Running head: CONTENT LITERACY RATIONALE

Content Literacy Rationale

Kimbra Shaner
Butler University

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Findings

Literacy is significantly different in history than in other subject areas such as math and
science because the reader must navigate through their own biases and those of the author to find
truth in the text (Shanahan and Shanahan, 2008, pg. 50). Whereas math and science tend to be
regarded automatically as truth, historical texts can be and certainly have been altered to paint
history in the way the author wishes it to be seen, and readers are equally apt to read what they
want into a text unless they carefully check themselves (Shanahan and Shanahan, 2008, pg. 50).
To construct true meaning from a text, free of author bias, historians must have knowledge of the
author and his or her personal beliefs and experiences; this knowledge helps historians to discern
if the author may have neglected, exaggerated, or fabricated any information based on their
personal perception of events (Shanahan and Shanahan, 2008, pg. 50).
Further, history cannot be completely summed up in one narrative; historians must
compare different accounts of the same event or time period in order to create a truer, more
whole picture of what happened. History readers thus need background information about the
time period which concerns the text in order to compare information and assess if the text adds
anything new truths to the narrative (Thibodeau, 2008, pg. 57). Unless the reader already has a
strong background knowledge of the texts subject, reading historical texts tends to involve quite
a bit of research even before the reading begins. To be literate in history, readers must understand
that they are not coming to the text to be taught everything about a certain event, but rather are
using the information they learn from the text to construct a more meaningful bigger picture that
combines the text, their background knowledge, and even other texts.
Some texts that historians use may not be conventional texts with conventional authors;
they may be documents such as records or censuses which do not tell a chronological story that

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can easily be understood, but still provide valuable information about a certain event or period.
Historians must be able to construct meaning from primary sources by examining evidence from
the time period and finding what it reveals in regards to social conditions during that point in
history. For instance, real estate records from the seventies may not seem particularly important,
but they provide evidence of block-busting by realtors in that time period. In order to find such
answers, historians must be able to recognize important information even outside of a typical text
organized in sentences, make conjectures about social life in that time period based on that
information, and then use their background knowledge and other texts to answer why.
Those literate in history are also able to infer cause-and-effect relationships between
different events (Shanahan and Shanahan, 2008, pg. 56). Once they have established an event or
pattern as historically accurate, they must ask why it happened and investigate the social
conditions or people that allowed the event to take place or continue. Historians are not so much
readers as they are detectivesthey must thoroughly investigate texts and their authors and
combine clues form the text with their background knowledge to create meaning.
Academic languagethe vocabulary that allows readers to engage with texts in a certain
disciplinein the area of history is also distinct because it is often not made up of entirely new
words, such as much of the vocabulary in science and math, but of everyday words put together
to create a new meaning (Flynt and Brozo, 2008, pg. 500). For example, both red and scare
are commonly known words, but the phrase Red Scare has a meaning that cannot be
constructed from the definitions of the two words alone. Texts recounting historical events may
also use phrases or verbs as the subject of a sentence or nouns as adjectives, which can be
confusing for readers who are unaccustomed to text organized in such a way.

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Conclusions and Future Study

Never before this class had I considered all of the skills and knowledge that are required
to be a proficient reader in a certain subject area, although I knew from personal experience that I
better understood texts about history and the social sciences than I did texts concerning
mathematical and scientific subjects. I had thought for many years that learning history meant
simply reading a single history book and memorizing the information; I did not consider author
and reader biases until I entered college and was assigned several different texts from which I
was expected to create a whole narrative about a time period, rather than a single text which
concretely laid out all of the facts, the causes, and the effects.
I had never heard the adage that every teacher is a reading teacher and had heard very
little of the concept of content literacy and knew even less about what it meant, so I did not have
an opinion at all on content literacy before last week. However, the articles assigned in class and
those I read in researching this paper have demonstrated the importance of having teachers
literate in their content area and able to teach literacy in their content area in classrooms. I felt
completely out of my element when I began to read scholarly texts during my first semester in
college, but if teachers in middle and high school had taught me how to read effectively and
acquire academic language in different subject areas, I would not have had to learn all those
skills on my own.
However, while I understand the importance of having these skills and teaching them to
my future students, I do not know what strategies might be effective in doing the latter. I was
able to eventually figure out how to identify important information in historical texts and become
familiar with how they are organized, but I cannot articulate what strategies I used to get thereI

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merely spent hours reading texts that I did not understand until I finally came to understand
them. Thus, I hope to learn in this course some effective strategies for becoming a better reader.
Specifically regarding my content area, I am also curious about the use of books in my
instruction. As stated earlier, historical texts contain biases, even standard middle and high
school history books which are supposed to provide a whole, unbiased account of history for
adolescents to learn. Whatever school employs me in the future will likely expect me to teach
from such a book, but teaching from just one of those books will impede my students ability to
become proficient history readers; they will read just that one book, if they read it at all, in search
of concrete truth, when it cannot rightfully provide a whole, truthful picture of the past. I hope to
find a remedy to this issue that both meets state standards and the expectations of my future
employer.

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References

Flynt, E. S., & Brozo, W. G. (2008). Developing Academic Language: Got Words?. Reading
Teacher, 61, 6, 500-502.
Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching Disciplinary Literacy to Adolescents: Rethinking
Content-Area Literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78, 1, 40-59.
Thibodeau, G. M. (2008). A Content Literacy Collaborative Study Group: High School Teachers
Take Charge of Their Professional Learning. Journal of Adolescent & Adult
Literacy, 52, 1, 54-64.