A Bernsteinian Analysis of Content Area Literacy

This article examines two approaches to teaching content area literacy: a strategies approach focused on general practices of reading and writing and a disciplinary approach attuned to the particular discourses of particular domains. Basil Bernstein's theory of the pedagogic device is used to critique both approaches' assumptions about content area literacy. Neither approach, it is argued, accounts for the ways content areas bring together discourses from multiple fields. The strategies approach, for instance, does not account for the ways literacies in different content areas are bound up with different discourses. The disciplinary approach, on the other hand, conflates content area discourses with university and professional discourses. At the same time, the disciplinary approach minimizes content area discourses' connections to the discourses of domains such as the public sphere and everyday life. At the end of the article, Bernstein's ideas are used to formulate questions content area teachers might consider when teaching different ways of reading, writing, speaking, thinking, and listening.