Multi- Genre Research Unit: Discussion

Describe and explain your online genre and how it works.

What makes the form you’ ve chosen logical given your
audience and purpose for the MG Research Unit? Be
explicit and give examples.

My online genre is the Wikispace that I created last semester in TE

407. I created this space as a place to organize and exhibit the
many types of artifacts I encountered and made over the course of
my time in the TE program. Since the site’s inception, I have
updated it frequently with lesson plans I’ve designed, my reflections
on what I’ve been learning, and larger projects or units I have done
for other class (such as the writer’s portfolio for ENG313). The Wiki
serves the needs of multiple audiences, including my own as a
source of organization and reflection, as well as other teachers and
administrators as a way to examine what I have done in this
program and to see concrete examples of my teaching philosophy
and style at work.

This form was the most obvious choice for me to publish my unit
on, since I’d previously put all other lessons, units, and reflections
here. I understood immediately that by publishing it here, I would
always know where to find it and would have no trouble directing
teachers or administrators to it. However, I began to questions
myself and my decision when I saw my peers publishing more
attractive, colorful, and interactive websites using Weebly and other
free hosting sites. For a moment, I thought the presentation of my
unit would pale in comparison to theirs. However, I went back to
an idea that my unit stresses day in and day out (as can be seen
on the calendar!): form equals audience plus purpose. It may have
seen fun to creative a more attractive, colorful, picture-laden
website to display this unit, but ultimately, I knew I’d forget about
it once the semester was over and it would be disconnected from
my other work. The purpose would fail entirely and it would never
have a way to reach its audience. Some teacher might have
stumbled on it while conducting a random internet search, but it
would not be shown in the context of my other work. That is how I
knew I must keep the unit together with my other artifacts. To be
blunt, it simply made the most sense.

How does this unit ask students to engage in

multiliteracies? What are the strengths and challenges of
planning with multiliteracy objectives? Be explicit and give
examples.

Engaging in multiliteracies can be called one of the central goals of

this unit overall. Going into this, I really thought a lot about the
way the typical high school student perceives research and the
research project. I thought back to how I thought about it when I
was in high school, which wasn’t much different from the typical
student today. Students tend to think of being hunched over big,
thick books and boring websites, just writing and typing until they
don’t care anymore. I think one of the strengths of this unit is the
way it attempts to change that perception by getting students
aware of the multiple modes and genres for research that exist all
around them. It asks that they be more conscious of the genres
they encounter daily, such as television and visual interpretation.
Furthermore, it recognizes the ability to question and comprehend
these different modes and genres as literacies. When we
purposefully examine art, film, and television and question and
respond to its implications (just as we would a novel or essay),
that’s literacy. Each of these genres around us can serve as texts,
and our ability to read them, make inferences from them, and
study them comprise multiliteracies. Students may not know that
they are taking part in this sort of dialogic learning, but the beauty
of it is that they don’t need to be aware of it in order for the
engagement of multiple literacies to take place. Some of my
favorite examples include the lessons from Arts Week, with students
examining photo stories, various depictions of youth on film and
televison, and listening to music all with the overall purpose of
learning about how their culture of research is constructed in
society. Many of the activities, such as the iVideo building, also
assume students may have some prior knowledge on using and
creating these forms. Students are encouraged to share what they
know with the rest of the class, during which I as a teacher can be
come aware of the digital literacy they had before coming to my
class.

The biggest challenge with engaging multiple literacies, I think, is in

having students look at visual, artistic, and multimedia genres
through the lens of research and not in the casual, non-purposeful
way they do regularly. What I mean is that asking them to make
inferences about how youth culture is represented in the media
from clips of a film they watch at home with their friends
may be difficult. Students have to almost perform a code switch of
what they are looking for and noticing when they engage this way,
and forget for a moment about the aesthetic, non-academic
pleasure they get from watching them. Essentially, this unit works
to re-evaluate what we mean when we call something a “text,” and
that is not a concept that is easy for students to grasp right away.

Reflect recursively on what it means to plan inquiry- based

experiences for students. Be explicit and give examples.
I think in the beginning, I thought that inquiry-based experiences
for students consisted of allowing them to choose their own topic
of research. This was my first choice that engaged inquiry-based
experiences for my students. After all, if they choose what they
want to know, they’ll be more connected to the overall process.
Looking back, that logic was spot on, and I know that many of my
peers accounted for inquiry-based experiences with student-chosen
research topics. However, when I’d come to the end of my
planning, I saw how my unit allowed for inquiry-based experiences
along the way that went beyond simply saying “I want to know
more about _______________________.”

