CI 414/504: Disciplinary Literacies Fall 2026

Artificial intelligence is becoming more common in school, work, and everyday life, but people are not necessarily becoming more comfortable with it. After reading Pew Research Center’s article “Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs,” I was especially interested in how much younger adults’ attitudes toward AI have changed. According to Pew, 55% of adults ages 18 to 29 said they were more concerned than excited about AI in 2026 , compared with 39% in 2024. Across all U.S. adults, 52% now say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life. This surprised me because younger people are often assumed to be the generation most comfortable with new technology. Many young adults use AI tools for school, work, searching for information, and creativity. However, knowing how to use AI does not necessarily mean trusting what it will do to society. The biggest concern appears to be employment. Pew found that 71% of U.S. ...

Artificial intelligence is no longer something students might use in the future. It is already part of their everyday lives. After reading Pew Research Center’s report “How Teens Use and View AI,” what stood out to me most was not simply how many teenagers use AI, but how quickly it has become part of the way students learn, search for information, and complete schoolwork. Pew found that 54% of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 have used AI chatbots for help with schoolwork , while 57% have used them to search for information. Teens also use chatbots for entertainment, summarizing materials, creating images and even getting news. These numbers make me think that the question for teachers can no longer be, “Should students use AI?” Students are already using it. A more important question is: How should we teach students to use it responsibly and thoughtfully? One finding that especially interested me was that one in ten teens said they use chatbots to help with all or most of their schoolwork ....

 In the Moschkovich reading they talk about some methods that can be applied to EL students in the math class. This includes using more graphs, gestures, and other visuals, as well as focusing on a students mathematical understanding as opposed to their accuracy with the language, and focus on mathematical explanation rather than the use of mathematical language. I think that all of the ideas are great and should definitely be thought of when teaching EL students, but I also think they would be very useful when teaching all children regardless of their comprehension of the English language. Obviously it is important for students to be able to use and understand the vocabulary of mathematics, but its most important for them to actually understand the processes and have a great understanding of the mathematics they're learning in general. Sometimes if we harp too much on some of these aspects we're limiting students from learning and could be discouraging them even if they alread...

 

Both James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” and Clint Smith’s “James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil” emphasizes how education should more so be not just memorization, but preparing their students for standardized tests. Baldwin argues that the purpose of education is to teach students to think independently, question society, as well as being able to recognize injustices within the school system as well as outside. Smith further builds on this idea as teachers can connect classroom lessons to real-world issues that will affect their students in the present and the future. One idea that had stood out to me was Baldwin’s argument also challenges the idea that teachers should be encouraging their students to question what they are taught instead of simply accepting everything at face-value or as the truth. I think this is important in the area of teaching history as textbooks do not always include every perspective to fully explain the experiences of differen...

My thoughts on "A Talk to Teachers" by James Baldwin Reading James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers” made me think about how education is more than just teaching students information and preparing them for tests. As teachers, we tend to focus on the things students need to learn, and there is always more they can learn. However, in doing so, we sometimes forget to teach them to think independently. Baldwin talks about how education should help students question things and challenge ideas rather than simply accept what society tells them. We need to help students think critically. Critical thinking can sometimes seem negative, but in every class, there are ways to teach students to think outside the box and question reasoning. I think this is especially true in a math class. As students progress through their math classes, they naturally begin to have more questions. I would not expect my students to simply follow everything they are taught. In my opinion, it is crucial for them ...

In 1963, James Baldwin warned that the fundamental paradox of education is that while society expects schools to enforce compliance, true education creates conscious citizens who critically examine and challenge their world. Today, education remains a fiercely contested battleground between systemic social control and human liberation. Knowledge as "Lethal" Resistance Systems of control have long recognized the revolutionary power of literacy. As Toni Morrison noted, oppressive institutions view true knowledge as "lethal." When Texas prison authorities banned Morrison’s novel Paradise fearing inmate disruption, and state authorities barred incarcerated activist Angela Davis from sharing books, they reflected an institutional terror of critical consciousness. As Victor Hugo famously wrote, "To open a school is to close a prison." Culturally Grounded Pedagogy To transform literacy into a liberatory tool, educators must reject rigid, apolitical curricula...

