Text, Role and Context: Developing Academic Literacies

What does it mean to be literate within academic contexts? How can literacy practitioners cooperate with discipline-specific faculty, and with their students, to explore this issue and to work towards common goals? In addressing these questions, the author argues for a “socioliterate” approach in which students are asked to draw on their own experiences with genres and discourse communities in order to interpret, produce, and critique texts within specific academic contexts. She also shows how literacy practitioners can act as mediators within academic communities, working with discipline-specific faculty in pedagogical endeavors, conducting research across the curriculum, and encouraging students to investigate and reflect upon the academic texts, roles, and contexts they encounter.
A socioliterate approach has major implications for the reading and writing classroom, as well. The final chapters of the volume outline core curricular design principles and suggest several ways in which these principles can be realized through portfolio curricula.