Many students in higher education, even in graduate school, begin as outsiders when they encounter disciplines related to their courses.  Their professors are the experts.  They are not.  The terminology, literature, and even cultures of these disciplines form barriers to participation.  Disciplinary enculturation is the process by which students become active participants within disciplines rather than outsiders trying to look over disciplinary walls.Disciplines need to be seen as "communities of practice"* rather than as repositories of knowledge.  As such, they have an agreed upon knowledge base (with variants), a culture (with variants), and a methodology (with variants).  Three terms label these elements of communities of practice: epistemology, metanarrative, and method. Disciplinary analysis is a first step for students entering into disciplinary communities as participants.  Beginning students must ask key questions that compel a discipline to explain itself, thus providing a path to enculturation.This is a guide to the theory and practice of disciplinary enculturation

This worksheet accompanies the science information literacy activity "A new study says..."  by Megan Carlton and Lea Leininger.  The worksheet was created by Megan Carlton using Canva and exported as a pdf.

These slides accompany the book chapter “Revelatory Reading: Understanding, Critiquing and Unveiling Religious News Stories” from Teaching About Fake News published by ACRL.

These slides are designed to accompany Chapter 16: "Sound Science or Fake News?: Evaluating and Interpreting Scientific Sources Using the ACRL Framework" by Anna Mary Williford and Charlotte Ford, from the ACRL book Teaching About Fake News: Lesson Plans for Different Disciplines and Audiences.

Use this slidedeck to explore, identify rheotrical trends, and critically analyze and evaluate different examples of conpsiracy theories with students. This activity is part of the Teaching About Fake News volume, published by ALA.

These slides are designed to accompany the book chapter, "Evaluating Data Visualizations for Misinformation & Disinformation," by Nicole Helregel, within the ACRL book Teaching About Fake News. 

A learning activity PowerPoint about appropriation or re-use of art history images to create memes, and how knowledge about the original artwork in context can provide a deeper understanding of the people and society that created the work.

PowerPoint that accompanies Chapter 21: Teaching Students to Analyze and Interpret Historical Propaganda by Amy E. Bush, Christine Cheng, University of California, Davis, and Alesia M. McManus, University of California, Davis.

A slide presentation to accompany the learning activity from the chapter "Senior Citizens, Digital Citizens: Improving Information Consumption in Older Adults" in Teaching about Fake News: Lesson Plans for Different Disciplines and Audiences. This lesson demonstrates some of the most common types of misinformation senior citizens may encounter using social media and evaluation techniques to prevent sharing with others. 

These materials were created to complement the "Bot or Not?" learning activity described in "Chapter 12: Fact-Checking Viral Trends for News Writers," in Teaching About Fake News: Lesson Plans for Different Disciplines and Audiences (2021). Students are to divide into groups, take a tweet provided by the instructor (samples are included in the link), and use evaluative methods introduced in the session to determine the veracity and newsworthiness of both the Twitter account and the tweet itself.