Genre, Pedagogy, and the MVE

Setting the Table

Serving It Up

Responding to Bazerman

Teaching the MVE

Play and Pedagogy

Genre and Our MVE

Reflections on Genre

Serving it Up

I brought sandwich fixings to a special Sunday afternoon meeting we had. Sandwiches are a loosely defined, highly flexible genre of food, although in this particular instance, we were all limited in our sandwhich creations to the fixings I brought: two kinds of buns, two kinds of cheese, turkey, tomatoes, lettuce, pickles, mustard, and mayonaisse. These limited fixings, however, seem an appopriate analogy to writing. It is not like we or any of our students really have the whole world of discourse at our disposal when we write. I was limited by things like how much money I had on me, the selection of products available, my sense of what my audience would think of as good and appropirate fixings, and the short amount of time I left myself to shop before class. We as a writing group were limited by how much money we had for books and photocopying, how much time we had to meet and write, the scarcity of models available to us, and our own uncertain sense of what audiences might want from this or any MVE.

In asking our group to read about and discuss genre theory, I was really hoping to test out some ideas I had been working on for almost a year. It had been my experience, through teaching a collaborative hypertext assignment in an advanced writing class for three years, that the groups that figured out what genre(s) they wanted to work with had considerable success. Groups that reworked fairy tales, including multiple perspectives, or groups that drew on popular genres like the teen/young adult melodramas (Beverley Hills 90210, Melrose place) to establish character types and plots, almost always succeeded. Groups that simply imagined meeting places (bars, coffee shops) had a more difficult time developing characters and advancing plots. They were not able to identify an appropriate print genre or genres to work with and adapt to hypertext, so their work tended to floundered, they became discouraged, and occasionally shut down. I had not, however, before the Fall 2000 semester, suggested to my students that they start their thinking about their collaborative hypertext projects, with genres.

I modified my approach to teaching this collaborative hypertext assignment by becoming much more explicit in my discussion of popular genres and their possible adaptation to hypertext. Charles Bazerman’s "The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom" provided me with a broad theoretical framework for thinking about genres and their flexibility–genres as life-forms. He also says very specifically that "When we travel to new communicative domains, we construct our perception of them beginning with the forms we know" (19). This concept is exactly what I was noticing in my students’ successful collaborative projects. Anne Freadman’s "Anyone for Tennis?" gave me a metaphor I was very comfortable with using–the tennis match, and the extended, rich set of conventions that surround games. She explains that the rules of a game are always loose and subject to interpretation. And she understands that the metaphor of writing-as-a-game does not confine or trivialize writing, but that the metaphor can serve as concrete, clarifiying, and animating tool for teaching writing. Richard Coe’s "Teaching Genre as Process" gave me the very concrete suggestions that I should have students analyze (hyper)texts as genres, and that I then ask students to choose genres appropriate for their sense of communicative and/or creative purpose.

For the dinner conversation, I was asking our group to look at this same material–Bazerman, Freadman, Coe, and others–in order to see what they thought of it, to see if they found it potentially useful for their own teaching of first-year composition, and to see if it would help us work our way through our first multi-vocal essay. Excerpts from our conversations that day are organized according to these topics, and not according to chronological order.

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