The following propositions reflect work in progress. They represent a kind of conceptual framework for the development of teacher professional learning in relation to disciplinary literacy.
- A discipline is a scholarly meaning-making tradition with its own characteristic procedures/methods and typical textual practices (literacies or discourse).
- To do science means participating in the discourse of science.
- The meanings produced in the context of a disciplinary community are socially and historically contextualized and are not fixed or absolute.
- All disciplinary knowledge is built upon a conceptual framework specific to the discipline.
- A concept is an abstraction or generalization from experience that enables higher-order thinking. In this sense, a concept is a tool.
- Literacies are cognitive, socially constructed and technologically mediated practices, utilizing agreed-upon systems of signification, to make sense of and communicate messages about experience.
- Disciplinary literacies differ in terms of the modalities they use to construct and represent meaning.
- School subjects are not the same as disciplines, but have disciplinary connections.
- A school subject is the recontextualisation of one or more disciplines so as to constitute a body of knowledge, practices and attitudes, constrained by a range of contextual factors and intended for student engagement.
- The professional content knowledge of teachers includes disciplinary knowledge related to one or more of New Zealand’s eight “learning areas”.
- The professional content knowledge of teachers includes a knowledge of the literacy practices associated with the subjects they teach.
- These literacy practices will have some connection with the literacy practices of the disciplines related to these subjects (learning areas).
- Teachers need some metalinguistic knowledge related to the disciplinary literacies they are required to teach.
- Teachers need to know what it means to compose texts related to the disciplinary literacies they are responsible for. This ideally means identifying as writers of such texts.
- Disciplinary literacies are associated with particular genres.
- Genres are types of texts associated with specific contexts characterized by relatively stable conventions related to content and linguistic/representational resources used.
- All genres are multifunctional but characterized by certain salient functions.
- Function is the work done by the language/representational resources utilized at any point in a text.
- Functions include narrative, argumentation, description and explanation.
- Explaining one’s understanding of a concept in language demonstrates one’s mastery of the concept.
- There is more than one way to represent a concept.