Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 54(7)

April 2011
doi:10.1598/JA AL.54.7.6
2011 International Reading Association
(pp. 525 533)

Beyond Is This OK?: High School Writers

Building Understandings of Genre
For writers, understanding
genre means understanding
forms, structure, rhetorical
devices, and how to write
effectively in school and
beyond.

Anne Elrod Whitney | Michael Ridgeman | Gary Masquelier

he problem with much writing in schools is how false it is. For example,
many students write literary essays mimicking journal articles of a type
they have never read. They write for unspecified audiences, which really
means individual teachers, or they write for teachers or examiners posing as
outside audiences, as in letters to the principal that are never sent. They
write in genres they have never read, or they read without attention to the
work as situated in any particular discourse community other than that of the
classroom. Most of the writing they do is first-try writing in a genre, and then
they move right on to another without a chance to try again. Or, alternately,
they write again and again, with much explicit teaching, in a genre that they
encounter on tests while in school but will rarely, if ever, encounter again
outside of schoolthe timed test essaydoing so mechanically and without
attention to the origins of this genre or its connection to other genres they
might find in the wild, such as other forms of the essay.
As teachers, the three of usa high school English teacher along with a
professor of English education and a doctoral student in education who are
also former high school English teachershave all struggled to do better
than this in framing writing opportunities for our students. How can we help
students learn to write in a range of genres in the way that genres are actually
learned in the world outside schoolthrough authentic exposure and immersionrather than writing to the specifications of a teacher in contrived
circumstances?
Together, we undertook an exploration in genre study with a class of
high school writers. We wanted to see students develop into f lexible, adaptable writers who felt comfortable working in a variety of forms and could try
on styles and experiment with new ways of composing. We hoped for a class
in which kids broke free of some of their habits as writers that had frustrated
us as teachers for years, habits they had obviously formed under the inf luence
of teachers just like us, such as following formulas like the five-paragraph essay even when it did not make sense to do so, or writing only in first drafts
and deciding whether it was done by asking a teacher, Is this OK?

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Thus, in a semester-long creative writing course, we engaged

To teach genre well
students in a series of activities
is to teach students
designed to help students develop
genre awareness. Through wholeto understand
class studies of nature writing and
genres in their social
fairy tales, an unfamiliar genre
functions.
assignment
(Andrew-Vaughan
& Fleischer, 2006; Fleischer &
Andrew-Vaughan, 2009), and collaborative analyses of state test materials, we worked
together to help students build deeper understandings
about genre.

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April 2011

Understandings About Genre

526

Genre has often been taught as long lists of characteristics that teachers should make explicit for students.
There are some good reasons to do this; for example,
there are times when the discourses embodied in a
genre are so nonoverlapping with students own because of socioeconomic or historical contexts that students need a tour guide, and if we can be that guide, it
is wrong to withhold our support (Cope & Kalantzis,
1993). Yet, in practice, teaching genre often becomes
teaching genres, that is, offering genres to students
as preformed, discrete, and rigid vessels into which
students ideas might be poured. Instead, to teach
genre well is to teach students to understand genres in
their social functions.
Many have called for more deliberate attention to
genre at the secondary school level, such as Fleischer
and Andrew-Vaughan (2009), Lattimer (2003), Dean
(2008), and Sipe and Rosewarne (2006). These authors
are working from a body of theory that conceptualizes
genre as typified social action (Miller, 1984). That is,
over time, people in recurring social situations develop
consensual, conventional ways of understanding and
responding. These genres are not only forms for action within situations, but they also shape the situations
themselves and constrain, in helpful ways, the meanings one might make therein. Thus, genres are not
fixed structures that some great arbiter of writing and
its forms has decreed long ago from on high, much as it
might seem that way to student writers. Instead, genres
are living traditionstemporary, f lexible agreements
about how to get communicative jobs done.

A number of teacher-scholars have illustrated

ways of engaging students in genre-aware writing
practice (Andrew-Vaughan & Fleischer, 2006; Dean,
2008; Fleischer & Andrew-Vaughan, 2009; Lattimer,
2003; ONeill, 2001; Ranker, 2009). Although varied, these accounts share two key traits, which we
have tried to draw on in our own work. First, they involve immersing students in some purpose for wanting or needing to use a genre; students learning to
use a genre are using it not just for an assignment but
because they are preparing for some real-world event
or are being called to step into a sphere of communication or action in which the genre is a conventional form of discourse. Second, the accounts usually
involve a great deal of metatalkexplicit and selfconscious discussion about what students see in texts,
how they are constructing texts, the audiences and
settings they wish to join with their writing, and why
certain textual features are used. More often than
not, it is the students who, through this metatalk,
produce emergent, inductive lists or definitions of generic features rather than a teacher presenting features
didactically.

