How Do We Read, Write and Think

EL Magazine shared this graphic on Twitter. The graphic is from "Disciplinary Literacy: A shift that Makes Sense" by Releah Lent, in the February 2017 issue of ASCD Express. It gave me some food for thought, and I imagined how I could use this in the classroom. As a design teacher, I would obviously use this to have students discuss how designers read, write and think....or could be more specific, using engineers, computer scientists, graphic designers, architects, etc. This could be used to explore reading, writing and thinking in any subject, and can help teachers make the connection that all teachers, no matter their subject, are language teachers.

I put an activity together in this slide deck. Feel free to make your own copy and use this in your schools. I would love to hear what your students come up with.

Other ways to use this activity:

• Have teachers answer the question in relation to the individual discipline. This will help them understand how and why they are all language teachers.
• Give students a text/audio clip and have them re-word it, as if it was being communicated from a different disciplines lens, for example, you could give them a short speech from a politician, and get them to have a poet, activist, journalist or historian re-tell it!
• Another resource which I think related to the above activity is Oxfam's "Planning Research for Influencing Document" - Particularly section two, which shows different audiences and the types of evidence they respond to best!