Hints of budding multigenre success

I think one of the difficulties I had the first year (aside from the fact that it was the first year of a brand new school and programme and country for me) was that I didn’t have an appropriate anchor for the project. I needed somewhere to start that would show students the importance and inherent reward in research. I decided this year to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot with the MYP 5 group. It is an amazing story with many angles for inquiry, but it is also a work of research that the author became invested in personally. The book is written in a creative non-fiction style that makes the scientific bits accessible and it uses primary source material to bring the research to life for readers. I’ve found it to be a perfect jumping-off point for multigenre inquiry.

I also felt that in my first year of experience with multigenre that I didn’t give the students enough opportunity to practice with different genres nor did I model different types of writing enough for them. The book has given us endless prompts for multigenre practice that both gives me formative feedback on how students are understanding the story and gives them experience with using research to inspire genre writing.

For example, last week we attempted to compose a poem based on the first few chapters of the story. I told students they could write a poem based on anything that came to mind from the text. This was challenging for some students, particularly the English language learners, but everyone came away with something in their writer’s notebooks – even me! After writing in their notebooks for about 15 minutes, I asked students to share their poems with the others at their tables and discuss why they made certain decisions about content and form. This discussion allowed students to use literary language (I heard words like “rhyme scheme” and “haiku” floating around) and forced them to reflect and rationalize some of their decisions. In hindsight I think starting with a poem was too intimidating for students and I might move it to a later week in the project, but it was successful despite how shy students were in sharing their work.

This successful interaction, though it took some time, told me I was on to something and I got excited. Maybe this year’s multigenre project would be different!

This week I decided to give multigenre practice a second go around, but with a far less literary genre: the to-do list. After some discussion of what exactly a “to-do list” is for some of the English language learners, we dove into practice. We had just finished reading a painful chapter from the book in which Henrietta Lacks is in the throes of a cancer that is metastasizing and literally eating her insides. I asked students to write a to-do list from Henrietta’s perspective – what would be on this woman’s to-do list in this moment? The results were exciting and led to even more discussion among students, some of them very philosophical. I think this genre was a good one to do because it was small, familiar and truly demonstrated for students how even the most common genres can be used to powerful effect. A few of them started jotting down ideas for their own projects after this bit of practice. I imagine I will be seeing the to-do list in more than a few projects.

Right now students have finalized their topics and they are beginning to do some research. This week they need to find their first source and do an annotation to start their annotated bibliographies. I have also asked students to add some genre ideas to their annotations after using the source and to consider what types of writing they could do to show their learning.

My requirements for the task are quite general. The project should include:

• a “dear reader” letter
• 5 genres with rationales for each – one creative, one informational, the rest is left up to the student
• 5 sources – one human, one print, one multimedia, the rest is left up to the student
• annotated bibliography
• form rationale in which the student explains the form of the project (book, website, etc.)