Disciplinary and idiomatic literacy: Re-living and re-working the past in senior school history

Abstract

This paper aims to contribute to the current interest among education practitioners, policymakers and researchers in the literacy demands that are distinctive to each curriculum and discipline domain. It uses classroom data from senior secondary lessons in history to exemplify and explore some aspects of this issue. The paper sets the context for these lessons via a discussion of the particular challenges presented to the advanced study of history by two strong cultural repertoires that students bring: well-developed common-sense understandings of the causes and propriety of human conduct, and media representations of past eras and events. Examples of research conducted by linguists, ethnographers and psychologists are summarised, with a focus on how students need to read and write about the sourcing and contexts of written documents, the nature and extent of corroborating materials, and the critical evaluation of syntheses of primary sources. A brief analysis follows of transcripts from two Year 11 history lessons in which teachers are shown to differ in the ways in which they engage students in the topic, set out the ways in which the students are to approach and deal with the written documents provided, and summarise the significant ‘take-home’ messages from the work. The data are discussed in terms of how these kinds of activities might prepare students in different ways for the expectations of the curriculum in general, the further development of their historical reasoning, and their ability to cope with the complexities of active citizenship in a literacy-saturated society.