Foundations of Teaching Genre Critique

A critical genre awareness pedagogy “opens students to see genres as created by people to achieve aims, not just as pre-existing and irrevocable constructs into which they must fit.”

Devitt, 2010, p. 348^[1]

Teaching genre critique is genre awareness at its most critical. This pedagogical approach requires the instructor to move past teaching simple awareness of the existence of genres towards teaching students to question the motivation behind the genres with which they interact.

This approach to teaching is the method most closely tied to the arguments made by RGT. It asks students to explicitly consider how groups (students or otherwise) negotiate, adopt, and perpetuate different genres that ultimately construct social situations and the cultural norms. This is not to discount teaching particular genres or genre awareness as these act as the foundation and building blocks necessary to achieve critique.

For the composition classroom, Devitt (2010)^[2] suggested teaching genre critique using an instructional cycle in which students analyze, use, critique, and change a writing genre according to their needs, only to start the process all over again.

Practically, this can occur in several ways. One example starts with introducing students to the personal narrative genre, asking them to create an outline mimicking the genre. After the outline is made, students consider how the personal narrative genre limits or alters what they would ideally say or do for the subject. For example, they may find more success with a change in modality in their presentation or take a different direction on the assumed audience for their work. In the end, students complete their personal narrative using this alternative approach, but also take time to reflect on how the genre’s rules helped, hindered, and influenced their work.

The Writing about Writing (WAW) movement in composition studies is a useful example of teaching genre awareness and genre critique. Elizabeth Wardle (2009)^[3], a co-developer with Douglas Downs of the approach, described how the classroom experience is too often an inauthentic and decontextualized rhetorical situation inhibiting learning of transferable genre knowledge. Consider, for example, what happens when you ask students to search in a database for random topics.  You may see little engagement during or transfer after these exercises. This is because the situation isn’t a fully immersive experience and students don’t get to learn the genre in a way that means anything to them.

WAW is an attempt to contextualize the rhetorical situation in which students learn in the composition classroom by teaching writing as a discipline rather than a skill required to succeed in other disciplines. To do so, instead of teaching students how to write, WAW teaches students about writing. In WAW, students think, learn, and write about writing, rather than write about topics outside of composition’s domain. WAW instruction, according to Wardle (2009), should include information on how:

• People use writing
• People learn to write
• Genres mediate situations in society
• Discourse communities change or validate genres
• Writing changes across disciplines

Genre critique within the contextual domain of the writing subject may well develop from the WAW instructional approach.