Final Synthesis Blog

Prior to this class I was under the impression that the teaching and monitoring of literacy skills was solely the job of the language arts teacher. I would say to myself that I would never grade for grammar or monitor for close reading strategies as a social studies teacher because that wasn’t part of my curriculum, but now I have a different perspective. The use of literature and skills needed to comprehend and apply what is being read are just as important in social studies classrooms as they are in language arts classrooms… I mean for crying out loud most of social studies is solely made up of reading and writing. The trick is to strategically use literacy practice in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the content you are trying to teach, and I have thought of a couple of ways to do that derived from what we have done in class.

One of the first things that really impacted me while reading Subjects Matter was how lacking many textbooks can really be. As students we just generally accept that what is in the book is not just what we need to know, but that its factually correct without any bias. This is something that, as a college student and as a future educator, I have learned to be wildly untrue. Not only that, but students just do not do the reading, at least in the depth we want them to by using any literary techniques whatsoever. While I never intended to assign long textbook readings outside of class in the first place, now I am hesitant to put much stock in the textbooks at all, at least without extensively and personally vetting them first. I think for me a better alternative would be to compile smaller reading sets that really home in on what I want my students to know in addition to what the standards state they need to know for the exam. In those smaller reading sets I would include alternative literature such as images, podcasts, videos, poetry, anything that might catch my students’ attention a little better than just assigning reading from a textbook would. I would encourage them to apply as many before, during, and after reading strategies that fit the medium as possible, but I have not decided how I would want to go about making it mandatory to annotate or not. I think right now I am leaning toward using it as an extra credit opportunity to add x amount of points to the exam score for showing me that the reading was engaged with. Either way I have been influenced to learn further away from textbooks than I already was, given the fact that I myself, a believer in education, seldom read textbook assignments to the extent that I know I should.

Another important thing I learned from this class was how beneficial cross-curricular learning can be especially in a co-teaching setting. While we didn’t entirely do an activity around this, we talked a lot about it with the lesson plan assignment(s) and the book/journal clubs. While I don’t see myself using a book club in a social studies or science classroom (unless we have time), I definitely want to try and pair with another teacher to use book clubs in their language arts classroom as a tag team project when learning about content related to the chosen book or books. For instance, if I were to be teaching about the Great Depression, I would love to see the language arts teacher on my team assign a book such as Esperanza Rising, or other Historical Fiction novels set during the Great Depression. This way my students gain factual background knowledge they can apply to the novel they are reading, and personal firsthand stories of what it was like during the Great Depression to give them a more personal understanding of the era. This way my students have an opportunity to get as well rounded of a grasp of the topic as possible while also offering more unique teaching strategies.

Overall this class really allowed me to see the value in literacy education in every subject, not just language arts, not only for knowledge of literacy skills but also to give students the tools needed to fully understand any text they are assigned. I look forward to incorporating literacy into my science or social studies classroom!