Multi-Genre Papers

Blending Genre, altering style: Writing multigenre papers by Tom Romano
Multigenre-Multigendered Research Papers by Mary Styslinger

Create flow: Pulling in all together. In The multigenre research 

paper: Voice, passion, and discovery in grades 4-6 by C.A. Allen

Say:
     So Vic has taught us a little about writing multigenre stuff, but I have not really heard anything about what a multigenre paper is until I did the reading for this week.  After reading Blending Genre though, I think that multigenre papers might be the thing that we have learned this semester that I like the most.  There are students in every class who hate writing the traditional essay, and when I say that, I mean that most students hate writing the traditional essay.  I don't remember the last time that I wrote an essay for an English class that I actually enjoyed writing and didn't just make up the whole thing the night before it was due.  My academic writing process has been painful to say the least.  Multigenre papers seem to be a good way to get students writing about something without them having to try and make stuff up to fill in gaps for page limits with meaningless fluff.  The big thing that we talk about is transacting with literature and the multigenre paper offers a great way to do just that.  The best example of this that I can think of from Romano's book is the Count Basie poem.  He gives students a biographical encyclopedia entry and asks them to write what they know about Basie afterward, then he gives them a poem about Count Basie and has students write what they learned from the poem about Basie.  The results are amazing.  Students feel a connection with this historical figure just by reading a poem about him rather than just reading expository text.  Romano is careful to make sure we know that there is still a place for expository text however.  Students still need to learn academic writing in the traditional sense so that they are prepared for college, and these papers should be taught alongside other writing, not replace it.  I do think that having students write at all will prepare them to write anything in the long run though.
      Another thing that I like about the multigenre paper is the wide variety of themes and topics that students can choose to write about.  The example from our reading gives an interesting critique on the author's dissatisfaction with selling cosmetics.  Students could also write a multigenre about a specific character from a work of literature, or about a topic from a text.  My middle schoolers from A2 are reading the YA novel Lyddie right now, and I could easily seeing them doing multigenre research about child labor and other working conditions in factories in the 19th century, with entries from the perspective of the main character put in with the rest.  The thing that I appreciated most about this book though was how Romano laid everything out for us.  We often get readings where people are telling us things that are nice to do in classes, but Romano said, "OK, this is how you actually organize this in your class day by day."
     The description of a research paper at the beginning of Styslinger's article is similar to what I went through in high school.  In English III when there were about two months left in school our teacher brought out a packet describing the research paper and what our expectations were.  We then scrambled to finish it at the end of the year.  It was a nightmare.  The solution to this is of course the multigenre research paper.  Where Romano talks about having papers about topics and themes, Styslinger presents us with the idea of creating papers as a way to answer a specific question.  By doing this we are given a broader definition of research.  This broad definition of research allows us to utilize transactional theory again, as students first think about the answers to these questions from their own point of view.  This is where the research begins, with their own thoughts and feelings about a question.  Multigenre-multigendered research papers offer students the chance to reflect on their views about gender in ways that a traditional essay form can't.  One of the students in this article writes about gender by way of satirizing the traditional view of familial roles in the 1950s.  This satire says more than if he had just described his dislike of gender roles in the mid 20th century.  These papers also offer ways for students to make arguments in their writing that they would not be able to in traditional essays.  They can use journal entries, newspaper articles, or pictures as backings rather than just talking about them or quoting them in a paper.
     Allen provides us with some more practical knowledge about how students can organize their research papers.  We cannot just get in front of our class and tell them to just get started.  We have to scaffold them into it.  Once we know that they have a grasp on what a multigenre research paper is, it is time to teach them how to organize it.  Allen gives us a few ways to open up research papers, and how students can use these throughout their papers to separate different sections.  The other thing that Allen offers is the opportunity for students to present their research papers.  There is a duty of the writer to make sure the readers understand his or her paper.  Allen provides his students with the chance to separate into groups so that students can teach their peers how to read their papers.

Do:
     Coming up with a DO for this week seems a little more difficult than previous weeks if only because the only thing that I can say I am going to DO is to assign multigenre-research papers.  This seems to be the obvious thing.  I do think however that we need to put thought into how we organize these multigenre research papers into our curriculum.  It is unfortunately likely that students have not had the experience of writing multigenre papers before they take our classes.  I know that this will be my first experience writing one and I'm a grad student.  We need to begin with teaching students what a multigenre research paper is.  Then we can move on to the different forms of genre that students can create.  From here we need to have students writing, and once they have works written we can begin teaching them how to 'create flow.'  The unit of course will end with presentations.  I found this introduction to multigenre writing that includes some links to helpful things like organizers and genre lists.

Multigenre DO