Leveraging Collaborative Expertise: Social Studies Teachers’ Perspectives of Disciplinary Literacy Instruction

This study aims to augment the current understanding of how practicing teachers perceive and implement disciplinary literacy and in what ways they collaborate with researchers in a disciplinary literacy project. To do this, we collected and analyzed transcripts of the meetings from a disciplinary literacy project that was a university-school partnership between history teachers, literacy education researchers, and social studies education researchers. To analyze our data, we applied a constant comparative method and identified three salient themes: collaboration, text use, and instructional practice. Specifically, the teachers cited that the triangular structure of the collaborative expertise of teachers, literacy, and social studies education researchers was useful in constructing professional and instructional knowledge. In terms of text use, teachers expressed that the intentional selection and teaching of multiple and multimodal texts provided diverse perspectives and supported the various ways in which students read and learn. Finally, concerning instructional practice, the teachers revealed that disciplinary literacy and thinking skills should be intentionally taught and that methods for enhancing discipline-specific motivation should be considered. Based on these findings, key issues and implications are discussed.