A Conversation with Shea Kerkhoff

Dr. Shea Kerkhoff talks to us about literacies in the disciplines, an inquiry stance, and authentic learning. She is known for her work in disciplinary literacies, adolescent literacy instruction, and literacies in global contexts. She utilizes mixed methods to investigate critical, digital, and global literacies. Her research centers on integrating inquiry-based global learning with adolescent literacy instruction. She is co-author of Read, write, inquire: Disciplinary literacy in grades 6-12 with Drs. Hiller Spires and Casey Medlock Paul. Her forthcoming book, Critical perspectives on global literacies: Bridging research and practice, co-authored with Dr. Spires is currently in press with Routledge Publishers. Dr. Kerkhoff serves as Going Global, Inc.'s Education Director and affiliated faculty with the Show Me Literacies Collaborative. Dr. Shea Kerkhoff is an Assistant Professor of literacy and secondary education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. You can connect with Shea at https://sheakerkhoff.weebly.com/.

To cite this episode: Persohn, L. (Host). (2023, Mar. 28). A conversation with Shea Kerkhoff. (Season 3, No. 21) [Audio podcast episode]. In Classroom Caffeine Podcast series. https://www.classroomcaffeine.com/guests. DOI: 10.5240/1E5D-51BF-BA59-2A4B-DDE1-S

Connect with Classroom Caffeine at www.classroomcaffeine.com or on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Transcript

Lindsay Persohn: 0:10

Education research has a problem. The work of brilliant education researchers often doesn't reach the practice of brilliant teachers. Classroom caffeine is here to help. In each episode I talk with a top education researcher or an expert educator about what they have learned from years of research and experiences. In this episode, Dr. Shea Kerkhoff talks to us about literacies in the disciplines and inquiry stance and authentic learning. She is known for her work in disciplinary literacies adolescent literacy instruction and literacies. In global context, Dr. Kerkhoff serves as going global inks, education director and affiliated faculty with the Show Me literacies Collaborative. Dr. Shea Kerkoff is an assistant professor of literacy and Secondary Education at the University of Missouri St. Louis, you can connect with Shea at

https: 1:10

//sheakerkhoff.weebly.com/. That's SHEAKERKHOFF.weebly.com. For more information about our guests, stay tuned to the end of this episode. So pour a cup of your favorite drink. And join me your host Lindsay Persohn. For classroom caffeine research to energize your teaching practice. Shea thank you for joining me, welcome to the show.

Shea Kerkhoff: 1:45

I'm happy to be here.

Lindsay Persohn: 1:46

So from your own experiences in education, will you share with us one or two moments that inform your thinking now?

Shea Kerkhoff: 1:54

Yeah, so I think of a moment when I was a PhD student that really impacted me, because my background was in English. I was a high school English teacher for years. And so that meant I had a bachelor's in English from the English Department. And I had thought about reading and writing and literacy practices in that discipline of English. That's how I was trained. And that's, that's how I thought because that's how I was trained to think. And so when I was a PhD student, my advisor was trying to help me with my writing. And it was kind of identity crushing to be an English teacher who taught writing for so long to have to have a conversation about my writing. But it was good for me. And well, my aha moment was, this isn't English, this is science, I am no longer in the English department, I am now in the College of Education, which is a social science. I'm now a scientist. So I need to learn the literacy practices of a of a social scientist. And so while as an English teacher, we like to play with language, and we like to think creatively and convey emotion, and through our writing and make our readers feel something in science, the values are to be concise, and to be clear, and to get to the point and to leave the emotion out of it. Not not totally as you learn the nuance, but but that's the value, the value is to be objective. And so I had to reorient my literacy practices into that discipline. And it made me realize, Oh, when I taught English, I was teaching my high school students how to read and write in the discipline of English. But that's not the only discipline they were experiencing during their day. They were experiencing science and the different disciplines within science, physics, chemistry, etc. They were experiencing social study. So they were needing to read, write and think like a historian. And as I thought about that, I, I wondered how we could reach across disciplines to help each other, learn more about each other's disciplinary literacy practices so that we could support students right then in there for their classroom experiences and to be successful in their classrooms. But more than that, because they are also people with lives, and they need to be able to negotiate all of the information about health and medicine in order to advocate for their own health with our health providers. They need to be able to navigate political arguments and distinguish facts from opinions and rhetoric in order to be civically engaged Ah, so that that moment that aha moment for me having to experience that dissonance of the two different ways of reading and writing really pushed me to want to be able to explicate to describe the differences so that teachers could then describe those differences to their students.

