Preservice Teachers’ Views of Content Area Literacy
The extensive literature on preservice teachers and content area literacy offers a compelling account for preservice teachers’ resistance to literacy approaches that weaves together at least three major strands. One strand argues that the structures of traditional content instruction resist content area literacy approaches (Alger, 2007; Moje, 2006; O’Brien et al., 1995). For instance, many content area literacy approaches aim to disperse instructional authority across students and teachers, while traditional content instruction centers authority on the teacher and textbooks (Draper, 2002).
A second strand suggests that teachers’ pedagogical goals resist content area literacy approaches. The problems with texts that many preservice teachers see as pressing are simply not addressed by literacy strategies (Donahue, 2000; Fisher & Ivey, 2005). Many teachers (and their students) view reading science and mathematics texts as boring and reading strategies generally fail to make Rolex Watches boring texts more interesting. Instead, preservice teachers want strategies to make the subject matter instruction more experiential and applicable to the real world and less text based. Compounding this perceived misalignment of goals is the fact that content teachers may feel poorly qualified to teach using content area literacy approaches (Hall, 2005; Lesley, Watson, & Elliot, 2007), further reducing the likelihood of their use.
A third strand in the literature considers preservice teachers’ beliefs about teaching and how such beliefs frame—and ultimately resist—their content area literacy experiences in teacher education programs. Holt-Reynolds (1992) showed how beliefs filter experiences and dramatically shape what is learned in teacher education courses. For example, based on their own experiences, preservice teachers may believe listening to lectures is active engagement in learning and simply dismiss teacher educators’ arguments that such learning is passive (Holt-Reynolds, 1992). Across these accounts, we find compelling reasons for -why content area literacy approaches are not visible in preservice teachers’ emerging practices. But -we also notice an important feature common to each strand: Content area literacy is largely positioned as a set of strategies external to science or mathematics content. Content area literacy is seen by preservice teachers as a literacy approach that is secondary, rather than central, to teaching and learning in the content areas.
For this study, we begin with the assumption that preservice teachers’ success in and commitment to their disciplines also makes it difficult for them to see how literacy practices are central to the learning of content. We recognize Fake Watches that our preservice teachers have achieved considerable success in school science and mathematics while pursuing disciplinary subject majors. Like many secondary teachers, their primary identities are as disciplinary experts (Beijaard, Verloop, & Vermunt, 2000; Helms, 1998). Because they have been successful at learning anatomy or organic chemistry or calculus, the literacy practices of the disciplines have become largely invisible to them (D. Hartman, personal communication, March 28, 2007).
To make the literacy practices of content learning visible, we use a novel strategy that compares how students in schools engage with both traditional and Internet texts. The content of these texts appropriates features of legitimate science or mathematics subject matter but is in fact nonsensical. We show how the insertion of problematic content into the literacy practices of school disrupts the invisibility of text and illustrates how literacy practices fundamentally shape understanding. We use Gee’s (1989) concepts of metaknowledge and powerful literacy to explain what our preservice teachers learned from this assignment and how the exercise rendered previously invisible literacy practices visible.
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