Conversations about Genre, part 9
A response letter from Amy
I hope you have been able to read the students’ letters in the preceding 6 episodes in this series .After reading such rich and engaged letters from the students, I found myself thinking deeply about their insights and perceptions — and about their questions.The result is a rather long letter that reflects on how my thinking has changed (and not changed), the teaching practices that have stuck with me, and what genre has meant to me. The length of this letter definitely violates the expectations of Medium readers, but I respond to all the students’ letters at once, and I want my letter to be just one part of this conversation about genre.
Amy J. Devitt, April 2, 2021
April 2, 2021
Dear students of Julián Felipe Ávila Aguilar from the “Géneros Discursivos Escritos en inglés VI” course from Universidad del Valle (Sara, Juan Diego, Carol, Fanny and Leidy, Ángela, Favian, Daniela and Miguel, Leyla, Maria Paula, Pau and Valentina, Faubricio Trullo, Stephannie, Andres Felipe, Dick Morales, and Luisa, Alejandra, Melany, Jazmín and Jhoana, and Valentina, Jhoan, Sandra, and Valentina — and I hope I got all of your names and all in your preferred forms!):
Thank you for writing to me so thoughtfully and vividly. I have never had the pleasure of hearing so directly from all the students in a class studying my work before. It is a treat for me. I appreciate the time and care you took to understand my article and theory of genre, as well as to write/record your letters to me. I’m happy that you found the ideas eye-opening, and, especially, that you recognize that you are and should be actively contributing to every genre you write — like this one! Since I understand that many if not all of you are future teachers, your understanding and use of genre matter even more than for most people.
I’d like to thank your teacher, Julian Avila, too. Not only did he make contact and create this opportunity for us to exchange ideas, but he also taught my article in the context of others. I’m honored to be in the company in your reading of Michel Foucault and David Bleich, and I’m very happy to have been “the cherry on the top of the cake,” as Leyla, Maria Paula, Pau and Valentina so cheerfully expressed it. I’m sorry I won’t be able to respond to each of you separately in this letter, but do know that I thoroughly read and enjoyed every one of your letters, in all their forms.
Your letters demonstrate how clearly you have grasped this new conception of genre, even though many of you found it challenging to understand. As you said, genre is dynamic, not static, constantly changing, and enmeshed in its social contexts. And you’ve asked excellent and perceptive questions. Because you did ask such smart questions, I’m afraid some of my answers will be long and maybe complicated.
One repeated question is about how my views have changed since writing the article that was published in 1993. I certainly hope my views have changed over almost thirty years! This article did appear a long time ago, and many in my field have expanded and complicated our understanding of genre. One of the big ways my thinking has developed has been to see genre as much more ideological and powerful than I originally conceived. Genres shape us, as we shape genres. I had read Foucault before writing my article, but I wasn’t making the kinds of insightful connections you in your class have made. Many scholars since then have pointed out that the discourse creates us, too, and I’ve come to see critical genre awareness as especially important to teach. It’s important to understand that the genres we learn and use encourage some ways of thinking and acting and discourage others. The genres we teach and learn in school push us toward certain ways of viewing knowledge and truth and what we should value. Our academic genres tend to favor evidence and data over feelings, for example, and research papers might teach us that some kinds of information are more important than other kinds. All that is good, of course, for what we want to teach and learn in our schools. But is there more we want students to learn, too? What genres do we teach in school that encourage students to question what the experts say, for example, or to figure out how to value our feelings and traditions alongside data and evidence? I’m not saying we shouldn’t value science!! After all, I am a highly educated person who has been well-trained in academic ways of thinking, so of course I think they are very important and valuable. But I have come to recognize that every genre shapes our thinking in some ways. I want both my students and me to be aware of those ways and question whether that’s what they want.
Some of you asked whether my views on genre have changed in particular because of new genres and platforms that have emerged. I actually think the newly emerging genres have confirmed my ways of seeing genre. New genres keep popping up on every new version of social media (tweets, stories, pins, updates, status postings, and so many more every day!), and old genres get used in new ways on digital and virtual platforms. Yet genres keep acting basically the same way, changing in response to those changing situations and contexts. People keep adapting and using the genres we have in new platforms and contexts, and creating new genres when needed. No, I don’t think there can be too many genres. The more genres there are the more options there are for ways people can act. The genres have changed a lot, but the theory of genre still works, I think. Of course, some of you may disagree since you are much more knowledgeable about the newer genres than I am, even though I try to stay involved.
So yes, my “new concept” is now an “old one,” as Valentina, Jhoan, Sandra, and Valentina put it so delightfully, but I think it’s still an oldie but goodie (to use an old-fashioned expression).
Many of your questions were about teaching genre. That makes sense for future teachers, and I love talking about how to teach genre. I teach my students a critical genre awareness instead of teaching only the expectations of particular genres. So I teach students what genres are and how they operate, as you read about. And then I teach them how to analyze any genre by figuring out its contexts, its rhetorical situations, and why the forms, contents, expectations are what they are. To make it easier for students to understand (it can be a challenging shift of perspective, as you noted), I use lots of examples. On the first day, I use the syllabus as an example (I’ve written about the syllabus on my blog https://www.amydevittcom/genre-coloredglasses/syllabus-as-genre if you search “syllabus” and want to read more about it.) We talk about why the syllabus is the way it is, how it meets the needs of students to know what to expect in a course and the teacher to lay out expectations. But we also talk about what it might look like if students wrote it instead of teachers, or if they collaborated on it. What if a syllabus had the purpose to invite students into the course?
