Primary Source Projects and Reading Apprenticeship in Mathematics History: Reading Apprenticeship

The Reading Apprenticeship (RA) framework is an excellent tool to further support and scaffold explicit instruction in reading historical mathematics. In Reading for Understanding [2012], authors Ruth Schoenbach, Cynthia Greenleaf, and Lynn Murphy describe four key dimensions of classroom life that are necessary to foster reading development: social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building. At the center of these four dimensions is metacognitive conversation or, to put it simply, “thinking about thinking.” The framework includes a variety of versatile techniques, or “routines,” intended to engage students as readers and to develop discipline-specific reading skills.

Figure 5. Reading Apprenticeship Framework, adapted from WestEd 2023.

Reading Apprenticeship was first developed in the 1990s, when a group of secondary teachers and researchers in San Francisco began working together to find new ways to deepen student learning. They found that there were many interventions to help elementary-aged students develop reading skills, but few methods or resources existed for older students or for content-specific areas. The San Francisco group thus developed the RA framework from objectives and approaches that were supported by educational research and that addressed both academic and social-emotional learning [WestEd 2023]. Although RA was originally developed for use in secondary schools, it has been adapted to all educational levels, including universities. Currently, WestEd, a nonprofit educational research agency, supports the RA community and has facilitated implementation at scale as well as evaluation projects [WestEd 2023]. A three-year evaluation for the California Community Colleges reported promising impacts of RA in STEM courses, including reductions in equity gaps [Edmunds 2017].

One of the core tenets of RA is its adaptability to different contexts. Common routines that can be used across disciplines and student levels include: discussion logs, think-alouds, personal reading histories, talking to the text, and metacognitive logs. Guides for these routines are provided in WestEd’s two RA texts: Reading for Understanding: How Reading Apprenticeship Improves Disciplinary Learning in Secondary and College Classrooms [Schoenbach et al. 2012] and Leading for Literacy: A Reading Apprenticeship Approach [Schoenbach et al. 2016]. A well-written PSP gives mathematical and historical content together in a guided reading approach. Overlaying RA routines on a PSP’s written materials can provide students with concrete mechanisms for discerning mathematical and historical meaning from the primary source excerpts in a PSP. In other words, the role of RA routines is to facilitate students’ engagement with the PSP materials and with one another during classroom discussion.