Working With Students on Genre

Matters
Taking these points into account, we approached students with the goal of helping them develop better
awareness of genre. Our students were enrolled at an
alternative public school located in the downtown
area of our college town. The school serves students
in grades 812, including many with learning disabilities or emotional problems along with gifted students
or others simply seeking a more f lexible curriculum.
Classes are small, and the school emphasizes including
student voice and responsibility in decision-making.
Students can meet graduation requirements through
combinations of courses at the regular high school,
courses at the local university, independent projects,
and semester-long courses offered at the school itself.
These courses meet state requirements for credits in
content areas, but they change from year to year along
with students and teachers interests. Our creative
writing course was one such English offering.
The class met every other day for 65 minutes
over a one-semester term. The population of the class

themselves the conventions of new genreswriters

who draw on their reading experiences as they write
and can bridge from genres they know well to new,
unfamiliar ones. Across all of the classroom activities,
each of which we describe in more depth below, students developed a sense of genres as discrete, grounded in distinct social worlds, and varied in purpose,
audience, and form.

Whole-Class Genre Study

Nature Writing: The Ecological Reflections Project.

Our school and university are in a rural college town

that is small in size yet, due to the annual inf lux of
40,000 undergraduate students, is more suburban than
rural in feel. Dense Pennsylvania woods and mountains surround us, yet to many students, our overnight
field trip to the Shavers Creek Environmental Center
(SCEC) was one of their first sustained experiences
exploring those mountains. SCEC, a natural educational and recreational area owned by Pennsylvania
State University, is a forested area incorporating a
creek, a lake (currently drained), trails, study plantings for forestry, a raptor rescue facility, and education center. In 2006, SCEC began the Ecological
Ref lections Project (Wing, 2007), in which one or
two professional writers are invited annually to visit
each of seven sites in the natural area and compose
writings to be combined into a 100-year archive.
We explained the Ecological Ref lections Project
to our students and invited them to take part. We
would visit SCEC, hiking to the same locations as
the professional authors, writing from these experiences, and adding our writing to the archive just
as the other authors had done. By this, we hoped to
position students as real writers in the setting. We
already believed that offering authentic assignments
and audiences was beneficial to student writers, but
our focus on genre made that especially important
here. We were trying to immerse the students in a
real discourse community rather than just the one
of our classroom and, in so doing, make available to
them the generic tools others in that same community used.
In class before the trip, students gathered examples of nature writing they found online or in print,
and we supplied models written by earlier Ecological

Beyond Is This OK?

f luctuated between 15 and 20 students. Students in

the course ranged across grades 812 with a wide
range of ability and interest levels, including academically gifted students and students with disabilities,
students who chose the course because they love to
write, and students who just needed an English credit.
The group included students from Native American,
Asian American, African American, Hispanic, and
white backgrounds. About three quarters of the students were female, and ages ranged from 14 to 18. All
students in this paper are referred to by pseudonyms.
We ultimately wanted these students to become
self-sufficient, f lexible analyzers of genre for the future. We aimed for a course in which students would
become more aware of genres as living tools. We
hoped they could come to see genres not as fixed
forms invented by teachers and evaluated by teachers,
nor as a set of different text boxes (e.g., cinquain, haiku, short story, five-paragraph essay), which they simply filled with words in an arbitrary way. Instead, we
wanted students to see genres as traditions or shared
habits, as solutions to problems that groups of writers
working under similar conditions over time share. We
hoped students would see genres as tools and, in turn,
see themselves as users of those tools, as writers who
could select, study, and shape genres themselves rather
than just completing assignments.
In their book Writing Outside Your Comfort Zone,
Fleischer and Andrew-Vaughan (2009) described a
writing course aimed at helping students become adept acquirers of new genres. Their course is designed
to help students think about genres and develop skills
of genre analysis. We drew heavily on their vision of
a genre-focused English class, organizing three major
sequences of activities across our one-semester course.
In the first sequence, we invited students to study single genres as a whole class, first by becoming nature
writers and later by looking together at fairy tales. In
the second sequence, students each selected their own
new or challenging genres to study in the manner of
Fleischer and Andrew-Vaughans unfamiliar genre
project. Third, we worked together to examine test
writing and ref lected on its status as a must-do genre
for students.
We believe that work with genre study can encourage f lexible, aware writers who can discern for

