Multiwriting.
Or multigenre. Multimodal composition. New media composition. Super awesome combinational writing of expressed learning. Whatever people wanted to call it.
That was what my Capstone project would be on, I decided. I was happy at last to work past my incredibly indecisive personality and lock in my choice for what I would be researching for the rest of the semester. With little ability to freely change once I got too far in…
I started to sweat again.
But in all honesty, I really did feel confident in having multigenre pedagogy as my topic. The seed of the idea was planted when I read a small, barely-over-one-page subsection of the book Bridging English, a piece on multigenre research papers that was part of a larger section titled “Research Alternatives.” The text was surprising alluring, as the multigenre strategy described seemed to offer a vast amount of potential for student creativity. That further thrilled the artist and teacher in me, so I jumped into another book that the section cited, one that sat on an end table a few feet away: Write Beside Them: Risk, Voice, and Clarity in High School Writing by Penny Kittle.
After reading through a chapter and a few other odd pages of that book in a sitting, I was thoroughly convinced about the potential of multigenre. And I’d be surprised if anyone wasn’t at least slightly interested, with passages like the following that make student-focused English educators like me drool:
[In] a multigenre research project [...] students choose a big idea and then examine it through multiple frames: poetry, commentary, narrative, editorial, letters, obituaries, songs, multivoice poems, mini-movies, and many more. Students present the many ways to see and understand something important to them. This project asks them to raise their writing to one level higher—to bring all of their skills in persuasion and exposition to creative genres, broad thinking, and a cohesive product. Almost all students create something unique and impressive. (16).
Overall, it sounded like an amazing teaching strategy. Back in the day, I couldn’t stand the research paper unit—a disdain that isn’t exactly uncommon for high schoolers. Sure, the papers were rewarding once I got through them and were often something I took pride in, but they were so rigid, so dominating over my flourishing creativity and expression that my favorite part about them was always getting done with them and moving on.
However, I could still vaguely remember a different cumulative learning project we had done for a Shakespeare unit my sophomore year of high school; one that was “written” as a display of learning across different modes and genres, one in which I enjoyed the process as much as, or more than, the end product. One piece of my project involved researching the Globe Theatre and constructing a (relatively) accurate model out of Legos, while a second piece involved developing my own soundtrack and CD cover for The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. Because of my affinity for sharing music with others, I reflected back on the plot and overall themes and tones of different parts of the play carefully to produce something I actually wanted to share with others. I can comfortably say that I enjoyed both of these pieces more than I would’ve enjoyed writing a paper on the Globe Theatre’s layout, or writing an essay on the themes and tones of various acts in the play. In the end, we can’t really know if I learned and retained more, less, or an equal amount of knowledge in comparison to if I had written a traditional paper. But I can say that I learned and retained some information, which means it wasn’t all for naught.
That’s why I believed in studying multigenre pedagogy as my capstone project. I had a direction—not definitive, but a direction nonetheless—and a strong desire to learn more about this relatively small assessment territory in English that isn’t often explored. But as I thought more about the plausibility of the topic, I was intimidated by the thought of culminating everything I learned into the final product of capstone: a research paper.
I paused.
Maybe I don’t need a research paper. I could do a multigenre approach just like—
No, Nolan. A second voice in my head interrupted the first. You’re an idiot. Nobody will take this project seriously if you don’t do a research paper…
Wait. Wasn’t that the point of the whole project? That I believed in the idea that multigenre research projects are just as important, just as expressive to learning as a traditional research paper?
If so, the product of my capstone would be experimental, as it would be presented in a way capstone projects typically are not. In addition, it would also be part of my research—an authentic test of the following questions: Can I really display my learning without a real “research paper?” Could I blend multiple genres to create something more expressive, something more appropriate for my purpose and audience?
The goal of the paper, then, might not be as drastic as I thought. Perhaps it would be as simple as defining multigenre research and analyzing the potential struggles and advantages of such a project in the educational and academic field.
Though I didn’t know what form my project would eventually take, I picked up Bridging English and my notebook and got to work.