 What inspires people to enact change? I sometimes think about how large-scale reform is born. I think of all the people experiencing and interpreting events and how that changes how they understand themselves and the world around them. So many people have to ruminate on their own on a particular problem before pieces start to fall into place and changes are progressed toward.       It both excites a nd scares me that as a future teacher, I will be a major influence on so many people's development of how they understand things to be. In one of my other classes, Education Policies and Foundations, we talk a lot about how Education (while some try to argue otherwise) is inherently political. From some of our readings in that class, the idea of  social reproduction stuck with me. The idea is that schooling doesn't automatically create equal opportunities and that school can actually reinforce or reproduce inequality. We as humans have what my teacher called cu...

  Dear Reader, For today's post I will refer to the reading “A talk to a teacher.” This reading reminded me about chapter 2 Political Economy of Education from a book by Saltman. (I read this chapter in one of my education classes a year ago, so I’m not sure what the title of the book is.) In this chapter it talked about how students who come from a lower income background and they attend a school in a low-income neighborhood, then their school is most likely teaching them to become docile workers. For example, when a classroom is lecture based where the teacher is mostly just presenting then this causes students to become trained to just follow the direction of the teacher. This will later prepare the student to follow the direction of their bosses.  On the other hand, the chapter explained that if a student comes from a higher income and goes to a school in a higher income neighborhood then the school is training the student to become a leader in society. In this school sett...

Online spaces have become an important part of how people communicate, learn, and build relationships. After reading Pew Research Center’s report “Online Community and Connection in America,” I started thinking about whether relationships formed online should be considered less meaningful than relationships formed face-to-face. Pew found that nearly four in ten U.S. adults are part of an online community , and participation is even higher among younger adults. About 48% of adults ages 18 to 29 say they are part of one. These communities can exist on social media, discussion forums, messaging apps, video games, or websites centered around shared interests and hobbies. Pew Research Center What interested me most was why people participate. Many people use online communities to stay informed, have fun, or receive advice and recommendations. About seven in ten people who participate in online communities say these spaces add at least some value to their lives , and roughly six in ten say...

Artificial intelligence is becoming more common in school, work, and everyday life. After reading Pew Research Center’s article “Globally, More People Expect AI to Cause Job Loss Than Growth,” one question stayed with me: If AI changes the kinds of jobs available in the future, what should schools be preparing students to do now? Pew surveyed people across 37 countries and found that, in 34 of them, people were generally more likely to believe AI would lead to fewer jobs rather than more jobs. In countries such as the United States, Australia, and South Korea, around seven-in-ten adults or more expected AI to cause job losses over the next 20 years. Pew Research Center What surprised me most was that younger adults are also becoming increasingly concerned. In the United States, the percentage of adults ages 18 to 34 who said they were more concerned than excited about AI increased from 40% in 2024 to 55% in 2026 . Young people are usually thought of as being comfortable with new techn...

One theme that kept popping up throughout all of the readings and the podcast was that students know more than what they lead on, and we must not try to be apolitical, because life is not apolitical. Society is built on racism, segregation, violence, and it should not be something that is danced around in the classroom. Students, kids and teenagers, are observant and curious. They, especially now with social media, are aware of the world around us, and ignoring that fact only hurts us as a society than helps us. How do we expect the future generations to change the world if in the classroom we refuse to acknowledge what's wrong? Like Baldwin mentioned, school is when many kids discover what oppression is, so why do we not teach them about it? When the Capitol Building was stormed in 2021, some of my high school teachers completely ignored the subject, choosing to focus on lesson with distracted students. Other teachers opened the floor to any questions or concerns we may have had o...

One question that kept coming to my mind when reading these texts was the topic of who gets to decide what knowledge is necessary in school? Being a future math teacher I like to think of knowledge in a relatively straightforward way. Students need to know how to solve equations, understand functions, deal with graphs, and acquire diverse arithmetic strategies. But the readings got me thinking further about what children bring to the classroom already and if schools really respect that knowledge. What struck me about Lee's reading was the idea of using everyday information. As Lee describes, Students come to school with knowledge from their families, communities, their experiences, and their everyday practices. While trained to see information in school as something different, teachers might use what students already know as a beginning point for the learning of academic subject. Lee (2007) I think this is especially relevant in math, because children are using mathematical thinki...

  One thing that stood out to me in Buehl's chapter this week was the idea that teachers should be mediators who bridge students' knowledge gaps and help them navigate challenging texts that are mismatched for them. This reading also validates our students' concerns that valuing literature indeed takes effort and greater reading stamina.  The reading also intrigues me to think about more practices to  help students build their reading stamina. So, in this blog post, I'd like to highlight some practices I would like to try more frequently to support students in building greater stamina for reading complex texts.  1. Framing the Text Before asking students to read a long, challenging text on their own, teachers can proactively engage in pre-thinking by connecting universal themes or ideas in the text to students' personal lives and experiences, or by making text-to-self connections. By doing so, students will activate their schemata and build their own mental ...