Lindsay Persohn: 5:20

Shea what you're saying, I think is so very critical, when we're talking about educating our students to be full humans in the world, right, there isn't just one way of communicating or one way of writing and when we think about how different disciplines use, not just language or word choice, but also the structures, and you know, sort of like cracking the code of that discipline, writing in the way that experts in that discipline write, it's just such an important idea that I feel like, you know, in my teacher training, I didn't have any exposure to this way of thinking. And particularly, you talk about that dissonance and realizing that you have to reorient your your style of teaching and even the what you're teaching, to help your students to really uncover what those big ideas are and how they work within those disciplines. I just I think this is so very important for really every teacher to know about not just those who are working in disciplines, but those who want to support their students to be this full well rounded human beings who can take in information from multiple avenues in life and and also know how to communicate there. So this is just such important stuff.

Shea Kerkhoff: 6:33

Yeah, well, and there was a reason that we may not have been trained to think in a disciplinary literacy kind of way, in our training, because it's a, it's an emerging concept in the field. So research continues to evolve, we continue to know more, we continue to have knowledge that becomes more nuanced, and or complex or both. And so this idea actually came from universities. So if you think about backwards design, where you look at the goal, and then work backwards, that is one way that disciplinary literacy started taking ground in K 12, was looking at the work of disciplinary literacy, what what was called in higher education, research on reading in the disciplines. And then looking at how we could then work backwards from college to then 12th, grade 1110, nine, keep going down. To provide students with the foundation, they would need to be able to be successful in college. And as we did that work, though, we realized that college wasn't the only place where this would be important. A lot of our careers right now are literacy based. So as we continue to move in this information age, and in an information economy, people who can create knowledge, our knowledge creators through reading and writing and the tools of communication, may be able to be more successful in a career than they would have been without those literacy abilities. And then also, as we mentioned, community life navigating and negotiating health and civic and community life right now to

Lindsay Persohn: 8:23

Yeah, that little history lesson of disciplinary literacy, I think is also it's so helpful for situating this in a really meaningful context. And I think helping us to potentially even see how it fits into a school day, right? How do you actually work these practices into the work we're already doing and to make them more robust and more explicit, so that our young people can sort of follow that path forward and and gain access to to the knowledge of those disciplines? That's great stuff. So Shea, what do you want listeners to know about your work?

Shea Kerkhoff: 8:58

Well, one important thing that I would like listeners to know is that disciplinary literacy is about learning in the disciplines. So it isn't, knowing the literacy practices in and of themselves is that the literacy is used to understand content in the disciplines and to construct new knowledge in the discipline so they can be a means to an end. And also that we want to break the dichotomous thinking that we first learn to read and then we read to learn, because we are always learning more about reading. And so thinking about disciplinary literacy is a way for us to think about what the advanced literacy practices are that we need to teach students in secondary school so they know How to maybe sound out words, they have their fluency, they have those foundational skills. But as literacy progresses, it becomes more advanced and more complex. And that's why we really need support throughout the day. When I told the story earlier, as an English teacher, I don't have the expertise of how scientists read and write and construct knowledge through inquiry. So I need my science colleagues to provide that information for students. And I'm happy as an English teacher to support that, but I need their help. And so it's about bringing the knowledge we have, as teachers, as members of the discipline in which we're teaching to the school day is not about reading a novel and math class. It's about what are the practices that mathematicians use to help them understand mathematics and just making those explicit to students.

Lindsay Persohn: 11:07

I think that distinction is so important and really helpful and understanding what disciplinary literacy is, you're not talking about the sort of cross curricular connections exactly, like you said, reading a novel in math class, although, you know, kudos to you if you can fit enough. It particularly, you know, something that relates to your math topic. But that's not the same idea that we're talking about here, right? We're talking about practices that are really specific to the discipline, not necessarily just bringing what we would teach in reading and writing or the English language arts into other subject areas, we're talking about diving deeply into those particular disciplines to understand how the experts in that field think and to give us access to not only understand that knowledge that they produce, but also to potentially become creators of that knowledge. Is that about right? Am I Am I summing that up in a fair way?