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April 2011
54(7)
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

528

Ref lections Project authors as well

as other published nature writing.
Our goal in these
The class then analyzed those examples and developed a descripdiscussions was to
tion of common features of nature
develop the idea
writing, first in small groups and
that genres are not
then on the board. The students
magically set in
list ref lected the slipperiness of the
genre as well as some of the prestone but develop
conceptions they had about nature
over time.
writing: They brought only poems, and they characterized nature
writing as adventurous, isolated, imaginative, expressing many emotions,
and having no rules. The students did not list other
features sometimes found in nature writing that we
teachers had discussed beforehand and had expected
to see listed, such as offering social or political critique
or including biological or other scientific information.
If we had set out to teach genres as discrete forms
in a more traditional manner, we might have stepped
in here to correct some of these ideas, such as the idea
that nature writers are isolated in the romanticized
sense of a lone writer sitting beneath a tree in silence.
Instead, we directed students attention again to the
samples, which included a broad range of pieces that
we all agreed could be classified as nature writing,
and which contradicted some of the features students
had brainstormed. We reminded them that their initial
ideas were bound to change as their experience as nature writers deepened. Later, as students wrote, we tried
to help them navigate their emerging understandings of
the nature writing genres functions and forms.
We next took an overnight field trip to the nature center. One of the professional authors involved
greeted the students as fellow authors and participants
in the 100-year project, which helped us position the
students as real members of the discourse community and thus real users of the nature writing genre.
Over a two-day period, students hiked and wrote,
taking notebooks to each SCEC site. At each site, students dispersed, perching on rocks or logs, climbing
embankments, or nestling themselves beneath trees to
write. When we returned to the classroom, students
engaged in peer response and then revised their work
for inclusion in a printed class anthology. This was also
contributed to the SCEC archive.

Students final products varied in form and content more than their initial analyses of the nature
writing genre might indicate. Although approximately three quarters of the class elected to write poems,
the content of the poems went beyond the isolated
speaker expressing many emotions that their discussions might have led us to expect. Soren, for example,
offered a commentary on connectedness in nature in
his poem Mutation:
A slight mutation
Can save the lives of thousands
Or take life away

Kerrys contribution similarly ref lected an advance in

her sense of the functions of the nature writing genre;
she pointed to nature not only in the woods but also
in an urban landscape, noting concrete sidewalks and
cities as places where life can be found.
A third student, Dean, moved away from poetry,
using the occasion to compose a memoir:
Memories
One of my favorite memories is when my Aunt and
my Uncle took me to Shavers Creek to fish. The time
they took me the lake at Shavers still had water in the
lake. We took out their fishing boat to fish off of. For
the people that brought in their boats could only use a
trolling motor. That day I caught 7 fish and we got a
total of 10 fish out of that lake.
Now returning to the lake to do writing reminded
me of that day. The memory that I have is good to look
back and you see how things change in time.

Overall, we hoped that our ventures in nature

writing would help students think more complexly
about what it meant to try a genre by joining a common project (which all users of genres do, even when
their communicative projects are not as explicitly
common as ours), discerning appropriate rhetorical
moves through observation and analysis of other users
of the genre, and adapting those conventions to current needs.
Unpacking the Fairy Tale. After the nature writing unit,

we again studied a genre as a whole class, this time with

more explicit attention to articulating understandings of what genres are and where they come from.
Although we had originally intended for the nature
writing project to do this on its own, we found that

Dean:

It has a prince.

Catherine: They get married.

Sierra:

The moral of the story is . . .

There were common features of the texts that

helped them qualify for inclusion in the fairy tale
genre. Once the whole list was on the board, it became apparent that these features included characters (e.g., princesses, dragons, stepmothers), drawings
(e.g., fancy dresses, fanciful colors), themes (e.g., rich
vs. poor, true love), and even specific vocabulary and
phrasing (e.g., once upon a time).
Then, we read aloud from Robert Munschs The
Paper Bag Princess, an alternative fairy tale in which
girl rescues boy, and the heroine rejects the fairy tale
staples of beauty and marriage. The class discussed
how that text is both recognizable as a fairy tale (e.g.,
princess, dragon, rescue) and challenges what fairy
tales conventionally say and do (e.g., draws attention
to and reframes the gender politics of stories with a
damsel in distress and of inner vs. outer beauty). As
the students observed,
Rosa: The girls more mentally strong and

Catherine: Its the theme of the century! Feminism!

