Epistemic Reading and Writing: Promoting Disciplinary Learning in Textbooks

Abstract

Textbooks are central to educational public policies as they operationalize the school curriculum. However, most activities are expositive and reproductive, with little attention to the epistemic potential of reading and writing to promote learning in the disciplines. Drawing from Writing to learn and Learning to write movements, this article aims to depict a theoretically-informed, systematic and replicable pedagogical proposal to teach reading and writing in Mathematics, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences in the basic education curriculum; the proposal was materialized in 107 teaching sequences that were included in 24 Chilean textbooks between 2015 and 2017. The proposal included identifying diverse and engaging genres across the curriculum; selecting textbooks disciplinary activities demanding the reading and writing of those genres; constructing teaching sequences through socializing expectations, modeling processes, and facilitating linguistic resources and procedures.