Shea Kerkhoff: 12:04

Yes, that is there. So in English language arts, we typically read narrative English as part of the humanities. So we are thinking about the human experience, and how do humans communicate their storytelling, and that typically is a narrative. And so there's a narrative arc. And we've seen in research on comprehension, that children understand the narrative arc, they can grasp that pretty quickly at an early age, because they hear stories as it's part of their everyday life, that beginning middle and that you have the person or the characters. But in science, we don't necessarily have a narrative arc, we might have problem solution or caused effect. And so when students are reading a science text, and they're trying to find out the main character, and there's no person there, there's no like, there's a frog, but they don't seem to be the main character. It can be confusing unless we talk about text structure. So talking about text structure is a practical way that we can introduce disciplinary literacy into each of our classes, talking about how the texts we're reading in our class is structured,

Lindsay Persohn: 13:24

right? Like the the frogs that we see in science probably don't look like frog and toad, right, were wearing pants and talking to each other, and, you know, living in a little cut out in a tree somewhere, right? So I think that, particularly for young children, explaining and talking through those structures, can help them to understand the purpose of each of those texts, and how they convey very different things to us, I think, you know, from from kind of a literary angle, you can even have conversations about anthropomorphism, and you know, those kinds of topics that, that help to distinguish what happens in narrative kinds of ELA context versus the sciences, or, you know, the hard science kind of disciplines. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So what else do you want listeners to know about your work?

Shea Kerkhoff: 14:14

I would like listeners to know that I am part of a team in the state of Missouri that are working on comprehensive literacy through a federally funded grant. And the grant is concerned with comprehensive literacy. Because we found that just focusing on early literacy wasn't enough to really support our students. There was a hypothesis that if we taught students to be able to decode words, through phonics and top vocabulary, what words mean that that would be enough that then they would be able to read and the more they read, the more their literacy would grow. And while reading does help us gain content knowledge edge. And it does help us continue to build fluency. It wasn't enough to really move our fourth graders fifth, sixth and up to be able to be prepared for the kinds of reading and writing that they were going to need to do in college and career. And so that's when the the big push for the College and Career Readiness came out and said, We need to look at this backward stair step and say, if this is where we know we need to be, then how do we get there, and let's look backwards. And so really thinking about literacy comprehensively as being Foundational Reading, yes. Writing Process, yes. And also, the more advanced literacies that happen in disciplines, the ways of thinking and disciplines, and the academic literacy and study skills that are needed across the day, such as digital literacy, and critical media literacy, information literacy, speaking and listening, as well. And so thinking about literacy more comprehensively is really important.

Lindsay Persohn: 16:13

So here's something that that you made me think of shea, as you were explaining comprehensive literacy, that's a word that I use a term I use quite frequently to. And maybe I'm a slightly different way, I think of comprehensive literacy as including not just kind of what we think of as science of reading kinds of topics, but also authentic literature responses to literature. And really, I talk about a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction that includes explicit systematic, sequential multimodal instruction, but not to the exclusion of meaningful texts and authentic experiences and encounters with that text. And so I think that's really very closely aligned with what you're saying. I don't mean to say that it isn't. But maybe what I think I hear you saying about comprehensive literacy is it's really using all the tools in the toolbox, right, and teaching all of the tools in the toolbox. And so I'm wondering if in your work, you found a way for teachers to get to that, particularly if they are in a place where curriculum is prescribed? Or they're sort of lockstep into programs? How do we think outside of those lock steps? How do we think in a more comprehensive kind of approach where we can bring in digital tools, we can teach foundational reading, but we can also teach different types of writing, as well as those more advanced literacy practices? Do you have any tips for our listeners about how we can make that happen? Because I truly believe that's the key to authentic learning.

Shea Kerkhoff: 17:40

Yes, it's not easy, but it is possible. And one, one way to approach that is with an inquiry stance, so think about science. What do scientists do they inquire about the world, they get curious. And, and they look for information in order to test their hypothesis in order to help them understand phenomena. So what do they use? Well, they read, they read what other people have discovered, and they read what other people have been thinking about. They observe, they use the power of observation. They create experiments in labs, they talk with other scientists, and they think about what if questions, what if we change this? What if we changed that? What would happen and they make predictions? And so some of those practices we do in other disciplines to so we can think about inquiry. Okay, what does inquiry look like in social studies, while in history, maybe, maybe we're talking to people who experienced it, rather than talking to other experts, maybe we are getting that speaking and listening through interviewing, we are looking at photographs and visual images. And we're trying to construct an understanding. And so that I think is, is one way to approach a more authentic type of learning in our classrooms, is that we aren't trying to just fill our students heads with knowledge, we are not trying to just fill their toolbox with tools. Those are what we are doing in order to help them inquire about the world and to make informed decisions to create explanations that are fact based.

