With disciplinary literacy being so new to my vocabulary list, it is very hard to remember what it is defined as. My definition as of now is: the critical use of student’s content knowledge skills and experiences when reading, writing, listening, and speaking during the lessons. With this in mind, I think that the history and physics class will look different, but not from a disciplinary literacy point of view, but rather from the way the teacher creates their lesson plan. This is because a teacher has to focus on the most effective way to teach the students their mattieral.

In physics class, a teacher could be more hands on with a lot of lab activities compared to a history teacher that could be more PowerPoint based. Therefore your physics classes emphasize heavily on your listening and critically thinking skills when performing an activity, because the students don’t want to mess up and get a bad grade. On the flip side, history may put more emphasis on your reading and writing skills because of how much the students have to read to understand the unit they are on. Helping Students to read “smarter not harder” is important because the students are using their knowledge of how to critically analyse a text more efficiently. This does not mean you don’t use all of the disciplinary literacy skills in both classrooms, but one will triumph over the other one depending on the unit and type of classroom the teacher has.

When looking at all the other subjects schools have and how they all intertwine with disciplinary literacy, I think they are needed to help the students learn various skills that one class may not be able to teach as well as another class could.  This being so, I don’t see how a teacher can equally incorporate the disciplinary literacy skill in their unit while also effectively teaching their lesson; which is why other subject’s lesson will look different.

When I took my first glance at thinking about what the differences are  between content, content area, and disciplinary literacy, I thought they were very similar.  However, now I see that that each one has their own “ring” to their uniqueness. Personally, this is how I would define each one separately: Content is what subjects or topics will cover in a book or through various academic subjects. Content area is creating the unique needs, that are needed for the students to know. Disciplinary literacy is concerned with addressing the process of how a teacher should teach the students in the classroom in different ways.  

For me, this is another way for teachers to decide if they created a good assessment by ensuring that they incorporated all three into the concept areas in a way that students understand what they were taught, and if they can apply it to real world activities.  Adding a way to create a better learning process through communication, and hands-on activities to engage the students mind. A way to create a mind set that you are “Using” the information as a tool rather than thinking about it as a hassle.    

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