Power Tools: 30 Critical Disciplinary Literacy Strategies for 6-12 Classrooms

Virtually all national standards now require students and teachers to understand the particulars of disciplinary literacy. But recently emerging scholarship suggests that disciplinary literacy is, by itself, an incomplete and potentially problematic approach to secondary literacy instruction. By asking students to “think like” or even “be like” experts, students may receive implicit messaging about whose knowledge is―and isn’t―valued.

Critical disciplinary literacy (CDL) creates space for, and highlights connections between, critical literacies and disciplinary literacies. CDL acknowledges disciplines as unique communities with their own specialized (and often exclusionary) skills, norms, practices, and discourses, but deviates from conventional applications of disciplinary literacy by responding to the ways in which power systems and the analytic skills needed to understand them work differently based on the disciplines at hand. A CDL instructional approach acknowledges that applying the critical literacy skills of “reading the word and the world” to understand the power dynamics of vaccine distributions requires a different skill set and strategy approach than looking at textual representations of masculinity in Romeo and Juliet.

Written by a team of educators with over 70 combined years of classroom experience, Power Tools: 30 Critical Disciplinary Literacy Strategies for 6–12 Classrooms offers readers research-based, multidisciplinary, ready-to-implement disciplinary literacy strategies from critical literacy lenses. The book sets itself apart from other strategy textbooks by offering creative strategy implementation that calls attention to power systems. Educators can learn, for example, how they might employ read-alouds to explore the global refugee crisis, or use the exit ticket strategy to help students reflect on the relationship between race and COVID statistics/experiences.

Power Tools: 30 Critical Disciplinary Literacy Strategies for 6–12 Classrooms provides standards-aligned lessons that both challenge and extend traditional engagement practices to build a more just world. Each chapter includes:

• An overview of each strategy, situated within the research of best practices;
• Two disciplinary examples for each CDL strategy (e.g., an example of a CDL think-aloud in seventh grade math and tenth grade ELA classroom). Chapters provide resources such as examples of student work, discussion prompts, dialogue between teacher and students, and reprintables;
• Ideas for addressing resistance to CDL instruction.

Preservice and in-service teachers, as well as teacher educators and researchers, looking to do and support justice-oriented work in disciplinary spaces will find value in the book.

Power Tools is an ideal text to implement in courses such as Disciplinary Literacy, Secondary Literacy, Content Area Literacy, Methods/Strategies for Teaching Social Justice, Multicultural Education, ELA methods, Science methods, Social Studies methods, and Mathematics methods.

Dr. Jeanne Dyches (she/her), an associate professor at Iowa State University, researches the relationship between curriculum, racial literacies, and antiracist teaching practices. Specifically, she works to understand how teachers and students resist limitations of their curriculum in order to engage antiracist, emancipatory, and joyful secondary literacy instruction. A former high school English teacher and literacy coach, Dr. Dyches has won awards for her teaching on both the secondary and post-secondary levels. The American Educational Research Association, American Reading Forum, Society of Professors of Education, and Iowa Academy of Education have recognized Dr. Dyches’ research and scholarly contributions to the field of education. Dr. Dyches has published in many journals, including Harvard Educational Review, Journal of Teacher Education, English Journal, and Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.

Ashley S. Boyd (she/her) is an associate professor of English/English Education at Washington State University, where she teaches graduate courses on critical theories and anti-oppressive pedagogies and undergraduate courses on Young Adult Literature and Methods for Teaching English. A former secondary English-language arts teacher, Ashley’s scholarship examines practicing teachers’ social justice pedagogies and their critical content knowledge; explores how young adult literature is an avenue for cultivating students’ critical literacies; and investigates how students select, organize, and implement social action projects. Her books, including Social Justice Literacies in the English Classroom: Teaching Practice in Action, analyze and amplify how teachers subvert traditional classroom curriculum to advance equity and justice. She is co-author of Reading for Action: Engaging Youth in Social Justice through Young Adult Literature, and she has also published in the Journal of Teacher Education, English Education, and The ALAN Review.

Dr. Katherine Baker is an associate professor of education at Elon University. She received her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction with a mathematics education focus from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She supports prospective teachers in their fieldwork in Pre-K–5 schools and teaches courses including Mathematics Methods, Education and Society, and Number & Algebra for K–8 Teachers. She has previously worked as a 4th and 5th grade classroom teacher and a K–5 Math Lead Teacher. Baker is a member of several professional mathematics organizations and an active board member of, and contributor to, state professional organizations. She collaborates with educators to explore and uplift students’ mathematical thinking in indoor and outdoor learning spaces, and then uses that thinking in instructional decision-making that promotes equitable and accessible mathematics.

After earning a B.A. in English Education from North Carolina State University, Dr. Alex Kaulfuss began teaching 9th- and 12th-grade English and Forensic Debate. Over the next decade, as a classroom teacher, Kaulfuss continued to further his own education and professional growth, earning an M.S. in English Education; acquiring additional certifications in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Information Technology; becoming a National Board Certified Teacher; receiving the Jenrette Teaching Excellence Award; and earning a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction. Kaulfuss became an Education Consultant for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction and then an Instructional Technologist with North Carolina State University’s Friday Institute for Educational Innovation, working with teachers to find ways to incorporate technology in the classroom. Kaulfuss returned to public education as part of the founding faculty of a full-scale, blended-learning high school, teaching first Mathematics, then Python and Java, before returning to English at the Wake Early College of Information and Biotechnologies. Kaulfuss’s education and research interests include implementing technology in the classroom, utilizing visual texts to augment the overall reading experience, and fostering collaboration and metacognition in young adult learners.