Lindsay Persohn: 19:42

That distinction is so useful, I think, because it really you know, the inquiry stance certainly does help to drive authentic learning, right. It's connected to questions. It's connected to possibilities, because, you know, I think anytime we teach something that feels like the sort of isolated skill that doesn't have a whole lot of application, right? It's harder to understand, there's less motivation to learn it. Right? So there, there are some real challenges whenever we're trying to teach concepts in isolation. But once we frame them as a question or wondering about, you know, the way the world works, or how about the way the world could work, you know, it's a whole different drive and purpose for learning. And I think that that can help to bring a little bit of energy back into a classroom, whatever, we can approach topics in those really authentic kinds of ways.

Shea Kerkhoff: 20:32

And those questions can come from our students.

Lindsay Persohn: 20:35

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, sometimes I think it's probably better if they do, right, it may be a little harder to plan that way. But if we, if we put some, I think of them as like guardrails, or like, you know, when you go bowling, and they they, they put the bumpers up for you, you know, so I think there are ways to guide students, you know, to the topics that the standards tell us or the pacing guide tells us we need to learn about while still providing some freedom and flexibility to ask their own questions within that, that lane, so to speak, right, for sure. So given the challenges of today's educational climate, what message do you want teachers to hear?

Shea Kerkhoff: 21:17

I know teachers are doing so much already. They have so much on their plates, and so much responsibility. And I want to say thank you, thank you for taking on those responsibilities. Thank you for your work and your passion for education and for children. And know that literacy isn't one more thing that I'm asking you to do. I want to advocate for teachers, making explicit what it is that they're already doing in their classes with their students. So I'm not asking science teachers to take up phonics instruction, or practicing fluency in that way. What what disciplinary literacy advocates for is just pulling back the curtain and helping our students to understand that in science, this is the way that scientists think in science, this is the way that texts are organized in science. This is the way we make arguments. And in history, and in when we're talking about literature in our English language arts classes. And so it's not one more thing is just being more explicit about what we're already doing.

Lindsay Persohn: 22:40

Right, like making that meta awareness, more transparent for students. I think that's just it's critical to understanding the way the world works. Yes, I will say Shea I thank you so much for your time today and for sharing your message with teachers and I thank you for your contributions to the field of education.

Shea Kerkhoff: 23:00

Thanks for having me, Lindsay.

Lindsay Persohn: 23:02

Dr. Shea Kerkhoff is known for her work in disciplinary literacies adolescent literacy instruction and literacies and global contexts. She utilizes mixed methods to investigate critical digital and global literacies. Her research centers on integrating inquiry based global learning with adolescent literacy instruction. Her work has been published in literacy Research and Instruction, teaching and teacher education, reading and writing and Interdisciplinary Journal, reading Research Quarterly voices from the Middle English language quarterly and changing English as well as other venues. She is co author of read, write, inquire, disciplinary literacies in grades six through 12, with Dr. Tiller spires, and Casey Medlocke-Paul, her forthcoming book critical perspectives on global literacies bridging research and practice, co authored with Dr. spires, is currently impressed with Rutledge publishers. She has been awarded over $5 million in grants as principal investigator and CO principal investigator. Dr. Kerkhoff was recently awarded co investigator of the year at the University of Missouri St. Louis. Shae is a former assistant editor of English education, a National Council of Teachers of English journal. She also serves as going global incs education director and previously served as education director for for the world. In this capacity the International Literacy Association awarded her the Constance makalah grant to conduct inquiry based digital literacy professional development and research with teachers in Khattala, Kenya. Dr. Kerkhoff is affiliated faculty with the Show Me literacies collaborative and in 2018, she was named a long view foundation global teacher educator fellow. Shea is passionate about literacy education at home and abroad. She taught high school English for seven years including in North Carolina and District of Columbia Public Schools. Dr. Kerkhoff holds a PhD from North Carolina State University in curriculum and instruction with a focus on literacy and language education. She is an assistant professor of literacy and Secondary Education at the University of Missouri St. Louis. You can connect with Dr. Kerkhoff at Shea Kerkhoff.weebly.com That's SHEAKERKHO F f.we BLY dot c o m. for the good of all students classroom caffeine aims to energize education research and practice. If this show provides you with things to think about, don't keep it a secret. Subscribe, like and review this podcast through your preferred podcast provider. I also invite you to connect with the show through our website at WWW dot classroom caffeine.com where you can learn more about each guest. Find transcripts for many episodes, explore episode topics using our tagging feature, support podcast, research through our survey, request an episode topic or a potential guest or share your own questions that we might respond to through the show. You could also leave us a voice message or a text message at 1-941-212-0949. We would love to hear from you. As always, I raised my mug to you teachers. Thanks for joining me