Genre and concept development

I’m inspired again by Bawarshi & Reiff’s book on genre.

This time, I’ve been reading Chapter 11 – “RGS Approaches to Teaching Writing” – and through just a few pages, I’ve been flooded with ideas.

I think I’m on to something with collaboratively developed rubrics – both as tools for concept development and as genre heuristics in particular.

I’m particularly drawn to R. Bullock’s question-heuristic (p. 195-6), but I wouldn’t want to simply provide students with the guide.  Instead, I’d like to help students develop a similar guide, building from their own spontaneous concepts toward scientific ones.  And I’m talking rubrics and graphic organizers.  This initial involvement in rubric development is scaffolded by the categories I provide and by a process of “warrantable assertions” (a la Hillocks/KT’s “good king” approach) – in such, it serves as the beginning of their ‘genre analysis’ apprenticeship.

Bullock’s guidelines could certainly serve as categories for a rubric we create together. Such a process enables us to build a collective meta-vocabulary about the function of language – the practical purposes of language use in the real world. And such an approach must be willing to not discriminate; it’s a situational literacy approach, so the high-end and the everyday discourses are in play.  [I think this is the way to go.]

It seems that Bullock’s guidelines are meant to aid students’ entry into particular genres, mainly those they have been analyzing and reading. That’s great, and I’m sure it’s effective. But I’m also interested in developing and helping students use a set of guidelines that they can apply to ambiguous situations, where the preferred genre isn’t so easily defined.

I’d like to capitalize on genre theory’s emphasis on the form-content-context marriage in order to help students consider which forms they might take in various situations. I’ve been doing this already.

[more to come….]