Multigenre Papers

I don't know that I am one hundred percent convinced that multigenre writing is an activity that must be included in the classroom. I like the notion of being able to target students with more artistic personalities through the freedom provided by the multigenre project, yet I wonder if this is necessarily a good thing. While I admit that giving students a breather from writting academically can extremely beneficial to the attitude and environment of the classroom, I do not believe that as teachers we should assign a great deal of multigenre projects. There is a strong level of value and merit placed upon formal writting and the skills that go along with being able to communicate effectively through writing. As such, we as future English educators need to be able to teach students how to produce high quality formal writting since that is what students will be required to use once they have entered the work place.

However, I am going to contradict myself right now by saying that multigenre writing is an excellent way of getting kids to find meaning in their writing and to be creative with their writing. In this way, writing becomes an authentic yet enjoyable task that most students would glean a great deal from. It is a more relaxed form where students can worry more about expressing themselves rather than about exact punctuation and usage. In creative writing classes I think a multigenre project would be highly beneficial as it would expose kids to a wide range of writing styles and various methods of expressing oneself through writing. In this sense, kids woud be forced to expand their knowledge of what it means to be a writer into areas of writing that they have never before considered. In using such a project, the chances of lighting a spark within a particular student are very high as there are many different types of material that might attract interest. Once interest in writing is gained and a certain confidence level has been gained a teacher may then be able to convince a young writer of the merits and necessity of more formal writing. Thus, this could be a great way of drawing kids into writing as a whole.

Once again, though, I wonder about the practicalities of using such a project. In teaching multigenre will kids be able to seriously develop their own style of writing with the genre, or will they simply mimick that of the writers that they study? What if meaningful multigenre writing does not translate into successful formal writing? Basically, I am wondering what constitutes an appropriate balance of multigenre and formal writing within a classroom? I guess I would like to know more about the subject of multigenre writing before I make a definite decision. Although Romano gives multiple examples of multigenre writing and the impitus for using it, I have never actually used or seen such a method used. I think once I am able to actually do some hands on things with multigenre stuff, I will have a much better idea of how I feel about this type of project overall. Anyone else have thoughts or suggestions about this?

http://www.webenglishteacher.com/multigenre.html
http://www.learner.org/channel/workshops/middlewriting/prog5.html
http://www.readwritethink.org/lessons/lesson_view.asp?id=774

These three sites deal with the subject of multigenre teaching. The first and third sites list several possibilities for lesson plans and subjects using multigenre writing techniques. The second site offers comprehensive downloadable materials that further explain and illustrate the multigenre technique. All together these sites provide a pretty comprehensive look at the subject of multigenre writing.