I remember always hating research papers in high school. They seemed like such a waste of time, and I felt like teachers didn’t even care what you wrote in them. I tried to use as few books as possible and just fill up the required number of pages with anything I could. I remember in one of my science classes I did a 10 page paper on benzene. I know I did it, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about benzene today besides that it has something to do with gasoline. It is pretty sad that I could write ten pages about a topic, and it was so meaningless that I remember nothing about it.
Projects that allow for creativity and actually understanding and making sense of the information are so much more meaningful and memorable. In the Moulton article she talks about traditional research papers being “clip and stitch” format while multigenre papers “meld fact, interpretation, and imagination”. There is so much more involved in a multigenre paper. You not only need to acquire information, you need to make sense of it and think about it. You can’t just copy it into your own words and forget about it. You work on it, and make it your own by adding something creative and unique to it. Looking at the examples you can tell how much thought went into those projects, and how much time must have been spent on them. That process is something that those students will remember though, and be able to take pride in.
I liked the detailed description of introducing multigenre projects that was used in Writing Without Boundaries. the descriptions of how to set up writing workshop and what it included was helpful in making more sense of how to go about using this is a classroom. I loved how it even included book suggestions to be used to target certain skills. The student quotes and examples made it all seem real, and made it believable that young students can actually complete these types of projects.
I’m looking forward to the multigenre project we’re going to be doing. Just need to come up with a topic….
dt78830 said,
October 7, 2008 @ 12:48 am
Meghan, I am excited about working on the multigenre project, too. I think it will be much better than the traditional research paper. I like the way you can be creative in doing the project. I believe we will learn so much more by doing it this way. I believe it will definitely be meaningful and not meaningless.