When thinking of myself as a reader, I typically enjoy literary texts that include novels, books about teaching and special education, poetry, autobiographies & biographies of people I draw inspiration from, Christian living books, and occasionally magazines and journal articles that attract my attention. I enjoy pieces that spark my interest, help transport me into the lives and worlds of characters in a given novel, and those that provoke deeper thinking. Throughout my educational experience, I have been especially challenged by science, math, and even history texts simply because I have a harder time connecting to them and they are not the texts I would choose to pick up on a rainy afternoon. I have found these types of texts difficult to get through partly because I feel like I have to keep reading them over and over before I can begin to comprehend the information.
Reflecting on my personal experience as a reader alone helps me see the need for disciplinary literacy instruction. Even looking back, I wish my teachers knew how I felt about reading texts from certain subject areas before the class started so they could be aware of how to go about instruction on how to approach those texts. I can see something like the survey we did on the first day of this class to be helpful in giving teachers insight into their student's reading identities. I was happy to hear the different voices Buehl cited that spoke up for disciplinary literacy instruction. I would absolutely agree that the disciplinary literacy instruction stage is not something all students can get to independently solely given the fact that they succeeded in the basic and intermediate literacy stages.
Buehl described that we each read texts through different lenses. I would consider myself someone who reads through a literary lens and has no problem with the complex texts of my literature courses, but when it comes to reading a history textbook, it feels like I am reading through lenses with the wrong prescription. I liked the way Buehl talked about creating new identities for students by challenging them to learn how to think about subject material in the ways that historians, scientists, and mathematicians would. I agree that if students can be instructed in how to put on the right lenses, they can have success with material that was previously challenging.
When looking at Chapter 2 and the discussion on comprehending complex texts, the first thing I think about from my early high school English classes is Shakespeare. Prior to high school, I had read one Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in which we were allowed to read both the original and a modern day version of. When hitting the 9th grade, reading Romeo and Juliet started off challenging as does most of Shakespeare's work for anyone who did not live during that time period. Reading Shakespeare requires practice and careful thought about the words, sentence structure, tone, context, etc. Our English teacher did a great job at guiding us into reading Shakespeare's work by helping us take small chunks of the story and work through it together, putting it into language we could understand. She modeled how to go about translating it and eventually led us to independent activities where we could try it on our own. This instruction helped set us up for success in that class and our future English classes that involved Shakespeare. Aside from just Shakespeare, our teacher used these similar methods of modeling and scaffolding as discussed in the chapter for the new short stories and novels we would approach. She helped model ways of picking up on an author's indirect communication and by the end of my freshman year English class, I was able to interpret the literary devices of stories such as symbols, themes, irony, etc. on my own.
This type of literary instruction is needed in the other content areas so students can learn to read different texts with different intentions and purposes. These chapters helped bring this to light by advocating for an educational experience that goes against students using the one-size-fits-all approach in their reading.
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