Remixing Genres
Affiliated Project: This activity may be useful for Project III, when students are adapting their second projects into new genres. It may also function well at the beginning of the course when introducing students to the concept of genres and the way we’re using it.
Purpose of Exercise: This exercise gives students some hands-on practice with adapting their writing from one genre to another in a low-stakes environment. It helps them draw on what they already know about genres, conventions, and rhetorical strategies. Finally, it gets them thinking about the differences between content and conventions and what has to be altered/left out of content in order to shape it into a new genre with a different purpose/audience.
Description: Students will work in groups to choose a topic. Individually, have them free-write about this topic for a set amount of time. Then, with their groups, have them transform their free-writes into one collective poem. After a discussion, have them shape the poem into a recipe.
Suggested Time: 30-40 minutes
Procedure: Students will work in groups to choose a topic. The topic can be anything, but it should have a lot of components (e.g. a holiday, a sport, the circus, the beach). Individually, have students free-write about this topic for a set amount of time (5-10 minutes is usually enough). Then, with their groups, have them transform their free-writes into one collective poem. Try not to give them too much direction with this, since the idea is to have them drawing on their previous genre knowledge, not asking you for the “right” way to do this. (Some will want to look up formats for kinds of poems on the internet, which is fine, but I don’t bring it up unless they ask.)
After they’ve had 10 or 15 minutes to complete this, have several (or all) of the groups share what they wrote. Have a discussion on the differences that appeared. (e.g. What kinds of poems did they write? How did they decide? What genre knowledge did they already have?) This can lead to a discussion of poetry as a kind of umbrella genre with lots of different sets of conventions. (e.g. How did they decide which to follow? Did any groups subvert the poetic conventions?)
Next, have each group remix their poem into a recipe. Again, try not to give them a lot of instruction. When they’re finished, have groups share their recipes and talk about the genre conventions, how they knew how to “write” a recipe without any genre research, the language they used that might echo traditional recipes, etc. You might also discuss how this deviates from the traditional understanding of a recipe and becomes a kind of piece of short fiction.
You might also consider having them remediate the same text into an image on SnapChat. How did they make choices and convert alphabetic text into a visual image? In what way did the spirit of the text remain the same across the transformation? What was lost/gained? How did they feel constrained by their task and environment?