Disciplinary literacy is the unique ways that reading, writing, talking, listening, and viewing occur in different disciplines (Moje, 2008). This perspective calls for teachers and students to explore and take up the FEATURE ARTICLE
In this study, we focused on the implementation of a disciplinary literacy inquiry unit with a group of sixth‐grade students. Guided by us, students learned about a local budgetary crisis, researched subtopics of interest to them (e.g., the effect of budget cuts on school athletics), and then wrote letters to their state’s governor sharing their concerns and striving to persuade him about their concerns when making budgetary decisions. These letters then became part of the public sphere through local news coverage. Our purpose in this article is to share and critique the implementation of a unit that was embedded in an authentic context.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.