For instance, one of the best concrete examples I can think of in

my planning is that while students are required to look into 3
assigned aspects of their culture, as they wrap up their research,
they must choose a 4 aspect of their own choosing. I put this last
th

aspect at the end of the unit purposefully. My intent was that, as

students worked towards researching the 3 required aspects of their
culture, especially considering the slew of modes and genres they
would be exploring, they would naturally become curious about one
or more aspects that they were not told to research. In this way, I
view the process of research as one that naturally scaffolds itself.
That is, as we learn new things, the desire to learn more based on
those new things grows (similar to the adage “the more I know,
the more I want to know”). My hope is that my plan was accurate
and students are driven to naturally, implicitly inquire as they move
along in their research.

How does what you planned account for the development

of procedural knowledge in your students? How does what
you planned on a daily basis connect to the overall plans
for the unit and vice versa? Be explicit and give
examples.

While many of my goals and objectives for this unit is conceptual

and “big picture,” I tried to keep aware of the need of my students
to gain concrete, real-life skills from this. Thus, I had to be sure to
incorporate much procedural knowledge throughout the unit. I’ve
done so in multiple places and ways.

Much of this unit is demonstration based. This unit assumes that

while students may have had some exposure to using and
examining these “new” genres, for many, these are new
encounters. Much of how I begin most of the class periods in the
library during the first week, for instance, are based around “how-
to’s.” How do I tell a good source from a bad source? How do I
begin to think about research? How do I use a Wiki? How do I
write a proposal? These are just a few examples within my unit
when, I think, if a student was asked what he or she learned how
to do over the past 4 weeks, he or she could answer in terms of
concrete skills, not just overall comprehension of overarching
themes.

On a daily basis, my plans connect back to my overall questions

and “big picture” ideas primarily through the use of scaffolding.
This unit scaffolds just about every other assumed unit of the
school year, and heavily scaffolds the previous multicultural
literature unit. It also scaffolds itself. For instance, students are
thinking and writing about the concept of form equals audience
plus purpose almost daily; it is being reinforced over and over
again, and that is not by accident or to be redundant. It is so when
it comes time for them to choose the appropriate form by which to
present their findings at the end of the unit, they have a plethora
of new forms to consider, and are well-versed in the audience and
purpose of each. I would say that the overall goal of the beginning
and middle of the unit is to prepare students for the end, and this
is what I hope it does.

What makes what you’ ve planned dialogic? What are you

learning about the challenges of dialogic teaching? How
specifically could you improve these plans in this regard?
Be explicit and give examples.

I’ll admit first and foremost that it’s hard to be dialogic all the
time. It was probably harder for me to engage dialogic instruction
in this unit than in any previous unit or lesson I designed, simply
because so much of it was procedural based. I find that balancing
procedural knowledge and dialogic instruction can be challenging,
because if students are new to a certain skill or concept, how can
they be engaged in learning it right from the start? However, I
think I found ways around this challenge in some key areas.

First of all, I must admit that this unit does employ more lecturing
and demonstrating than most of my prior units. Much of it starts
with me standing before the class with an overheard or computer
and introducing brand new skills, concepts, or perspectives.
However, the dialogic aspects come though when students are
called upon to contribute their experiences with these and similar
genres. For example, I accounted for a specific day during Arts
Week for students to think on any sort of genre NOT discussed in
class that may suit similar needs and purposes, now that they’ve
been given the chance to re-tool their notions of what “texts” are
and what a “genre” is. That is a day for students to carry a
discussion and for me to step out a bit and watch their prior
knowledge, experiences, and perspectives shine through. They then
have to find new genres of research without leaving the classroom.
This interactive, hands-on and considerably rule-free activity places
students in the driver’s seat of their own learning, so to speak. It
also calls on them to help inform their peers, specifically in the
discussion and small group activity.

I suppose I could improve my plans to account for more dialogic

instruction by allowing students to completely lead a demonstration
on how to use a new multimedia tool or genre. This unit assumes
that while students may have had some prior exposure to the
genres, none are proficient enough to actually teach their peers
how to use them. This may not always be true, and by keeping
this assumption, I may be excluding some wonderful, knowledgeable
students from sharing what they know with the class and perhaps
shaping the way they learn a bit more. Dialogic instruction, after
all, is more than the recall of prior knowledge and student opinion,
and that fact becomes cloudy at times. However, I will try and
keep what I’ve learned over the course of this unit (and this whole
year!) about dialogic instruction at the forefront of my goals for my
internship year and beyond.