Women ran for president and vice president, and its just taking over, and I think
this [story] contributes to it.
Our goal in these discussions was to develop the
idea that genres are not magically set in stone but develop over time. They both ref lect and shape the conditions from which the writing emerges; for example,
fairy tales ref lect a cultures expectations for women
and also shape those expectations, and texts like The
Paper Bag Princess acknowledge and capitalize on that
shaping potential as well. Having now practiced some
of these ideas about genres and their functions in two
whole-class genre studies, we posed a challenge to
students: Select and write in a genre that is new or
challenging to you.

Accepting a Genre Challenge

Students, therefore, next embarked on individualized
genre study and writing. In this, we closely followed
the example of Fleischer and Andrew-Vaughan (2009),
although we can certainly see many ways in which
their approach is much more developed than our own
as beginners. As a class, we first generated a list of
all the genres we could think of, which ranged from
detective novels to sonnets to legal briefs to text messages. The list filled the board as it grew, and students
seemed to realize the very broad range of genres in
which they had significant experience reading, if not
writing. Students selected genres in which they were
not currently comfortable writing, and they wrote
proposal letters to us explaining why they found that
genre challenging or intimidating, what their previous experiences were in reading and writing in the
genre, and how they might go about learning more
about its origins and conventions.
A few examples illustrate how students were
thinking about genres during this activity. James, for
example, proposed to write a horror story. He explained that horror is
much harder than what I usually write which is fantasy
fiction and romanceIm better at creating drama and
romance, things that deal with emotional problems
and issues. It will be more difficult to express through
words a characters utter fright and delirious thought
when under extreme pressure.

Beyond Is This OK?

the excitement and logistics of preparing for the trip

had sometimes stopped us from going as far with the
genre idea as we wanted. Upon our return to school,
we saw a need to pause and talk explicitly about what
we meant when we say genre. After all, our goal was
not to teach students to write well in specific genres,
such as nature writing, lyric poetry, or advertisements,
although that is indeed an outcome of genre study.
Instead, we wanted to engage the class in metatalk
about what genres are and how they function.
To do this, we looked together at a genre that was
already familiar to the students: the fairy tale as seen in
childrens picture books. Annes (first author) 2-yearold daughter had many examples of these on her bookshelf to share: Disney versions, a pop-up book circa
1960, animal versions, and more. We distributed books
to the students, small groups spent a few moments leafing through one of the examples, and then each group
reported to the class. Everyone agreed these were fairy
tales, but how did they know? Together, we compiled a
list of clues, with students calling out fairy tale features
to add to a list on the board:

529

In this way James drew on antecedent genres, ones with

which he was comfortable already, then bridged into
the new genre by considering what different content
would need to be expressed thereincontent that regular readers of the horror genre, and thus the discourse
community to which he would need to direct his efforts,
would expect. Here, James astutely identifies ways his
chosen genre resembles and departs from conventions
of antecedent genres with which he is more familiar.
He is beginning, in a basic and initial way, to develop
a sense of the features (e.g., fright, delirious thought)
and purposes (e.g., exploring experience of characters
under extreme pressure) of his target genre. Although
these thoughts are tentative, they mark an entry point
through which he began to research the genre, through
attentive reading and exploratory writing.
Dean, conversely, chose a genre for which he
seemed to have no antecedent experience; however,
he could imagine himself in the role that his target
genre would require him to occupy:

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April 2011

I would really like to write a couple of toasts. I have

never seen this type of writing, nor have I ever used
this at any point in my life. I think it is going to be a
challenge for me because I usually write disaster and
war stories, nothing this formal. I think it would also
be fun to write because you can make them funny too,
and I have a wonderful sense of humor.

530

Although Dean claimed he had never seen this type

of writing, we are certain he has seen toasts delivered orally in films, if not in person. He distinguished
the genre as somehow more formal than genres he
had worked in; although many adults who have given toasts extemporaneously might disagree, we read
Deans proposal as referring not to the format of the
written piece but to the formality of the situation in
which a toast is used: milestone celebrations in the
presence of distinguished guests.
Deans persona in the classroom was usually reserved and rather flat in affect. His in-class remarks and
written responses were usually short, just a few words
or a single sentence, and delivered in a tone of voice
that seemed reluctant to the three of us. Yet, writing a
toast would call for him to enter a different role: leader
of the table conversation, celebrant of a group event,
and speaker for the gravity of the situation. In a situation like a banquet or celebration, he would need to

