Date of Award
Summer 2018
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Teaching & Learning
Program/Concentration
Literacy Leadership
Committee Director
Thomas Bean
Committee Member
Tony Perez
Committee Member
Jamie Colwell
Abstract
Many students enter college with inadequate reading, writing, and critical thinking skills to successfully navigate discipline-specific college-level coursework (Duff, 2010; Hyland, 2006; Lea & Street, 1998; Tsui, 2002). As such, college faculty, and specifically community college faculty, are challenged to meet the multiple literacy needs of their students while still maintaining high expectations within their discipline-specific courses. One option is for discipline faculty (e.g., history) to integrate disciplinary literacy instruction within their courses. As discipline faculty are deemed experts in their content area and often not trained in literacy, professional development focused on disciplinary literacy could provide the knowledge and experience for faculty to make this pedagogical shift.
This multi-case study investigated the impact participating in a disciplinary literacy learning community had on community college discipline faculty’s perceptions, self-efficacy, and practice regarding incorporating disciplinary literacy instruction within their courses. Ten faculty from a large, multi-campus mid-Atlantic community college participated in three discipline-specific learning communities, where they learned about Moje’s (2015) 4E framework for teaching disciplinary literacy, collaborated with their peers, enhanced an assignment to address disciplinary literacy, and reflected on their experiences. The following data were collected for this study: learning community curriculum and documents, initial and final semi-structured focus group interviews, faculty journal entries, enhanced course activities, and researcher observations and reflexive journal. Data were analyzed using open and axial coding and constant comparative analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2008) to identify within-case patterns and replicative relationships across the cases (Yin, 2018). The findings revealed similarities and differences across the learning communities, and they provide insight for community college discipline faculty, literacy personnel, and administration.
Rights
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DOI
10.25777/bt6z-5435
ISBN
9780438538412
Recommended Citation
Gregory, Kristen H..
"A Multi Case Study of Community College Discipline Faculty’s Participation in a Disciplinary Literacy Professional Learning Community"
(2018). Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Dissertation, Teaching & Learning, Old Dominion University, DOI: 10.25777/bt6z-5435
https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/teachinglearning_etds/13
ORCID
0000-0002-4879-0991
Included in
Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Higher Education Commons, Language and Literacy Education Commons