A Content Area Reading Course Re-Imagined: A Situated Case Study of Disciplinary Literacies Pedagogy in Secondary English Teacher Education

Abstract

This study investigates the experiences of one secondary preservice English teacher facilitating an out-of-school e-book club with urban youth while enrolled in a required course entitled Content Area Reading. Data were generated through field notes, interviews, course assignments, and book club artifacts and narratively analyzed using holistic thematic inductive and deductive coding schemes. Findings show how the participant recruits his experiences and identities as a reader, a former grant writer, and an aspiring English teacher to develop a disciplinary literacies pedagogy informed by his knowledge of disciplinary Discourses and youths’ lives. These findings have implications for how teacher educators prepare secondary English teachers to craft relevant and engaging content literacy instruction.

Keywords:

• qualitative research
• teacher education
• adolescent literacy
• content area reading