Draper Chapter 1

Jo Draper, R. (2010). (Re)imagining content area literacy instruction. New York, NY:       Teachers College Press.

Summary: Chapter one went over why it is important for collaboration between content area teachers and literacy teacher to occur. Content area teachers bring their expertise in the discipline, and know the best way to teach the information so that the students understand the lesson. Literacy teachers bring different ways that teachers can teach the literacy's of that specific discipline. Although the literacy teachers are not literate in all subject areas, they know general tools that they can go over with the content area teachers and find out which best suits the literacy of the discipline.

At first this chapter was very difficult to follow and I was unable to become interested. The whole chapter was a struggle, but I kept re-reading the text, I slowed down and tried to comprehend what I was reading, and I also tried imagining and predicting the information that they were going to tell me in this chapter.  Since we had gone over the different types of literacy in each different content area, I understood that students had to be literate in mathematics and it is a teacher’s job to teach it to them.  I agree that literacy and content area teachers need to come together because most teachers are not going to know how to teach reading if it is not their subject area. For example, most mathematics teachers do not enjoy reading and probably chose mathematics because it was far from English. Thinking that they have to teach students how to read mathematics literacy, is out of what they would normally think. By bringing in a literacy teacher, they could give the teacher helpful ways that can help the students understand and learn mathematics through reading. The whole goal behind students becoming literate in different subjects is so that they can put it all into practice outside of school. This is not only when they are done with their schooling, but also currently while they are still learning in school, but can apply it to their lives outside of everyday school. In doing this, the students are interested and enjoy learning the information, which is a shared goal of both literary and content area teachers; that the students are able to use the learned information outside of school.