Teaching a Multi-Genre Paper in Freshman Comp

As a big proponent of the multi-genre assignment in FWCs, I thought I'd talk about the positive experiences I've had with these papers and the primary benefits I found they brought to the classroom.

The Assignment:

The first paper students in my ENG 101 class wrote was a Multi-Genre Personal Narrative. My experience was shaped by teaching this assignment at WVU, where the writing program has both a Freshman and a Sophomore component and so the FWC has more room for personal writing. I don't necessarily believe the personal narrative elements of this assignment would be appropriate for the ENG 151 classroom. However, I believe the multi-genre elements could easily be incorporated in any of the three major papers we already teach in a variety of ways. And so I will focus on those. Key elements to the assignment were:

• A requirement that the paper contain at least five different elements and a holistic approach to positioning those elements as each illuminating one or more aspects of the general topic of the paper. It was important that students understood they were not developing five different papers and then stapling them together, but that they were exploring in depth a single question in multiple ways.
• A great variety of available genres listed on the assignment prompt and an openess to including genres not anticipated by it. (My assignment prompt, which varied only slightly from the standard prompt, had over seventy possible genres listed in three categories.)
• Categorization of the genres to ensure that at least two of the five included pieces contained significant text elements and that three included researched elements.
• Clearly stated expectations for the amount of writing required in each genre category, so that students understood that while they could choose some genres which did not require significant writing--say, an editorial cartoon--the final paper still needed to have a word count of at least 2000 and that they should consider this when planning their paper.
• A grading rubric (which students helped to design) that emphasized key learning goals applied across the work as a whole, and which each component was expected to address.

The First Good Thing

The first good thing to come out of starting the FWC with a multi-genre assignment was that the discussions of genre gave us a common language for analyzing and creating texts that we would use for the rest of the class. As Ashley pointed out in class, students do already have a working understanding of genre--particularly in music and film--when they come into the classroom. What they don't have is a shared set of key terms. By focusing on genre in the initial assignment, students had the opportunity to use this language first in familiar settings by applying it to genres with which they were already familiar and then to the academic genres which were part of the coursework leading up to the drafting of the paper.

The Second Good Thing

Everybody is really good at something, and really excited about being good at it. By opening up the possibilities to multi-modal writing early on, it's possible to move students toward thinking about writing divorced from the concept of "writing a paper." They were, instead, writing songs, poems, advertisements, reviews, etc. Things they were interested in writing outside the classroom discourse. This generated work that could be praised, and a key element in my teaching philosophy is that it's important to find (genuinely) praiseworthy things in the work students produce. In her paper "Multigenre-Multigendered Research Papers," Mary Styslinger asserts that "(t)he multigenre research paper allows students equal access to voice(s), and its flexible structure permits them to utilize those genres most comfortable and suitable for representing independent ideas" (54). It was my experience that while it was often easy to tell which genres students were most engaged with in any one paper, every paper showed serious engagement with at least one--and usually many--genres in a way that I don't think we find as often in early FWC papers.

The Third Good Thing

Asking students to shape their work to the expectations of a variety of genre conventions requires critical engagement not only of the writer, but also of peer reviewers. The peer review process itself becomes, in part, an exercise in genre analysis. These skills are critical to later assignments, such as rhetorical critique.

The Fourth Good Thing

It's fun. It brings play back into the process. Students create works which other students are able to identify as interesting (and, let's face it, peer reviewing even a really good strong summary/response papers is unlikely to produce the same enthusiasm for the work of another student), and of which the author is often genuinely proud. In my experience, producing early work that had value to peers allowed students the confidence to take greater risks in later assignments.

Some Dangers

Of course, with any assignment, there are dangers that have to be avoided. In order to get students to understand that this is both playful and serious work, it's important to craft the prompt in such a way that the evaluative part of the process is as transparent as possible. Clear expectations are particularly important because it's not unheard of for students to try to cherry pick "easy" genres. Because of this, it's also key that instructors become involved in the writing process of each individual early on so as to intervene if there aren't enough genres with depth to adequately meet learning goals. Finally, it's an assignment in which the instructor must be able to allow for some risks that don't pan out: the rap that ends up more silly than insightful, for instance, or the Lady Gaga/Gloria Steinem mash-up that seemed better as an idea than it is as a realized product.

And so...

I haven't included a multi-genre assignment in my ENG 151 classes, although I am considering doing so next year. It's an easier paper to fit into a four or five paper, semester long course than into the three paper, quarter long course. I'm interested to know if any of you who are teaching comp classes include a mutli-genre paper, and if so, how you've fit it in.

Work Cited:

Styslinger, Mary E. "Multigenre-Multigendered Research Papers." The English Journal 95.4 (2006): 53-57, Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 19 April 2012.