EDC 760 - Adolescent Literacy in the Disciplines

3 Credit(s) Why do adolescents struggle when reading and writing content-area texts? How do secondary teachers match students with texts, and which strategies are used to support student learning of complex information from content-area texts? To address these questions, aspiring teachers in this course will do the following: assess a range of adolescents’ reading and writing strengths and area of need, including the specific needs of English learners and student from underrepresented populations; analyze a variety of texts and match those texts to particular students and specific instructional goals; select and teach academic vocabulary; plan and pilot reading and writing instruction that promotes culturally responsive disciplinary literacy and content-area learning. Course participants will end the course by creating and adapting literacy strategies that they will collaboratively pilot with colleagues in class and with secondary students in local schools to better support secondary discipline-specific literacy instruction for a wide variety of learners and classroom contexts. Three lecture hours per week. Field-based assignments are required.
Pre-requisites: EDC 115 Exploring Education; Admission to the combined undergraduate/graduate licensure program.