Multigenre Projects

Tom Romano's "The Many Ways of the Multigenre" offered an intriguing look at how teachers can push students to do more than the mandated minimums, while having fun in the process. His contribution to The Neglected R was extremely readable and contained poems, interviews, and the inevitable expository writing. Romano's multigenre article about multigenre projects fulfilled one of the basic tenets of successful narrative writing: Show, don't tell.

As I was reading about the many facets of the multigenre project, I remembered doing something similar in my 9th grade English class. We kept class journals that we wrtoe in at the beginning of class. Often it was a response to the assigned reading or to a quote on the board. Anyone in the class could suggest a "quotable quote" for the board, the teacher would decide if it was worthy of reflection and post it. In addition to the journals, which were occasionally turned in and responded to by our teacher, the class assembled a portfolio of our work for a final grade at the end of the year. Our own poetry, a research paper of our choosing, some short fiction and some other genres, all turned in for grades throughout the year became part of the portfolio. I believe we also had to illustrate our poem, adding another dimension to an already creative project.

My 9th grade English class was a lot of fun and the teacher, Mr. Asklar, was one of the teachers who inspired me to go into teaching. Our classroom discussions were lively and during the Romantic Poetry unit, we delved into Samuel Taylor Coleridge's opium use while analyzing Kubla Khan. That's one way to make the "magic" of otherwise inaccessible poetry come alive for a bunch of jaded teenagers. Now that I am slightly older and significantly less angst-filled, I can see that my poetry was truly awful and probably not worthy of the "B" it recieved. I blame it on all the hairdye: going from fuschia to blue to magenta to red really dumped a lot of nasty chemicals in close proximity to my brain.

My penchant for morbid poetry created heavy-handed use of symbolism. Looking over the wretched writing of my melancholy youth, the cemetary-and-dead-tree motif was pretty well beaten into the ground. Despite the petulant poetry, I did well in the class and the mutligenre approach certainly helped that. Learning the conventions of various genres and applying them to our own creations was more engaging than writing yet another 5 paragraph essay. Mr. Asklar must have known, on the cusp of the 21st century, that multigenre projects would help his students become truly literate in a multimedia world.