CI 414/504: Disciplinary Literacies Fall 2026

 Hello Reader,  Today I will refer to the reading “Teaching Comprehension of Complex disciplinary.” One part of the reading that stood out to me was on the part of the expectations some teachers have with middle and high schoolers. This section reminded me about how in my freshman year in high school my teacher from a social studies class told another teacher about how their students are behind in their reading and writing skills, and I remember her also saying that many of the students don’t know how to write a simple essay. My teacher and the other teacher were talking in the back of the classroom somewhat quietly. Listening to their conversation did not make me feel good because it kinda made me feel as if I was also behind. This then made me wonder why is it that high schoolers and middle schoolers are behind in their reading skills? On the other hand, something I really appreciated from my AP Language and composition teacher is that he did not expect us to know everything...

Complex texts and my thoughts on them By: Jack Freeman     When I was younger the act of reading was really hard for me. I would often read a whole page of a book and then when I got to the bottom of the page I would realize I kinda spaced out and would restart. Even into high school i would most of the time just look up a summary of whatever required reading I had to do. However when In class, when we would discuss the content, I would realize that the summary I read didn´t provide all of the detail or nuance that I would've gained if I had just made time to read the actual text.      I think a lot of other people my age had similar problems. Because its so easy to open up a canvas assignment and be like ¨40 pages! forget it ill just look up a summary.¨ In the past few years as I've finished high school and started college I have made it more of a point to read the text and make my own connections and conclusions. I think this is especially dangerous if student...

After reading “Apprenticing Adolescents to Reading in Subject Area Classrooms” and “What is Metacognition”, one of the main ideas I gained was that being a good reader is not just about being able to read words on a page. Students need to fully understand how they are reading, recognize when they are having a difficult time understanding something, and figure out and know how to improve their understanding. This further connects the ideas of reading apprenticeship from Schoenbach et al as well as with Martinez’s explanation of metacognition. Both readings demonstrate students becoming stronger and more independent learners when their teachers make the process behind readings and learning more visible and accessible.  In the first reading, “Apprenticing Adolescents to Reading in Subject Area Classrooms” authors Schoenbach, et al explain how students often struggle with academic texts as they are not taught how to approach a difficult/high-level text in different subjects. The readin...

After reading Pew Research Center’s article about the U.S. Department of Education, I was surprised by how complicated the federal role in education actually is. I used to think the department directly controlled much of what happens in schools, but most K–12 funding comes from state and local governments. In fiscal 2022, the federal government provided about 13.6% of public elementary and secondary school funding nationwide . However, that percentage varies greatly by location. Pew Research Center This difference made me think about educational equity. Federal funding may represent a small part of one school district’s budget but a much larger part of another’s. For example, Pew reported that 23.3% of school funding in Mississippi came from federal sources, compared with 7.2% in New York . This means changes in federal education policy may affect communities differently. The article also shows how the Department of Education supports students through special education programs, aid fo...

Artificial intelligence is becoming part of almost everything we do, from writing and searching for information to analyzing data. Because of this, I was interested in the Pew Research Center article “Can AI Stand in for Human Survey-Takers? Not Really.” What stood out to me most was not simply that AI made mistakes, but what those mistakes tell us about the difference between predicting people and actually listening to them. Pew researchers asked an AI model to act like real survey participants using information about those participants. They then compared the AI-generated answers with responses from actual people. Across nearly 300 survey questions, the AI-generated results differed from the human results by an average of about 12 percentage points . The researchers also found that AI sometimes exaggerated characteristics associated with particular groups and did not represent the full diversity of opinions found among real people.  Pew Research Center One finding that especiall...

When I think about reading, I (and everyone else, I'm pretty sure) usually think about words on a page. Maybe a textbook, an article, a novel, or even a test problem. But that definition of reading is actually limited. We are constantly reading things that are not necessarily made up of traditional sentences and paragraphs. We read images, graphs, facial expressions, sounds, gestures, symbols, and even the way information is organized. Hair Love is an interesting example of this because so much of the story is communicated without explicitly telling the viewer what to think. The short film follows a father learning to do his daughter's hair, but we understand much more about the storyline through the different ways the film communicates that information, like the examples I gave earlier. So what really counts as text? If we can "read" a video, what else can we read? The Buehl reading made it clear that different disciplines have different ways of communicating knowl...

I found Buehl’s description of the elements that increase text complexity really important. While I know these blog posts are not intended to summarize the readings, I wish to create a chart that briefly describes and draws connections between these text elements and the comprehension strategies required to make sense of them. This is largely in service of expanding and monitoring my own comprehension of Buehl’s text (let’s get meta, baby!), but also to provide context before I pose some questions and wonderings that surfaced for me as I read Chapter 2. The above chart reveals the depth of comprehension work required to make sense of texts as they grow in complexity. If the goal for many middle and high school disciplinary teachers is largely connected to absorbing specific content, then it is easy to see why teachers would eschew traditional texts and engage in what Buehl terms “reading avoidance” (2017, p. 41) – instead, seeking out sources that require fewer comprehension demands. F...