CI 414/504: Disciplinary Literacies Fall 2026

 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 ...