Reiff states "one criticism leveled against a genre approach to literacy teaching is that it focuses on analysis and critique of genres, stopping short of having writers use genres to exact change." I think this kind of thing is true, but I also see it as fundamental because it empowers students to be able to deconstruct the media they encounter regardless of how clever its presentation--a kind of defense of sorts. What I noticed today was that even though students were using genre as a means for some kind of advocacy, they didn't exactly have a strong grasp of the different components of their projects within their genre presentation. I believe they were relying on comfortability. Have others noticed this kind of trend in students?
How can we repurpose the analysis of genre in order to empower students away from their reservations about abstract thinking? How can we eliminate the word "weird" from our students' vocabulary?
Dustin,
ReplyDeleteGoing to try to deconstruct your first question, but hoping I make sense. I agree with you on the first point, it is valuable to teach students how to critique genres they encounter, especially if they are presenting false information/are being assaulted with an onslaught of advertisements as they will be for the rest of their lives. But they do seem to miss the mark at times when it comes to creating genres for their own arguments. Of course, it could have been that the students in the class I'm interning at are lazy, but it seemed that some of them were using genres that didn't make sense for what they were trying to argue, and Katelyn and I had to question them or redirect them. Again, I wasn't sure if they honestly didn't understand, or were just trying to do an "easy genre." I'm not sure how many of them picked their genre out of comfort as much as they did ease, but that definitely is a possibility.