So I help students practice understanding the rhetoric of the genres they want to write and that they read. Because I now recognize the force of genres, I also teach them to recognize the power behind those genre expectations and how they are being encouraged to act. When they start learning the genres expected of teachers, for example, how are those genres shaping their behavior? If you write lesson plans in your system, why are they structured the way they are? What aspects of teaching do they make most important, absolutely necessary to include, and what do they leave out? Do they leave room for student input, for unexpected discoveries? Do they value following the curriculum more than following the students? These are just questions to begin asking. With the syllabus example, I bring in the institutional setting: How does its institutional setting limit what a teacher can do in a syllabus? I’ve written syllabuses that break the conventions, but I can do that because I’m a full professor who wouldn’t be chastised or lose her job over not doing the usual. What about beginning teachers? They probably have to be more careful. These are issues you asked about, and you’re right that challenging the system is not so easy. We may have to make changes more gradually, or in smaller ways, or look to the most powerful people in our communities to push for change.
Some of you point out that you think school discourages critical thinking and encourages conforming to existing practices, and I’d say students too find their work is easier if they follow conventions that are given to them. After all, genres aren’t evil. They help people do the work they need and want to do. Sometimes it’s difficult to get students to question when they’ve been trained to conform and just want templates to follow. But existing practices should always be questioned as we practice critical thinking. Challenging existing conventions is hard work, and in some contexts it can have negative consequences. You have to follow expected ways to keep your job, to get good grades in school, or to publish scholarly articles! But I heartily approve of and agree with the assertion of Sara, Juan Diego, Carol, Fanny and Leidy that, “Education today needs to move towards an unlearning environment, an environment where we stop repeating obsolete ideas that hinder the proper development of society.” New notions of genre definitely can be part of that unlearning, once people see which genres or genre expectations are obsolete and hindering them instead of helping or serving their ends. Once we recognize, as Ángela, Favian, Daniela and Miguel write, “that it is human being who establish the rules and that we have the right (as a society) to decide how we want to write according to the changes of our social practices,” we see our power as both individuals and as social groups to act deliberately to do what we think best. We can take more control over what Alejandra, Melany, Jazmín and Jhoana call a “‘collective subjectivity’ that influences its construction,” leaving room so that, as they wrote, “when writers let their subjectivity guide them, they begin to construct genre.”
Varying from expected genre conventions is not so easy, though, as the experience of Leyla, Maria Paula, Pau and Valentina showed. Trying to break away from the usual, they wanted to write a comic instead but were, as they wrote, “facing this dilemma between being misunderstood and showing our conception of a genre or just following a template and takingthe risk of losing our essence as writers.” As they discovered, trying to write a comic when the situation calls for a professional letter didn’t work for them because the situation and the discourse can’t be separated, they “complete each other.” As many of you wrote, the context and the discourse combine, are one.
But even following conventional genres requires writers to act and make individual decisions. As Faubricio Trullo, Stephannie, Andres Felipe, Dick Morales, and Luisa pointed out, “Even if having genres means having a ‘pattern’, when writing, we have to make decisions that allow us to create, to construct, to shape reality,” even though the discourse does construct us, too.
Some educational systems have incorporated these new views of genre (to answer one of the questions from Valentina, Jhoan, Sandra, and Valentina). I’m aware of full genre curricula in Australia and Brazil, in particular, and some individual schools and programs in the United States have developed genre curricula in their writing courses. But all of you are right that the traditional notions of genre (and the false dichotomies that go with them, of society and individual, for example) are persistent. One part of that answer is the persistence and calcification of “genre” as a concept that serves particular communities. Think of how librarians, literary scholars, teachers of writing, and bookstore owners use genre to help them classify what they study. It makes their work easier, just as existing genres themselves make all of our work easier. But the newer perceptions of genre have become more common in lots of fields, including literature and education, so it may just be a matter of time waiting for newer understandings of genre to become the common ones. Maybe each of you will help that happen.
Even though I see these richer understandings of genre becoming more common, I still usually start any workshop or talk I give by explaining what I mean by “genre” and how it’s different from what my audience might think. And it has been a challenge in my career and my teaching that I have to always battle those conventional meanings. Sometimes I wish I had used a different word for what I was talking about (though I don’t know of a word in English that would work better than “genre”). Some of you asked about how genre has affected my career and my teaching, and I’d say it has all been positive. Besides making my professional reputation, it has opened my eyes to how communities use writing to achieve their ends and to initiate new members. It has helped me see how genres are shaping my own ways of acting, and sometimes limiting how I see life. I’ve become more impatient with the genre of scholarly article, as I’ve come to see how it encourages writers to take on the role of expert rather than discoverer, and how it pushes distance between the writer and readers. That’s all the more reason I have been glad for this experience of having conversations with you through our letters.
Well, this has been a really long letter. I bet you didn’t know you’d have another article to read in response to your letters. I hope I have answered your questions well enough. Thank you again for taking the time and effort to study my work and to share your thoughts with me. I wish you each the best in your futures, wherever they may go after these strange times.
Sincerely,
Amy
Amy J. Devitt
Professor Emerita
University of Kansas
If you have gotten this far, I am grateful. I hope you discovered, as I did, that these students were worth listening to and their questions worth considering. Genre is a rich topic; the letter genre they used to write to me helped enable this rich human exchange . Please feel free to send your own responses to their questions or my response and we can continue these Conversations about Genre.
