Current reforms in content area education present new challenges for literacy educators. These reforms promote engaging students in the practices of the disciplines—teaching students how to participate in an activity in which disciplinary content is produced. Content area literacy (CAL) instruction that supports only the learning of general academic or school literacies undermines these content area reforms and their focus on participation because it does not teach the literacies that students need to participate in the disciplines. In this article, the authors present an argument for why CAL instruction should focus on teaching disciplinary literacies instead of a general academic literacy. The authors show how CAL instruction focused on disciplinary literacies can support the educational goals of both literacy educators and content area reformers. The authors also contrast four corresponding characteristics of both types of CAL instruction and illustrate these with examples.

Combined‐text picture books unite multiple genres, providing nuanced information on a single topic from the unique lens of each genre. By providing guided practice in reading and writing a combined‐text picture book, teachers can help students develop sensitivity to different types of texts, to what they do and how they do it. Such sensitivity can give students a foundation for selecting appropriate strategies for reading and writing effectively in a wider variety of genres. This article describes the process of explicit instruction, discussion, and guided practice with one such text, One Leaf Rides the Wind, that helped one class of seventh‐grade students develop as strategic readers and writers when they created a class version of a combined‐text picture book.

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eter Elbow writes that the mind has a "natural capacity for chaos and disorganization" (288). While the research paper provides a valuable model that helps writers learn to locate, organize, and synthesize information, at times we have all been disappointed with what our students produce. My neighbor returned 150 history papers to her high school juniors with the comment, "Do they think that I am so dumb that I can't tell when they are passing off words like 'concomitantly' as their own?" An excellent teacher, she worries about her students' tendency to plagiarize, their lack of writing skills, and a general apathy toward Circling through Text: Teaching Research through Multigenre Writing research. Is there an alternative we can offer students to kindle the imagination, draw out creativity, and convince them that there is not just one "right way" to write? For me, multigenre writing has become a powerful complement to the traditional research paper, allowing my students to develop the discipline of organizing their thoughts.