"Reading and Writing Multiple Genre"

Create Flow by: Allen
Multigenre-Multigendered by: Styslinger
Multigenre Stirrings by: Romano

Say:

Styslinger discusses the process of "seeking" or better known as researching. She talks about how her desire to research her own students' learning motivated her to create this multi-genre-multi-gendered project. During a unit she taught they had focused upon gender, thus the multi-genre paper was going to focus upon gender. However, the students were given the choice to choose a sub-genre within the big genre of gender. As she read through the finished products she was able to identify how gender played out even in their writing. Styslinger learned more about how her students identified themselves through these projects than she would have if she had assigned a very traditional end of the unit essay. Her students also explored and learned more about gender through this project than if they had to write a five-paragraph essay.

Multi-genre papers are exactly what they sound like: papers that include a variety of genres that all discuss the same topic. Multi-genre papers are good for compare and contrast activities, research, memoir writing, biographical writing. Essentially, it can be used for any kind of writing you'd like your students to engage with. It may be a difficult genre for most students to grasp at first because most students will not have done such a project before. I think a great way to introduce multi-genre is to allow students to experience it. You can conduct book passes that eventually turn into book clubs on books that have multi-genre in them. You could also do socratic circles with your students during a unit where the core text has a multi-genre text you could pair with it. For the socratic circle, you could assign the students to read the multi-genre text and come to class prepared to compare and contrast the two.

I think exposure to these kinds of texts is most important, but how will they write one if they've never written one before? Well, in Allen's, Create Flow, he gives suggestions on how to keep the piece united. There are a total of 11 suggestions in his article about how to link genres and create flow in a multi-genre paper.

How will students choose a variety of genres? Well, they will need to have been exposed to a variety of genres within the classroom. This is where it's important that, as educators, we are teaching a plethora of genres to our students. We need to have a variety of argument pieces at their fingertips, a variety of informational texts at their fingertips, we need YA novels in our classrooms and we need to constantly engage our students in a variety of writing.

Once students have become acquainted with multi-genre texts and have been engaged with writing a variety of texts within the classroom, they should be comfortable enough to begin writing their multi-genre papers. Romano's piece gives so many great examples of students who have written multi-genre pieces. This would be a great resource to use within the classroom in order to prepare students for their own projects. You could do a sort of book pass with these examples within small groups and have students write down the components they see in each piece. They can also write down questions, and you can come back as a large group and discuss all of the things the students observed about the pieces. They then could model their own projects off of the ones they read in Romano's book.

I have only completed one multi-genre assignment, other than the one assigned in this class, in my entire life. Unfortunately, I wasn't assigned one until the very last semester of my senior year in undergrad. :( However, the experience was great! We literally worked on the project the entire semester and we were able to choose the topic. I was surprised that we had completed the project in my advanced writing course because it seems more like a creative writing piece than anything. However, there was a lot of research I had to put in in order to "complete" the project. I put 'complete' in quotations because I don't think that the piece is quite finished, and I designed it in such a way where I could go back, at anytime, and add to it. The piece is designed to be both written and performative writing. This was my first experience with performative writing. It also took me the first six weeks to really have a very, very, very basic understanding of what performative writing is. So, at the end of the semester my entire class and I performed each of our pieces in the Nursing building for the public. Anyone and everyone was invited. I think we had a total of 75 people who came and went throughout the performances. It was an amazing experience! It definitely changed my idea of writing completely.

My piece is a critique on how The Holocaust in taught in our public schools. I rely heavily on the idea of using story-telling as the best method in which to teach The Holocaust to students. Sometimes humanizing history does more good than giving cold, hard facts, especially when discussing topics such as genocide. Those victims and survivors need respect not a record of data.

Please feel free to navigate this in any way you want to, there is no set order. I will warn you that it gets pretty emotional at times due to the subject.

Do:

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