When Phillip Hare started his first job as a social studies teacher more than 15 years ago, he entered the field with a history degree. But then, he was asked to teach geography.
The two subjects are technically under the same umbrella—social studies—but they draw on different knowledge bases, and distinct ways of reading, writing, and analyzing text.
“I found myself needing to build a lot of these skills,” said Hare, now the president-elect of the National Council for Geographic Education, and a high school geography teacher in Taylorsville, Utah.
In a history class, students examine artifacts—oral histories, newspapers, photos—to make arguments about how to understand the past. They interrogate the provenance and bias of sources and try to corroborate claims.
In geography, the sources students consult, the kinds of arguments they make, and the questions they ask of text are different. Being able to navigate these diverse methods is known as disciplinary literacy.
View the downloadable below for two examples of how social studies teachers build disciplinary literacy in geography and economics. And check out Education Week’s recent report on literacy across the curriculum for more classroom-focused insights.
