Single Member Journal Club- Focal Area Content

Journal: Teachers and Content Area Reading: Attitudes, Belief, and Change 

Summary: This article addresses the issue of teaching literacy and reading across content areas and the attitudes that pre-service and in-service teachers bring to the table regarding this issue. Moreover, it is a summation and analysis of many different studies on the same issue and provides some possible conclusions as to why certain teachers have negative or positive attitudes about teaching literacy and reading in their classrooms.

Making Connections: I believe that the biggest and easiest connection that I made with this article was the fact that I can relate with what the article brings up about pre-service teachers. As a pre-service teacher myself I can relate to the idea that my only reference for literacy in the classroom is through what I grew up with and have tangibly experienced myself. I think it is hard to fully believe that my opinions or ideas about teaching literacy in the classroom would change so drastically after my first few years in the classroom, but I do understand that actually being in the classroom can bring up so many realizations that aren’t possible until you experience the actual act of teaching students on a day-to-day basis.

Critique: Overall, I really enjoyed reading this article. I believe that it brought up some really thoughtful points about how to encourage and equip teachers. Some of the things that were mentioned concerned placing pre-service teachers into in-service environments. This would allow them to experiment with ideas about how to incorporate literacy into the classroom. They also brought up that along with this, teachers should be provided with an environment to debrief and volunteer creative ideas for improvement. I think that I generally agree with all of this, even with the critiques that were made concerning how educators are currently instructed concerning this topic. I do think my biggest critique with this article has more to do with the limitations of it. It was nice to see an article that compiled the ideas and conclusions from many different sources, but there wasn’t a definite answer attached with any of the conclusions that the author was stating. While this make sense, I would have liked to see these conclusions put into practice and then analyzed as well.

Importance: I believe that majority of the importance of this article lies in the conclusions that it draws from the studies the author has researched. This article mentions many things about why pre-service teachers have such an aversion to teaching literacy in their classrooms or the lack of confidence they have in their ability to teach literacy. I believe that there are very important things to draw from this information. For instance, it provides suggestions for how to remedy this problem and fill educators with more desire and confidence to bring literacy into the classroom. 

Word Count: 475