Supporting Teacher Learning about Disciplinary Literacy: An Exploration of Professional Development, Social Studies Teachers' Thinking, and Inherent Challenges

This dissertation is comprised of three manuscripts that explore aspects of teacher professional development (PD) for disciplinary literacy. These aspects include (1) the ways that five core features of PD – duration, coherence, collective participation, active learning, and content focus – appear in a PD program focused on developing teacher thinking about disciplinary literacy; (2) the conceptions that social studies teachers held about disciplinary literacy while they participated in a PD program focused on disciplinary literacy; and (3) the challenges inherent to disciplinary literacy that impede the enactment of PD focused on disciplinary literacy. Data for this dissertation was collected through a yearlong qualitative study of a county-based PD program that focused on developing teacher thinking about disciplinary literacy. Data collected include observations of PD sessions, interviews with the PD Coordinator, interviews with and observations of four participating social studies teachers, and artifact collection. The analysis of the PD program (Chapter 2), based on an application of Desimone’s (2009) five-feature conceptual framework for studying PD, finds that most of the core features of PD were only partially realized, including the content focus and coherence. The exploration of four social studies teachers’ thinking (Chapter 3) reveals a continuum of disparate conceptions about disciplinary literacy and how it can be taught. A review of the challenges that arose during the enactment of the PD program (Chapter 4) uncovers some challenges inherent to learning about disciplinary literacy, including the disciplinary expertise gap between teachers and disciplinary experts. Taken as a whole, these sets of findings suggest that disciplinary literacy is a particularly problematic topic for teachers to learn because part of the necessary content focus is the work of disciplinary experts. Since disciplinary expert work takes place outside the settings of schools and traditional PD sites and may not be familiar to teachers, PD programs focused on disciplinary literacy confront the added challenges of bridging the world of the disciplinary expert with the world of the teacher. This, in turn, places higher demands on teacher knowledge development than might be encountered in PD programs that deal exclusively with school-based topics. To assist in meeting these demands, this dissertation proposes a set of design principles for planning and facilitating PD focused on disciplinary literacy (Chapter 5). Based on a translation of the five-feature conceptual framework and the findings of this dissertation, these design principles suggest actionable means for implementing core features of PD focused on disciplinary literacy.PhDEducational StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138641/1/jaumen_1.pd