 Comments on Buehl Ch 3  This chapter focused on texts and how gaps in our background knowledge can impact our willingness to continue engaging with a text. In the chapter we got some text excerpts and I didn't have much of an issue understanding those excerpts because I already had some combination of text-to-self, text-to-text, and/or text-to-world knowledge regarding those topics. However, I can definitely recall times when I have not been able to fully grasp a text. The types of text that as you keep on reading you end up more confused and demotivated to keep on reading, because we don't have the background knowledge required to make sense of that text, it can be hard for that text to keep us engaged.  This brings me to talk about something I have called "The Scale of Author-to-Reader Match-up". While reading the section titled "The Match Between Authors and Readers", I felt like I should extend the idea using my own schema. Because I like to think visua...

When I watched Hair Love for the first time for this class, I mainly focused my attention on the relationship between the daughter and her father as they both tried to tackle her hair together while the mother was in the hospital. The movie seemed like a simple, heartwarming story about a family facing challenges together and working through them. After connecting it to chapter 7, "customizing literacy practices," I began to think more about how small details can help us understand the full meaning of something. The chapter further discusses other disciplinary literacies, which can involve approaching information through different methods/perspectives depending on what is being taught.  One idea from the chapter that stood out to me the most was the importance of being able to adapt to different learning strategies to further encourage deeper and critical thinking. The author explains how students need to start learning how to ask questions, make interferences, just overall b...

As I was reading this chapter of Buehl I saw how they connected this importance of prior knowledge to reading and understanding to how math classrooms and curriculums operate. I think it shows the most devastating part of learning math in our school system and shows why so many people in this country seem to hate math. A lot of people say they "don't get math" or "math isn't for them", when in reality math is for everyone, it's an important basis of understanding the world around us and despite peoples claims otherwise, we use it everyday to some extent. So why is it that so many people have this view of math and are so adverse to learning it so defeatist about learning it? Well it all comes down to conceptual knowledge, conceptual knowledge is required to be able to build off and learn more in that discipline. It's not just knowing how to do something but instead why you can do that, not just plugging numbers into an equation but understanding what ...

While reading the Buehl chapter for this week, I kept thinking about Catherine Snow’s heuristic model for understanding reading comprehension. The model illustrates that reading comprehension is an interactive dance between characteristics of the text, reader, and literacy activity – all sausage-cased by the larger sociocultural context in which all of these factors exist. Similar to Buehl’s argument, it understands reading comprehension not as a static or objective skill, but as a fluid dynamic between multiple factors, including the reader (who brings their own background knowledge and capacities) and the text (which brings its own content and discourse). This feels like an important acknowledgement of the power dynamics that shape disciplinary reading comprehension in schools. There is often a massive chasm that exists between the formalized texts we privilege in academic contexts and the extensive informal “funds of knowledge” that so many of our students/readers bring to school. G...

 The first time I watched Hair Is Love, I just watched it because it felt like it was easy to understand. As I rewatched it in class, I noticed smaller details in the film that helped me connect it to the readings in the chapters. While the general plot was still there, the actual worksheets helped guide me on how to approach complex readings and media. Specifically, for me, it was more useful to think about how you can apply it in math. Even then, it is very useful to create. Especially when writing songs, as I do for fun. Going back to Hair is Love, though, connections can be made mostly from the tiny details. Notice how, when the girl showed her mother she had hair just like her daughter's, the girl wanted to do it just like her mom's. At the same time, we see her father's persistence in helping his daughter achieve her desired hairdo. The film was wholesome because you can see how strong their bond is and how, in the end, after her daughter doesn't like the hair typ...

Reading Buehl’s Chapter 7 and learning about how we as teachers can customize literacy strategies was really interesting. There are multiple literacy strategies, and for each subject, there can be different ways to teach and use literacy. This reading got me thinking about how students can struggle with specific subjects, especially math. I plan on being a math teacher, so I think it is really important that students understand not only how to do the math, but also what the problem is asking them to do. There are multiple types of problems that students have to work with in a math class. Some are entirely numerical, while others are word problems. With word problems, students may know how to do the math, but if they do not understand what the question is asking, they may still have trouble solving it. This made me think about how teaching literacy can differ from subject to subject. A strategy that works well in an English class might not work the same way in a math class. I think we n...