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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

multigenre writing, teaching literature, Banneker High School

College

Humanities

Department

English

Abstract

Multigenre writing is a nontraditional style of writing developed by pioneers in education such as Peter Elbow, Tom Romano, and Sirpa T. Grierson. This form of writing is ideal for high school students who view writing, especially research writing, with apathy and boredom. Dr. Grierson’s approach to multigenre writing requires students to do traditional research on a topic, but then write about it in a creative way, using their imaginations to “[fill] out ‘the bones’ of the researched facts” (Grierson 52). This method of teaching literature, reasearch, and writing has been researched and tested extensively in Utah schools, and I wanted to see how the method would fare in Washington, D.C. where I completed my student teaching at the “inner-city” Benjamin Banneker High School. I hypothesized that multigenre research writing would be highly successful among inner-city students because of what I thought were their poor reading and writing skills, their struggles with Standard English, and their general resistance to academic writing. Once I arrived in Washington, D.C., however, I found many things that contradicted my original assumptions and expectations; through these contradictions and obstacles I discovered some important things about teaching multigenre writing, and about how to best implement new teaching methods and programs.

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