What is the point of a subject? A subject, or discipline, is a way of working with certain kinds of information in order to answer certain kinds of questions. A subject is not 'information'; it is knowledge. Any knowledge has a structure. The difference between random information and a discipline lies in these structures. Science, history and geography might sometimes use similar or overlapping areas of information, but they are distinguished nonetheless by the kinds of questions they are seeking to ask and answer and the methods they use to establish truth.

What does all this have to do with literacy? For most pupils, historical, scientific or geographical thinking needs to be explicitly taught. This is why teachers in each of these subject areas will have views and practices on how to plan for progression in learning. How do pupils get better at identifying or analysing certain historical issues across Years 7 to 9? Which geographical skills should be taught in Year 8 and how should these be extended in Year 9? How do pupils get better at using a certain scientific concept? Subject departments that have a clear vision about moving pupils on - as opposed to those that are lost in a sea of content - will wrestle with such questions on a regular basis. In most subjects, pupils need to grow in knowledge and to deepen their understanding of how that knowledge is created.

This has enormous and very positive implications for teaching literacy. The way a subject uses words, sentences and texts will be dominated not just by its types of information but by the questions and issues that each subject confronts. When these questions and issues are made explicit to pupils, reinforced regularly and used to motivate pupils into serious and deep thinking, the literacy opportunities are boundless.

But they are not just 'opportunities'. They can also make literacy teaching quite direct and systematic, as opposed to random or bolt-on. The trick is to find the natural literacy in the subject. The challenge for the literacy coordinator is to make sense of the structure or logic that underlies each subject area. Only then can literacy be truly coordinated across the curriculum.

If, by contrast, literacy strategies are bolted on without subject sensitivity, disaster looms. Blanket policies that consist of nothing more than writing frames, 'key words' on the wall and dictionaries will, at best, miss a massive opportunity. At worst, such policies can distort a subject and fail to motivate pupils. Sometimes, for example, history is viewed rather naively as a setting in which to develop skills in 'reading for information' or 'factual writing'. This is based on worrying misconceptions. History is not about gathering facts. It is about gaining knowledge. It is also about learning how such knowledge is constructed. Pupils need to understand the conditions under which valid statements about the past can be made. For example, in some history departments, pupils are taught, quite explicitly, the difference between evidence and information. The last thing they need is someone coming along and using the two words interchangeably! Across key stage 3, in line with national curriculum requirements, the good history department might have strategies for teaching weaker pupils to use words like 'evidence', 'example' and 'illustration' or 'infer' and 'imply' in different types of sentences. In their reading they might be trained to identify language features that suggest different types of historical claim -is it certain, tentative, uncertain? This might be just one strategy in the ongoing work of teaching pupils how to substantiate their own arguments. The tricky problem of what constitutes historical evidence underpins all.

An example from Year 8 - the language of causation

Teaching pupils to use the concepts of the discipline to organise their own texts.
History's main organising concepts - cause and consequence, change and continuity, similarity and diversity - are used a great deal at key stage 3 to teach pupils how to identify what is 'relevant' to a particular question or how to rephrase something in order to convert a mere fact into a 'cause' or into an 'example of change'. These concepts are central to the national curriculum for history, and have been since 1991. A bolt-on strategy in 'research skills' that took no account of this conceptual framework could be very distorting.

Here is a snapshot of high quality history teaching in Year 8. Of course, such a snapshot will only make sense in the context of the wider planning. Two planning dimensions underpin it: first, the historical enquiry or 'big question' governing the lesson sequence (the medium- term plan); second, the role of the activity in the department's wider planning for progression (long-term planning).

The lesson
As part of a sequence of lessons building towards extended, analytical writing on the question 'Why did the Great Fire of London get out of control and destroy so much of London?' pupils carry out structured sorting activities using the eight cards in figure 1. These items are deliberately limited in number and deceptively straightforward in content. The activities are designed to focus the pupil on the organisational problem that such a causation problem presents.

In pairs, pupils organise the cards according to relative importance (figure 2), short, medium and long-term causes (figure 3) and headings of their own in an open- ended classification (figure 4). The teacher prompts, probes or guides so that pupils start to see, and to enjoy articulating, the new problems that these strategies throw up.

The activity causes pupils to reject certain cards. Whilst all cards are relevant to the topic, only some cards are relevant to the question. The teacher might lead discussion on how the words in the question (such as 'control') helped pupils to select and reject cards. Armed with a clearer understanding of the question, pupils can later go to some primary sources -visual or written -on the Great Fire, knowing exactly what they are looking for in order to substantiate their hypotheses. Armed with a clearer understanding of the organisational problem, they can now begin to think about a paragraph organisation that is focused on the specific demands of the question.
  Many history teachers now attest to the striking way in which this strategy starts to lift the quality of lower-attaining pupils' extended writing, enabling them to structure texts without the aid of a writing frame, and to think and talk about organisational possibilities. Above all, it lifts pupils out of narrative, chronology and story and into argument and analysis - a key goal for writing in history at key stage 3. The concept of 'cause' becomes temporarily concrete. The struggling pupil can manipulate and play with these causes and so starts to see {literally, to see) the historical problem.

The position of the lesson in the overall enquiry or lesson sequence
When deciding where to position such a lesson in the overall enquiry, the history department might think about questions such as: Do the pupils already have some knowledge, some visual sense of the Great Fire? Or of seventeenth-century towns?

How will this help them to make meaning out of the cards? In other words, what will render pupils ready to access this difficult conceptual and abstract work? Choice of video, roleplay, story or visual sources to precede this lesson might prove critical. The images and stories a pupil has in his or her head can make all the difference to abstract problem-solving.

Conversely, a lesson such as this might be positioned to begin the process of motivating pupils to glean further knowledge. Pupils might move on to read a short text about seventeenth-century town administration or a moving extract from Samuel Pepys' diary. They will approach such texts with a very clear, conceptual purpose in mind, one that they now own and have wrestled with as a result of the card-sorting activity.

The role of the enquiry in planning for progression across key stage 3
The history department will also consider issues such as: What causation activities did pupils do in Year 7? How will pupils be helped to recall words such as 'cause', 'reason' or 'relevant' and of common and recurring classifiers such as 'technological' or 'economic'? How will pupils' attention and interest be drawn to similarities and differences between this causation problem and other types of causation problem in earlier enquiries? Pupils need to be helped, directly, to transfer earlier learning. That earlier learning will be a blend of knowledge -their heads will be full of analogies and parallel examples in different period or topic settings -and skill in using history's structures and processes. Subjects matter. They are not just settings for the deployment of someone else's skills. The more we think clearly about the boundaries and distinctive purposes of our subjects the more we will be able to make the curriculum bigger than the sum of its parts.
 

Fig 1

 

Fig 2  Fig 3  Fig 4

 

Christine Counsell is deputy president of the Historical Association and editor of its journal for secondary teachers, Teaching History. She is a consultant on the extension of the National Literacy Strategy into key stage 3 history and speaks at the National Literacy Trust secondary conferences.

 

Subscribe to Literacy Today