Disciplinary Literacy: Math

Synthesis

Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas
According to the authors, "communication is central to successful engagement in mathematical processes" (p.192).  Thus, students and teachers must learn how to more effectively communicate during and outside of math classes.  Math language is different from other types of literacy because it includes many symbols and visual representations in addition to what we often consider "normal" reading and writing.  The authors suggest several ways to help students understand the language that is specific to math.  These include using background knowledge to expand on new concepts; modeling the use of math language to explain a concept; encouraging students to connect new ideas back to their original knowledge through discussions and writing; providing effective, meaningful feedback; and inviting students to generate texts for an audience outside the classroom.  Learning a new foreign language requires exploration and practice, and learning the language of math is no different.  Of course, students must feel respected if they are to engage and ask questions while learning the language of mathematics.

Jetton and Shanahan
A recurring theme in this chapter seems to be that math teachers and literacy instructors need to work together in order to make math instruction effective in the classroom.  Unfortunately, literacy instructors often do not take the uniqueness of "math language" into account.  Recommendations from literacy coaches and others have suggested using general texts ("The Lottery" was mentioned), children's books, or picture books to incorporate literacy into the math classroom.  While these texts do support literacy as a whole, the concepts that they teach tend to be so vaguely related to math that they are not useful.  Teachers must learn to expand their ideas about literacy when it comes to the mathematics classroom.  In math, it is just as important to be able to read charts, graphs, symbols, and other visual representations as it is to read a story about a mathematical concept.  Students do need to demonstrate conceptual understanding (which can, at times, be acquired through reading a general text), but they also must demonstrate computational fluency and knowledge of mathematical processes.  The authors of this chapter also mentioned that it is very important for students to create their own texts in math.  In short, teachers need to redefine their views of literacy in the math classroom, and students need to be invited to engage in multiple literacies there.

Moji
The YouTube video reinforced much of what the authors stated in the chapters that we read.  Moji states that adolescents have many avenues in life to navigate, and it is our job as teachers to help them navigate the many different disciplinary literacies.  Explicit attention must be given to this, and students must be provided with opportunities for repeated practice and exposure.  Students must be active, not passive, in literacy engagement and production.  Navigating disciplinary literacy is taught through "five Es": Expose, Engage, Elicit/Engineer, Examine, and Evaluate.  All of these steps are important in helping students learn to read and comprehend the multiple literacies that face them in secondary school.

Responses

Text-to-Text
I found that the readings this week were actually fairly unlike any that I have read before.  It seems that I have often heard and read that it is good to use children's books and general texts in a secondary mathematics classroom, but this week's readings seemingly contradicted that.  But, like our previous readings, the authors from this week again mentioned the importance of keeping students engaged so that they will feel comfortable asking questions and will want to participate in class activities.

Text-to-self
As I was reading the Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas chapter, I thought back to my days in math class.  Math has never been my strong subject, but I wonder how much more I would have enjoyed it and felt more confident in my abilities, had more of my teachers employed some of the strategies mentioned in these chapters.  All I remember from math is doing computations, proofs, etc.  We did not often engage in meaningful discussions about the concepts, and I certainly never considered that I might be learning literacy skills in math.  The two subjects always were completely separate in my mind.

Text-to-world
I think that, as teachers, we all need to do a better job of helping our students realize that math actually is important to them in our future lives.  So often, I hear kids say, "But I'm never going to use this in my job!"  We need to point out the ways in which math is useful every day, even when the particular concept being taught might not seem to be.  Literacy extends far beyond the pages of a book; just think how often students are required to use math when counting money, telling the time, or reading a chart/graph!

Questions

1.  Norman uses Everyday Math, and some of the ways that the curriculum teaches math concepts are completely bizarre to me.  How to I make these teaching methods (such as partial sums or lattice multiplication) seem useful to my students when I personally don't believe that they are?

2.  How do I encourage students to participate in a class discussion or help group members work a problem on the board when they are very fearful about getting an answer wrong?  I know that, obviously, I need to build relationships with each student so that they feel more confident in their abilities, but are there more practical ways to do this?  (I was always the student who was shy and unwilling to participate in math!)