Action Research Plan: Multigenre Research Writing

I already read Normal Lugar’s essay on the Hatfields and McCoys. I didn’t need to read it again. But when the time came to turn in our research assignment, I received one hundred papers ranging from paraphrased echoes of Luger’s words to outright copying. I wanted students to interact with the facts. What happened was transcription.

I knew this effect was my fault. I’d taught them how to find sources and cite them. I’d taught them how to read and take notes. What I hadn’t taught them was how to take what they’d read and write about it in their own voice. The problem didn’t lie in the research assignment in and of itself, but in our approach to how we wrote about what we researched.

I’d taught what I consider an expository research assignment. The students produced a standard prose essay with an introduction, body, and conclusion that informed the reader of the facts the student had learned from their reading. My failures with adequately teaching this assignment led me back to the multigenre approach. I’d first experienced this style of writing in college and found it a fascinating. I loved how it made the writer stretch their own abilities and not rely solely on tried and true methods of expression. It encouraged exploration, growth, and development; or as my state’s Curriculum Standards and Objectives termed it, “[using] the writing process to demonstrate the ability to compose a variety of written work.”

In my class, the first steps in tackling the multigenre assignment were the same as the expository research assignment. The students picked a topic; they gathered sources; they read their sources and took notes; they prepared a bibliography. But when it came time to write about their noted facts, we explored this information through creative writing. Each day, I would teach a mini-lesson on two particular styles, or genres, of writing. I would present examples and we would discuss as a class the particulars of each of these genres. Students would then be responsible for writing a piece in each genre that represented at least one fact from their research with the remaining class time. We did this activity for five days so that students had a total of ten rough draft genre pieces in their portfolios. Students were then responsible for choosing a minimum of five pieces to revise and organize into a finished, cohesive, mutligenre exploration of their research topic.

The writing I received when students turned in their multigenre assignments was worlds apart from the writing in their expository assignments. They weren’t just regurgitating the words of their primary source; they were interacting with the information and presenting it in a new and different way. I was pleased with the results and I wanted to know more about the effect of the multigenre approach on student research writing.

What I want to research is how the multigenre approach can improve student’s writing in the context of the research assignment. Specifically, I want to know how this style of assignment can limit instances of plagiarism and encourage students to explore their own unique voice while still incorporating information from primary sources. Additionally, I would like to inquire about ways the multigenre approach can be applied make research writing more authentic for the student.

I think that any instructor who incorporates research writing into their curriculum could benefit from this inquiry. Once the instructor is comfortable introducing the different styles and genres of writing, the multigenre approach can be applied to any research project.