Doing and Teaching Disciplinary Literacy with Adolescent Learners: A Social and Cultural Enterprise

In this essay, Elizabeth Birr Moje argues that educators can make radical change in student learning and well-being if they reframe teachers' work with youth as less about meeting standards and more about teaching youth to navigate the multiple literacy contexts in which they live, learn, and work. To that end, Moje offers a take on disciplinary literacy instruction that puts the process of inquiry at its center. In contrast to a frame that ignores or removes value, purpose, affect, emotion, imagination, social interaction, and the learning and challenging of cultural conventions from the work of adolescent literacy teaching, she presents a teaching heuristic designed to capitalize on the social and cultural nature of disciplinary inquiry and support students in navigating multiple literacy contexts as part of the teaching of disciplinary literacy, characterized by what she terms the 4Es: engage, elicit/engineer, examine, and evaluate.