The Challenges of Genre
My first year as a graduate teaching assistant was my first year teaching to a curriculum, but not my first year teaching overall. Prior to my appointment as an EN 111- College Composition I instructor at Northern Michigan University, I spent a year teaching English in Austria. The transition from a foreign secondary school to an open-enrollment, medium-sized, single-campus university located in one of few cities in Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula was quite daunting. However, the transition from being blissfully unaware of general education program requirements to having said requirements become the centerfold of my teaching was even more taxing.
In an overwhelming two-week summer colloquium before I began my contract, I was instructed to teach four specific genres of essay and seven outcomes to my twenty-three students. Some of those outcomes, which I later discovered were dictated by my university’s Writing Program Administration, were already familiar to me as a recent college graduate. Unfortunately, Genre conventions, one of the aforementioned outcomes, was of particular trouble to me in that I had no idea how to teach a genre beyond simply stating that a genre is a basic category of writing and making a list of the writing features that appear in that category.[1]
Unfortunately for me, genre conventions reared their head not at one specific point in the semester, but during the entirety of the sixteen-week period. I was required to teach my students—a group of reserved aspiring nurses fresh out of public high school—how to write specific genres of essays at nine in the morning, four days per week. Because I didn’t quite grasp what teaching a genre entailed, even after consulting countless pedagogical resources, what resulted in my lessons were PowerPoints listing what the different types of essays were supposed to accomplish when written properly. This lecture-based method, though the best I could muster with my limited knowledge, was not effective for my introverted students or my classroom, which featured a setup that invited discussion: five hexagonal tables, each with six seats for students. There were little to no interactive elements in my genre lessons, and my students, who needed coaxing in order to speak outside of their tables, were silent as the grave. Needless to say, I was frustrated with this lackluster approach to teaching.
Thankfully, a pedagogical turning point occurred for me. With a colleague, I founded the Graduate English Pedagogy Association at Northern Michigan University in an attempt to rectify teaching issues for graduate teaching assistants. In a stroke of brilliance, our organization started inviting experienced educators to our biweekly meetings to discuss pedagogy. Our guest week fourteen was Dr. Madeline Pawlowski, a professor in our department who specialized in genre-based composition pedagogies.
Dr. Pawlowski effortlessly solved all of the problems I had been having with the genre conventions outcome by teaching me how I could frame my course using an interactive genre-based approach. She suggested beginning each essay unit by asking students to discuss their prior knowledge about the genre of essay they were assigned to write. Essentially, I could ask students what design, structure, and language conventions a given genre had, have them discuss the information with their peers, then fill in the gaps in student knowledge as needed with the entire class. Furthermore, I could facilitate the identification of conventions by assigning multiple student- and professionally-written samples of a given genre as reading homework.
Dr. Pawlowski’s generously shared expertise ended up being nothing short of revolutionary for me. Now that I have begun a new semester of teaching the same EN 111- College Composition I course, I use her interactive approach to teach genre conventions. My newly improved think-pair-share-style lessons—sans tedious PowerPoints—facilitate a higher level of understanding of genre conventions for both myself and my students and have made my classroom a place of lively discussion. In essence, Dr. Pawlowski gave me a springboard for my teaching that countless websites and textbooks could not provide me with, which taught me the most valuable lesson I believe I could learn as a first-time teacher: in a world of innumerable resources, often the best resources a new educator can turn to are other educators.
Tiffany M. Stachnik; Northern Michigan University
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tiffany-stachnik-060852145