Writing Pedagogy Multigenre Project
In my annual spring course, Teaching Secondary Writers, I offer preservice teachers an opportunity to research pedagogical content knowledge in writing through a study of education thought leaders.
I invite students to draw on their education coursework to identify a thought leader, but I also offer writing scholars and practitioners who have influenced me as well as names that my education friends have suggested (see below).
I begin the assignment like this:
In developing a philosophy of, knowledge about, and practice in teaching writers, you will need to know and be in conversation with your people. What I mean is the thought leaders upon which you ground your teaching practices, which can be early practitioners or new scholars– a combination is likely. Instead of studying many thought leaders, you will focus on one and create a multigenre research project. Your classmate/colleagues will do the same. We will benefit from your research, and you will benefit from their research in creating a collection of thinking and writing about, well, teaching writers. Further, in synthesizing your research in this way, there is space to engage you own writing life and teaching philosophy across the genres you choose.
A Multigenre Research Paper (Romano) is an alternative to a traditional research paper. A genre is a type of writing situated in a specific rhetorical context, and you will be asked to select and craft five genre forms (see the project overview) along with research notes and reflections about your process. Different genres serve different purposes, different voices, and different audiences. You will learn how genres can provide multiple perspectives on a single topic along with the way that genre is at once creative, rhetorical, situated, and reflective (see Genre Theory).
Here is the Project Overview. (I will be writing a longer process piece about this at some point.)
Two of my students have given their permission to share their project. It is with gratitude that I share their work with you: