According to Fang and Croatian the differences between CAL (Content Area Literacy) and DL (Disciplinary Literacy) are as follows:

CAL (content area literacy): is a developed literacy skills that is used a “generic tool”

DL (disciplinary literacy): the development of other skills (social, semiotic, cognitive) have direct relation to how well the student is able to engage in other literacy aspects (Fang).

For me, it’s hard to apply these in my area. Working in a library brings on a different set of challenges that aren’t always apparent in the classroom…or have to deal with reading. While we see hundreds of students everyday, what they need from us isn’t always literacy based. Many times it’s technology or a quite workspace. So in order to understand CAL and DL, I had to really understand how the articles were going to break it down. 

After gathering the general definition of each, my first instinct was that DL wasn’t going to be a skill that many readers naturally developed. And throughout the 3 articles, it seemed my suspicion was right…or at least in part. 

Fang and Coatam talk about this on page 629; the idea that DL is only for those in “advanced classes.” If we take the idea that DL cannot exist without a solid foundation (CAL) it does beg the question; does this higher level of thinking demand too much of students, especially if a solid general (or generic) skill set isn’t there? How do you encourage students with “lesser” basic reading abilities to want to continue to read and be engaged? And while there may be some merit to this thinking, I fear it is too often that these “generic” skills are developed or focused on but don’t offer students a connection to that “higher thinking”…there are no connections to something that may allow thoughts to extend beyond the classroom when CAL is the only focus. 

As I mentioned above, before reading the article, I asked myself how this information could pertain to the library. What do we ask our patrons to do on a daily basis? Collaborations between the library and the classroom are common but generally focus on basic research skills. (Usually unable to delve deeper due to time restraints.)  At the high school level, weekly check outs or classroom visits are rare; there isn’t enough time in the day for classroom teachers to come down and have their students check out books when they have a large variety of things they need to cover in the classroom (and textbooks that provide the majority of that information). In ELA, while some teachers are able to take some liberties with the texts they read, the required books are still there (Spratley and Lee talk about this “Limitation to range of texts” and how this can impact the desire to want to “think deeper”.) 

The bottom line: 

Understanding the differences between CAL and DL, I don’t think I can place a higher importance of one over the other. Without those “generic skills” (CAL), the development of those higher connecting skills cannot be complete. However, I think DL helps promote literature appreciation, but only if we give readers the materials they want to read. But literature appreciation is sometimes hard to come by. We don’t see a lot of (what I like to call) leisure readers and this is the easiest connection I can make to CAL and DL skills. For some, that “want” to read outside of the requirements will redevelop later in life, for others it will never happen. Our job as library staff is to spark that interest so that hopefully they will find that and be able to read the books (or find reliable sources) and understand the deeper meaning. Brozo et. Al talk about this spark and creating and maintaining it between “literacy specialist” and “content area specialist”; and in part I think that is what library staff can be.

“Only a small percentage of students graduating high school remain lifelong readers of the kind of canonical texts that the literature curriculum hopes to apprentice them into appreciating.” (Spratley & Lee) 

How we encourage lifelong readers:

Library displays should offer engaging material that easily translates from classroom to leisure. Interactive monthly displays like poetry month for April, can help promote the kind of conversations students are used to having in the classroom without the demand of a grade. 

For poetry month we do blackout poetry. By taking pages out of old books, newspapers, magazines we give students the opportunity to create their own unregulated poetry. Students take a black sharpie and cross the words they don’t want to use. Students are not only able to reinvent the text but also gain a new appreciation and understand the different ways poetry can be created. While they may have developed the “generic skill” (CAL) in their ELA class, the potential for a deeper level of thinking or appreciate (DL) is great and tends to encourage other curiosities.

Video to blackout poetry: https://youtu.be/Maed55XObjU