Literacy & Learning: Reading in the Content Areas

Literacy & Learning involves a cooperative effort between Southeastern Louisiana University and Louisiana Public Broadcasting to develop and deliver, via satellite, a professional development series whose purpose is to enhance reading skills in grades 5 through 8. This five-year project is funded through a grant from the National Educational Telecommunications Association.

The focus of the project is to provide support by developing special video materials for staff development addressing classroom instructional strategies for reading across the curriculum, including the major content areas of language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. The series of sixteen videos will include instructional information which are illustrated with actual classroom vignettes.

The array of productions includes:

The collaborative project has been developed through the Louisiana Public Broadcasting staff and Southeastern Louisiana University Literacy & Learning Instructional Design Team.

Summary
Literacy & Learning will provide support for "reading across the curriculum" in grades 5-8 by developing special video materials for staff development and classroom strategies in reading for the four major content fields — math, science, social studies, and language arts — along with demonstrating them in selected test-bed sites.

Within the span of grades K-12, there are important "watersheds" in reading, at which point the reading demands on students change drastically. The first and most critical watershed comes in grades 4/5, when students' need to "learn to read" changes to a need to "read to learn." However, when primary grades end, teachers tend to spend much less time and effort than before on teaching reading (far too much less!) even though the reading demands of the different fields of study intensify greatly during grade 4 onward, in terms of the kind, amount and importance of reading in each subject area. Because of this decline of overall time spent on the direct teaching of reading in upper elementary grades, some schools have turned to installing "reading across the curriculum," an effort in which subject-matter teachers teach specific reading techniques/skills that are associated with reading in their subject as an essential part of teaching a lesson or a unit in their particular field of study. However, many subject-matter teachers are unfamiliar with teaching reading skills that help students read and learn from their subject-matter texts, whether the field is math, science, social studies — or even language arts.

Literacy & Learning will assist them to learn ways to address this serious need.

The major purposes of Project Literacy & Learning are: (1) to produce several types of video-based start development resources (such as video cassettes with accompanying computer disks and/or print) to support professional development for teachers of core-curriculum subjects in grades 5-8, to he shared with teachers through several means (satellite; broadcast; tape); (2) to design and distribute a set of strategies that school staff (5-8) can use in implementing "reading across the curriculum"; (3) to promote and support the use of the resources and strategies in the classrooms (5-8) in selected test-bed sites; and (4) to monitor and adjust all ongoing implementation efforts in order to attain preset milestones throughout the project period.

Literacy & Learning is a five-year project featuring initial and ongoing planning and production of materials and strategies that will be followed by continuous development and production of training videos (with disks/print) as well as materials-testing in several test-bed sites at identified milestones.

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