Merinda Gurney Cutler and Dr. Sirpa T. Grierson, English
Multigenre writing is a nontraditional style of writing developed by pioneers in education such as Peter Elbow, Tom Romano, and Sirpa T. Grierson. This form of writing is ideal for high school students who view writing, especially research writing, with apathy and boredom. Dr. Grierson’s approach to multigenre writing requires students to do traditional research on a topic, but then write about it in a creative way, using their imaginations to “[fill] out ‘the bones’ of the researched facts” (Grierson 52). This method of teaching literature, reasearch, and writing has been researched and tested extensively in Utah schools, and I wanted to see how the method would fare in Washington, D.C. where I completed my student teaching at the “inner-city” Benjamin Banneker High School. I hypothesized that multigenre research writing would be highly successful among inner-city students because of what I thought were their poor reading and writing skills, their struggles with Standard English, and their general resistance to academic writing. Once I arrived in Washington, D.C., however, I found many things that contradicted my original assumptions and expectations; through these contradictions and obstacles I discovered some important things about teaching multigenre writing, and about how to best implement new teaching methods and programs.
The first thing I learned is that students are very different from what the district’s standardized tests and statistics show. Banneker High School was indeed located in the inner-city with violence, drugs, and poverty surrounding its walls, and the students were indeed nearly all minority students and some even ESL students. However, as a magnet school for academics, this school was full of students who were intelligent, hard-working, and high-achieving students who certainly knew how to write academically in Standard English. Therefore, I had to shift my research hypothesis to the idea that multigenre writing would encourage these students who saw writing as merely a tool to see that writing and literature have merits of their own.
I quickly found, however, that both teachers and students are often resistant to new teaching methods that they perceive have no practical benefits. My class was one of burned-out seniors in their last semester of high school already conditioned to a highly traditional and objective teaching approach. They were working on a school-mandated twenty-page formal research paper and certainly did not want to take on another research project. My challenge, then, was to immerse them in the beauty and power of literature on a small scale as they created literature themselves using multigenre writing.
To start my students on the path of creating, I dove quickly into using an active hands-on group performance approach to Macbeth. As a novice teacher, I made some mistakes in the way I hastily assigned, taught, and evaluated this project; the students found such a dramatic shift in expectations and teaching style shocking, and therefore many lost trust in me as a teacher. Many begged me to stop trying out all my new ideas and just start lecturing and testing more. When the majority of the students failed an objective test on the play, I wondered if my methods were in fact comparable to traditional methods in learning outcomes.
However, convinced that the fault was not the nontraditional method itself, but instead my clumsy implementation of it, I planned a few small-scale multigenre writing assignments that yielded positive results. In these assignments, I found that students who normally did poorly in class did well. By contrast, successful students often struggled with the assignments. These multigenre writing assignments seemed to engage different learning styles and thinking skills than traditional work. The finished products of most students were phenomenal, and the positive peer reaction to their creative work posted in the hallway helped them understand the concepts I was teaching and develop an appreciation for the literature itself.
In addition to this work, I recruited Sara Clement, another student teacher, to test out multigenre writing in her classroom of juniors who were more accustomed to creative writing and independent thinking. I shared with Sara my knowledge and resources on multigenre writing, and she formulated an excellent project for her students as a capstone project to replace a unit test on three authors. Her project required such multigenre forms as parody, dialogue between authors/characters, connections to art, double voice, and found poems to show understanding of the literature and authors studied. These writing forms not only helped them show what they had learned, but forced them to look very closely at the authors’ style of writing, and helped them form connections to themselves and between the authors themselves. The writing they produced was dramatic, poignant, and insightful. Some complained that grading such a subjective assignment can be difficult, but the majority of the students were proud of their work and found the work enjoyable and fair as an assessment of learning.
Based on this research, I conclude that multigenre research writing is an excellent way to teach literature, encourage creativity, and assess real learning. As a method for teaching writing it challenges students who normally do well academically and empowers students who often do not. It allows students to explore a topic in a personal way that solidifies learning and encourages innovation. Such new methods for teaching literature and writing in the classroom, however, need to be implemented slowly and carefully to ensure students and teachers understand the nature of the method and its benefits. I am confident that when implemented in such a way, multigenre writing methods can do much to infuse enthusiasm into research writing in English classrooms from Utah to Washington, D.C.
References
- Elbow, Peter. “Collage: Your Cheatin’ Art.” Writing on the Edge. 26-40.
- Grierson, Sirpa T. “Circling Through Text: Teaching Research Through Multigenre Writing.” English Journal 89:1. (Sep 1999): 51-55.
- Romano, Tom. Writing with Passion: Life Stories, Multiple Genres. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1995.