(10/25/12) What is a genre? What is genre? What are genres?

Throughout the course of this semester we have established an extremely broad reaching definition of literacy. Literacy demands a flexible definition because the characteristics and influences of literacy impact the lives of our students on a perpetual basis. Unfortunately, the approach to literacy development in English classes across the country is, more often than not, far too rigid. From district mandates to teacher practices, educators attempt to constrain literacy by approaching it mechanically, in order to somehow quantify the literary achievement of students into a measurable unit.

            All five of the multi-genre articles we read for this week’s class revealed the negative implications of what I will refer to as a fixed-literacy approach. Whitney, Ridgeman, and Masquelier explain the limiting issues of this approach, writing “Yet, in practice, teaching genre often becomes ‘teaching genres,’ that is, offering genres to students as preformed, discrete, and rigid vessels into which students’ ideas might be poured. Instead, to teach genre well is to teach students to understand genres in their social functions” (Whitney, 2011). Students need the ability to view genres as a literary tool that has a direct purpose for what and how they are presenting information. In order to do so, students must abandon the traditional constraints of “genre” writing in order to become “real” writers and active members of a “discourse community” (Whitney, 2011). In the Whitney article, students were able to embody these personas as they physically entered nature in order to write as a true “nature writer.” More importantly, the teachers did not stymie their students writing by placing “rigid” limitations on the genre. The article explains, “The students did not list other features sometimes found in nature writing that we teachers had discussed beforehand and had expected to see listed, such as offering social or political critique or including biological or other scientific information. If we had set out to teach genres as discrete forms in a more traditional manner, we might have stepped in here to correct some of these ideas, such as the idea that nature writers are “isolated” in the romanticized sense of a lone writer sitting beneath a tree in silence” (Whitney, 2011). There is no reason to stop a student from including political or social commentary within a nature piece simply because of some imaginary genre boundary, especially when these boundaries act as a limiting influence on students’ ability to express themselves and to engage in open discourse communities. Moreover, in the real world, these imaginary genre boundaries do not exist; a nature author is allowed to bring political critique into his or her writing just as easily as a sports writer is able to talk about social implications without facing punishment. Since literacy is not rigid in the real world, why should it be rigid in schools?

            The articles, especially (Romano, 2000), (Gillepsie, 2005), and (Whitney, 2011) also highlight the potential breakthroughs that can come from productive and creative multi-genre projects. Through the successful multi-genre projects cited, students were able to view genre as a living tool, establish themselves as “real” writers, build audience and genre awareness, engage in multiple forms of literacy (e.g. the map use in Gillipse, 2005), engage with the social functions of genre (e.g. Dean’s use of a “toast” as a genre in Whitney, 2011), and ultimately engage in student generated work that they were proud enough to present to their peers. These types of activities should be embraced in learning communities as a way help students view the structures of literacy not as limiting constraints, but rather as powerful tools available to all writers.