ISSUE BRIEF:
“Rethinking the Role of Knowledge in the Literacy Classroom”
Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1) pp. S283-S298
Copyright 2020 International Literacy Association
In recent years, policy discussion of reading in K-12 education has focused on building students’ content knowledge—narrowly defined as “knowledge related to a particular field of study” (Alexander et al., 1991). This emphasis on content knowledge is connected in part to declining literacy scores in the U.S. (NCES, 2017), and has resulted in many knowledge-based curricular initiatives (e.g., Core knowledge, Achieve the Core, EL Education, UnboundED, and Wit & Wisdom). Yet, teachers may feel pressure to address content knowledge in curriculum without understanding the full picture of what thoughtful knowledge development means to students’ backgrounds and familiar cultures.

Hattan and Lupo offer three key principles of teaching content knowledge for K-12 teachers desiring to support students’ funds of knowledge and prioritize the question: “Whose knowledge matters?”
As the authors describe, “Without considering this [question], the focus on content knowledge overemphasizes knowledge systems in schools that are designed to maintain the dominant authority” (p. S284). For example, curriculum in schools often emphasize learning the history of western civilizations (e.g., the expeditions of Christopher Columbus) through the lens of the experiences and history as told by people who are White. Or English language arts curricula promote a pre-selected canon of books (e.g., Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Hamlet) that all students are required to read, yet these texts are often disconnected from the experiences and lives of many students.

Teacher Suggestion 1: Work to reframe the “knowledge gap” by embracing a framework in which teachers privilege students’ knowledge as assets during literacy instruction.

Teachers can often unwittingly adopt the mindset that students from low socioeconomic or non-dominant backgrounds possess a “gap” in knowledge that must be fixed. Not surprisingly, this belief leads to a devaluing of the significant knowledge students bring with them to school. At times, these harmful perceptions are disproportionally aimed at students for whom English is not their primary language or students from diverse cultural backgrounds. Students recognize consciously (and subconsciously) their teachers’ positive or negative beliefs about their reading abilities and/or knowledge and experiences that children come to school with. Hattan and Lupo state that “it is critical for teachers to engage in approaches that show students how much their knowledge is valued” (p. 4).

The authors offer these suggestions for embracing students’ background knowledge and cultural identities:

  • Learn about students’ histories…be open to the fact that students’ difficulties with a text may be connected to their previous cultural knowledge (rather than their reading ability).
  • Be open to many interpretations of texts by valuing the integration of students’ knowledge.
  • Work with students on critically evaluating mainstream narratives in popular dominant biographies (e.g. Christopher Columbus).
  • Find high quality texts for all students by seeking diverse texts that represent your students’ cultures.
  • Try centering students’ knowledge in your discussions of a text. Lasting learning happens when students are guided to combine their previous knowledge with new information to form new understandings.

Teacher Suggestion 2: Support students fully in activating, integrating, and revising their knowledge during text processing.
To learn new skills and knowledge, people must find ways to couple their existing knowledge with new frameworks and material. Although some students can “call up” their existing knowledge without support when they are presented with new material, most students require support in activating their previous knowledge. In addition, teachers can support students’ learning by using knowledge activation exercises throughout discussion of a text—rather than only in the beginning stage.

For example, Hattan and Lupo offer several strategies for activating, integrating, and revising students’ prior knowledge:

  • Use a Know – Want to Know – Learned (KWL) activity at the beginning of a new text discussion. In this exercise, students identify what they think they already know about a topic and what they want to know; during and after the reading, they identify what they learned. The KWL might be paired with Relational Reasoning Questions (e.g., Hattan, 2019, 2020) that guide students to gauge how their personal knowledge fits or does not fit with the new information.
  • Integrate visual representations of knowledge at the beginning of a reading. Examples can include thematic organizers, concept maps, and argument diagrams. These representations work because they cue students to important pieces to focus on during reading. In addition, these visual organizers are most effective when students can modify or adapt their visual representations during and after reading.
  • Try to include texts that disagree or present alternate views on major texts in your class. Named refutation texts, these supplementary texts help to counter common misperceptions of a topic, alerting students to popular misunderstandings around an issue.

When students see information that conflicts with or challenges their existing knowledge, they face an intellectual dilemma: change what they formerly believed or revise their understanding to somehow integrate the new knowledge.
Teacher Suggestion 3: Support students in using other types of knowledge to support reading comprehension.
Hattan and Lupo suggest that teachers consider six types of knowledge in their support of students’ literacy learning. In addition to bolstering students’ reading comprehension overall, focusing on a more diverse definition of knowledge helps educators to broaden their sense of “what matters” in literacy classes. The six types of knowledge are

  • Cultural and Linguistic Knowledge – students’ values, traditions, and histories, as well as the knowledge of language and linguistic structures that connect to sociopolitical and cultural histories.
  • Principled Knowledge – understanding how constructs, ideas, and popular knowledge connect to each other, particularly through studying a topic from different disciplinary perspectives.
  • Strategic Knowledge – understanding how to evaluate a text’s trustworthiness, as well as how to use information from a text to address a problem or need in the students’ worlds.
  • Knowledge of Multimodal Texts – knowledge of how to integrate material from different modalities, including visual/graphic, written, digital, and spoken (e.g. videos, pictures, maps, and tables).
  • Knowledge of Multiple Text Usenowledge of Multiple Text Use – understanding how to integrate information across documents and diverse sources and with students’ prior knowledge.
  • Conditional Knowledge – metacognitive awareness of when to integrate different forms of knowledge to better understand an issue or topic (e.g. questioning an author’s perspective, connecting to cultural or linguistic knowledge, activating and using past knowledge).

Hattan and Lupo conclude by stating, “we agree wholeheartedly with the notion that knowledge has an important place in literacy instruction…however, we caution educators to not oversimplify the role that knowledge plays in comprehension, and, as a result, position students as deficient. We encourage…expanding our collective understanding of how students learn from texts and the role that knowledge plays in the literacy classroom” (p. 12).