the most appropriate aim for content-area literacy instruction, with calls for writing to support knowledge acquisition, there appears to be growing consensus that adolescents should write not only to demonstrate content-area learning, but also to grapple with domain dependent and intellectually challenging issues. Secondary literacy and content area learning become inextricably interlinked, with academic progress increasingly dependent upon the acquisition of specialized knowledge and skills and distinct purposes in literate, scientific, and historical communities. Thus, by adolescence, literacy development is no longer the official purview of English teachers only. Nor is literacy simply a matter of developing facility with general reading and writing practices regardless of content. Instead, recent standards initiatives (e.g., CCSS, C3 and NGSS) now frame literacy as a crucial feature in any effort to help students understand and develop knowledge in the disciplines. Because disciplinary literacy includes reading and writing as well as conceptual understanding and procedural knowledge of a discipline, the literacies demanded are not generalizable; they vary by discipline.

In this presentation, I will briefly differentiate content area literacy from disciplinary literacy, and then highlight domain general and domain specific aspects of argumentation, which is the central genre for academic learning. I will end with a focus on discipline specific ideas about the interpretation of evidence, drawing on examples from prior and current research involving middle school students.

Bio: Dr. Susan De La Paz has worked for 20 years with middle and high school teachers, developing writing interventions for students with diverse academic abilities. Her scholarship in adolescent literacy intersects the fields of special education, history education, and science education through the study of written argumentation. Dr. De La Paz’s research spans both learning to write and writing to learn and is driven by the need for specific and proven instructional strategies that general and special education teachers can and will use to enable students with and without LD to write successfully, as well as to support students’ use of writing for developing conceptual understanding in subjects such as history and science. She has directed two federally funded grants, a Teaching American History Grant, and a Struggling Readers and Writers Grant from the Institute of Education Sciences, and received funding from the American Educational Research Association.