Investigating Community College Discipline Faculty's Understanding and Implementation of Disciplinary Literacy and Critical Disciplinary Literacy in Eastern North Carolina Grant uri icon

abstract

  • Many students enter college with inadequate reading, writing, and critical thinking skills to successfully navigate discipline-specific college-level coursework (Duff, 2010; Hyland, 2006; Lea &; Street, 1998; Tsui, 2002). As such, college faculty, and specifically community college faculty, are challenged to meet the multiple literacy needs of their students while still maintaining high expectations within their discipline-specific courses. One option is for discipline faculty (e.g., mathematics) to integrate disciplinary literacy instruction within their courses. As discipline faculty are deemed experts in their content area and often not trained in literacy, professional development focused on disciplinary literacy could support faculty with the knowledge and experience to make this pedagogical shift.
    I have previously studied community college discipline faculty's perceptions of their role as a literacy educator (Gregory &; Colclough, 2018), developed a valid and reliable scale to measure community college discipline faculty's role, self-efficacy, and practice with disciplinary literacy (Gregory, Bol, Bean, &; Perez, in press), and investigated the impact participating in a literacy-based learning community had on community college discipline faculty's perceptions, self-efficacy, and practice regarding incorporating disciplinary literacy instruction within their courses (Gregory, 2018). The project I am proposing continues and expands this research with community college discipline faculty in both southeastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina. I plan to continue to study discipline faculty's role, self-efficacy, and practice with disciplinary literacy, investigate the role professional development has on discipline faculty's self-efficacy and practice, and investigate the impact professional development and coaching has on student success with disciplinary literacy in the classroom.
    Through this research, I will (a) continue to develop and offer strong professional development offerings for community college discipline faculty, (b) build learning communities of discipline faculty to collaborate and develop disciplinary literacy instructional strategies for their courses, (c) implement a disciplinary literacy coaching model to work with community college discipline faculty, (d) investigate how such professional development impacts faculty self-efficacy and practice, (e) investigate how the implementation of disciplinary literacy instructional strategies impact student success, and (f) analyze data to inform community college discipline faculty, professional development personnel and adult education faculty. This project would provide important information about community college discipline faculty's incorporation of disciplinary literacy instruction and its impact on student success.

date/time interval

  • January 2020 - February 2020