Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry & Instruction

A revised and expanded edition that promotes inquiry and teaching practices to help students gain the discipline-specific literacy skills they need to succeed in college, the workplace, and the society of tomorrow.

In this second edition of Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry and Instruction, Jacy Ippolito, Christina L. Dobbs, and Megin Charner-Laird update their framework for guiding discipline-specific teaching and learning in K–12 classrooms. With new and revised chapters, the book outlines disciplinary literacy professional learning that not only supports the development of new instructional skills but also inspires hope, authentic engagement, and collaboration among teachers and educational teams.

Ippolito, Dobbs, and Charner-Laird show how their adaptable framework, which is based on the RAND model of reading comprehension, allows educators across grade levels to embrace the language, genre, and modality of their particular subject areas while attuning specifically to texts, tasks, students, and classroom cultures. Offering research-based best practices, guiding questions, and concrete real-world examples, they prepare teachers to meet the demands of today’s educational climate.

This useful resource for professional learning demonstrates how the disciplinary literacy framework can guide both larger-scale and hyperlocal implementation. It maintains a special focus on critical disciplinary literacy work, which interweaves the ideas of disciplinary literacy with critical, culturally sustaining, and antiracist pedagogies. It also prepares educators to serve diverse student populations with specific literacy-learning needs, including neurodivergent students, deaf students, and multilingual learners. This book gives teachers and school leaders the tools to equip a more technically proficient, informed, and creative citizenry.

Jacy Ippolito is a professor in literacy and leadership at the McKeown School of Education at Salem State University, where he codirects graduate programs in Educational Leadership and the Center for Educational Leadership. Christina L. Dobbs is an assistant professor and director of the English Education for Equity and Justice program at Boston University. Megin Charner-Laird is a professor in leadership and elementary education at the McKeown School of Education at Salem State University, where she codirects graduate programs in Educational Leadership and the Center for Educational Leadership.