This document discusses approaches to teaching genres in English class. It defines genres as vague categories with overlapping conventions that works can borrow from. It emphasizes the importance of teaching genres as it focuses attention, teaches context and history, and develops reading and writing habits. The document discusses using inquiry methods to analyze genres, as well as teaching genres through situated practice, instruction with metalanguage, and critical framing of social context. It provides curriculum expectations involving using genres and gives examples of teaching genres through text-based hypertexts, close reading practices, and shifting between genres.

1. Teaching Genres September 29, 2009

2. Three Parts For Today . . . Introduction to genre definitionsPlace of genre in teaching EnglishApproaches to teaching genre and its connection to the four strands

3. GenresGenres are vague categories with no fixed boundaries, they are formed by sets of conventions, and many works cross into multiple genres by way of borrowing and recombining these conventions.

4. Raymond QueneauExercises in StyleThe simple story of a man seeing the same stranger twice in one day.

12. QueneauSonnetsHundred Thousand Billion Poems

14. Teaching genres is importantfocuses attention and teaches noticingpoints to the history and context of the formteaches habits of minddevelops practices for reading and writing

15. Engaging MindsEnabling constraints are starting places for possible paths, not routes to be followed. The space of possibilities opens up only in the actual moment of teaching. They are not prescriptive (i.e., they don’t dictate what must be done), but expansive (i.e., they indicate what might be done, in part by indicating what must not be done.)e.g. Ten Commandments, rules of hockey

16. Randy Bomer, Time for MeaningEvery piece of writing, every text we read, comes to us both as a text—the piece it is—and as a kind of text—an instance of genre. And what kind of thing it is puts some limits as to what we expect to find there. Genre, an oft-overlooked cueing system in reading, constrains our prediction, and lays down a track for our reading.

17. Donald Murray, Learning by TeachingMost writers view the world as a fiction writer, a reporter, a poet, or a historian. The writer sees experience as a plot or a lyric poem or a news story or a chronicle. The writers uses such literary traditions to understand life.

18. Lucy Calkins, The Art of Teaching WritingStudents need to inhabit the genre if they are to master it .

19. Randy BomerHelping students learn how to learn about different genres of writing empowers them to find a way of writing that counts in the different communities they will move through in their lives. I don’t teach poetry so that kids will remember all about writing poems and be able to do it forever. I want them to develop habits of mind related to learning a genre, so that they can learn in whatever genres they need.

20. Inquiry MethodFrom Thinking Through Genre, Heather LattimerWhat makes this genre unique?What do we need to know and be able to do in order to be successful readers of this genre?How can we best interact with this text and what can we take away from it?What language and structures do successful writers of this genre use, and how can that inform our own writing?What processes are appropriate for gathering ideas, drafting, editing, and publishing our work in this genre?

21. Teaching MultiliteraciesSituated effortful, meaningful practiceOvert instruction that introduces metalanguage to describe and interpret.Critical framing to interpret the social and cultural context of particular designs of meaning.Transformed practice, which puts meaning to work in other contexts.

22. Genres and Curriculum ExpectationsDevelop a character who will deliver a short monologue; create the dialogue for a scene in a selected film after viewing the scene with the sound off; select and develop ideas from their journals to use in a poem; record facts from a mock press conference to use in writing a news article; read several reviews of a movie to find comments to use in a promotional poster for the movie; over the course of one week, write a series of “after-school” vignettes based on observations made at home, et. . . .; read local and community newspapers to determine local issues and choose one issue to explore in an article . . . (Gr. 12 College)

23. Genres and Curriculum ExpectationsDevelop a character who will deliver a short monologue; create the dialogue for a scene in a selected film after viewing the scene with the sound off; select and develop ideas from their journals to use in a poem; record facts from a mock press conference to use in writing a news article; read several reviews of a movie to find comments to use in a promotional poster for the movie; over the course of one week, write a series of “after-school” vignettes based on observations made at home, et. . . .; read local and community newspapers to determine local issues and choose one issue to explore in an article . . . (Gr. 12 College)

24. Teaching Approacheshypertext and other digital forms—different entry pointsclose reading practicesshifting genres

25. Text-based hypertextEastgate. com’s reading room

29. (in which the scene before me is blurred no matter how hard I squint, blink, and rub my eyes; I persevere, haunted by the suspicion not that I am blind, but that I'm not looking properly, that all my efforts will punch a hole in the scene before me and I will see clearly, but see only my bedroom ceiling, denied access forever to the tantalizing secret, which turned out to be not far away behind fogs and darkness but too near, as if I tried to make out the pattern on a translucent scarf laid over my face. The answer, of course, is to look with my dream eyes, not the eyes of my body.) (Dreams)

30. Stevie:I think it works because the whole story is thoughts basically. . . . I know that my thoughts . . . bounce from one thing to another so I think it’s . . . almost a stream-of-consciousness. It’s like a written portrait of the human mind almost.

32. Scalable City by Sheldon Brownhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvsAudGTsGY

34. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZHh70xpi-M

35. 1. What are the devices used to represent and reorder experience? (Eco, 1994) 2. What is the dynamic relationship (if any) between writing and other modalities?3.What kinds of interpretations and meaning-making are possible through the form?

36. Close Reading Jane Gallop (2000) calls for the “close reading” of texts as an ethical practice. We need to slow down, she suggests, and pay attention to the words, the syntax, the punctuation, rather than predetermining what will be found—just as Maxine Greene call on us to pay heed “to attend to shapes, patterns, sounds, rhythms, figures of speech, contours, and lines.”

37. Francine Prose (Reading Like a Writer)We all begin as close readers. Even before we learn to read, the process of being read aloud to, and of listening, is one in which we are taking in one word after another, one phrase at a time, in which we are paying attention to whatever each work or phrase is transmitting. Word by word is how we learn to hear and then read . . .

38. Reading Like a Writer . . .I read closely, word by work, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made. And though it’s impossible to recall every source of inspiration and instruction, I can remember the novels and stories that seemed to me revelations: wells of beauty and pleasure that were also textbooks, private lessons in the art of fiction.

40. Poem (William Carlos Williams) As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot