Literacy across the curriculum requires students to have skills which enable them to read and write texts across different disciplines. ​

This year, Lesley Cowie and I have been researching and developing workshops around subject specific literacy to enable kaiako to understand their role in teaching literacy within their subjects. 

Our mahi this year was mainly focussed on the Science Department. We ran a series of workshops with science teachers.  Teachers were quick to understand they possessed a lot of cultural capital in their subjects and that to be culturally responsive, they needed to share their insider knowledge of ways of decoding and writing texts. Then they could start to remove some of the barriers to achievement. 

Our workshops were centred around helping teachers to develop strategies to share with students their insider knowledge about literacy in science. We have really enjoyed working with the Science Department because they were always enthusiastic participants and very open to learning. 

We also ran a workshop about common text types with our teacher aides. Teacher aides are an invaluable resource in our kura and it was a pleasure to work with them. 

Next year we would like to continue working with science teachers who are keen to be observed trialling strategies and work together to reflect on those teaching actions​.  We have also been approached by a health teacher to help develop strategies to improve teaching of writing in health. We are excited to have the opportunity to work across kura as we have been invited to Ao Tawhiti next year to run a workshop with their teacher aides.