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Single Member Journal Club - Focal Content Area

Journal - Teachers and content area reading: Attitudes, beliefs and change



Summary: This article addresses the big debate of whether of not reading should be taught across the content areas and both pre and in service teachers' attitudes toward this. Overall, this article describes the many benefits and need for teaching reading across the curriculum, while also using research to show how it is (or isn't) actually being implemented in classrooms and teachers' opinions on this highly debatable topic.

Making Connections: While reading this article, I was able to make many different connections. One thing in particular that stood out was the differences between the pre service and in service teachers that the research pointed out. As a pre service teacher myself, I was able to really put myself in these shoes and think about how this will look in my future classroom. Another thing that stood out to me was the mention of having pre service teachers take a class to think about how to teach reading in different content areas. This LLED class seems to be exactly what they are talking about. As the article mentioned the importance of this class, I was able to relate these things to this class and the experiences I have had so far this semester. What I thought was interesting about this however, is the idea of having pre service teachers take more than one of these classes. While many universities, including UGA, only require us to take one, I agree that we would have a greater chance of implementing these reading strategies in our own content ares classrooms if we had more then just one required LLED class.

Critique: Overall, I think this article brought up some really great ideas. however, from the very beginning, when different content areas were mentioned, it was science and social studies, not mathematics. As someone who wants to teach math, I was really excited about reading this article to hopefully get a new perspective on how to incorporate reading in with mathematics. I know math may be the hardest content area to embed literary within, but I was hoping to learn more. The one paragraph that they did mention mathematics in is somewhat in line with this. The research shows that many teachers felt like mathematics was not discussed in ant of the reading courses they have taken. I think this is very interesting. We want reading to be across the curriculum, but I think reading in mathematics is sometimes overlooked, and this could also be why many math teachers do not think it is their job to teach reading.

Importance: The importance of this article, in my opinion, is to bring awareness to the idea that reading should be embedded in all content areas. By supporting the argument with so much research, readers are able to see how this idea is being received and actually implemented in classrooms today. Overall, this article serves to bring about a consciousness of reading across the curriculum and how pre and in service teachers feel about this idea.

WC: 375

Comments

  1. ThompsonNovember 22, 2019 at 6:23 AM

    Hi Kim,

    Very nice job with the reading protocol for journals. Your summary is comprehensive without being wordy. I really appreciate your critique. What you said in class about not seeing math instructing in literacy is poignant. One of the concepts that the authors of our book open with is the importance of building schema for reading in our students by helping them to see how any given text or topic is related to their lives. So, your point that math is the least commonly and least comprehensively address subject-area in literacy instruction for teachers shows a bit of hypocrisy. I hope that you find ways to see yourself and the subject of math in literacy instruction. If I ever get the opportunity to teach this class or another like it, I will work harder to find math in literacy because it is clearly a limitation of mine.

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