occupy a very different social-communicative position

from the one he occupied in the classroom. These were
not habits of communication that Dean had exercised
much in his other writing, yet he could find a way into
this unfamiliar situation by noting that he was well
equipped for the humor it would require.
These examples show students drawing on
emerging senses of the recurring social-communicative settings of which their target genres are artifacts. We note also that students did in fact accept the
genre challenge, even those whom we would otherwise characterize as reluctant writers or disengaged
students. We think they invested themselves in this
task because they were able to place themselves in the
social situation associated with a particular genre. Just
as when they became nature writers by virtue of their
inclusion in the Ecological Ref lections Project, they
became users of their chosen genre by choosing it.
We did not invent their investment by assigning or
grading; they invented it by attending to life situations
they were in (e.g., toastmaster at a family gathering) or
wanted to join (e.g., the ranks of social commentators
and critics who used parody to make their critiques).
Next, the students gathered examples of writing
in the genre, analyzing these first alone and then in
more depth in class. We asked them to address a series
of questions as they looked at their examples, which
we provided on a handout:
What are common traits found in these examples?
What are differences between these examples?
Who is/are the audience(s) for these examples?
If asked to provide instructions to others on how
to write in this genre, what would you advise?
W hat is/are the function(s) of writing in this
genre? In other words, what purposes does this
genre serve for the writer? For the reader? For
society?
Some students found this analysis more difficult
than others. Soren, who had decided to write a picaresque after learning the term in connection to Twains
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in another English class,
correctly discerned that this genre is a vehicle for social
commentary. He noted, The themes usually tend to
depict how bad things are in the world and with the

In time, and particularly through

our discussions of revision, we noted subtle shifts in the ways students
framed questions about their work.
Our project culminated in
a day of ref lection, in which we
had a read-aloud to celebrate the
work and then ref lected on its
significance. Dean eventually offered three toasts, and one in particular captured both the humor
he brought with him to the task
and his newly understood sense of
the layers of meaning in marking
an occasion with a toast. Toasting an
leagues retirement, he remarked,

Students did in fact

accept the genre
challenge, even
those whom we
would otherwise
characterize as
reluctant writers or
disengaged students.

imaginary col-

Heres to the next step in life

Heres to freedom, except from your spouse
Heres to all the extra time
Heres to a happy retirement

His jibe about except from your spouse ref lects an

understanding of the ribbing that is conventional at
such events, and the rest of the toast ref lects an understanding of the retirees likely hopes for the future.
Similarly, Kims eulogy includes comments meant
for those who did not know the decedent well by listing the persons interests and club memberships, comments meant for those close to the decedent (e.g., She
always told me that her friends were what kept her
going), and comments perhaps directed toward the
decedent herself, listing all the ways in which she will
be remembered. The students work showed that in
preparing their pieces, they had inserted themselves
into the appropriate social milieu and adopted the
conventions of that scene for accomplishing their purposes within the genre.

Talking About Test Writing

As the course drew to a close, we engaged in some
deliberate conversations about writing beyond our semester course. Very soon those students would leave
our class setting and move into othersother classes, college, and the wider worldin which different
genre understandings prevailed, and they would need
to be able to pick up those new understandings to

Beyond Is This OK?

lower social class. Yet, he seemed to disconnect from

this insight when describing the audience for his target genre, claiming that its audience is anyone who
wants to pick it up as opposed to, say, people already
feeling critical of the society portrayed in the novel or,
perhaps, perpetrators of its injustices.
Another student, Kim, planned to write a eulogy, and she noted in her analysis of eulogies written
by others that usually the audience for a eulogy is
people who all knew the victim well and who loved
him/her, yet it is also sometimes the case that the
audience could be a large group of people who did
not seem to know the deceased as wellwhich made
it a more formal overview of the persons life. Here,
she shows an understanding that the task of the eulogy
is both to inform general acquaintances in attendance
about the decedents activities and accomplishments as
well as to mark the significance of the death for close
loved ones. Yet, she was able to add to this description
of audience in an even more nuanced way as well,
pointing out that often the person who is deceased is
believed to be an audience member as well, and this
can affect the eulogy itself. One would say different
things about the decedent depending on the relationship you had had with him or her, who was in the audience, and the extent to which you felt responsible to
or watched over by that person after his or her death.
Students next drafted, received feedback on, and
revised their own attempts at writing in the genre.
Throughout the process, we noted shifts in the ways
students spoke about their writing. At first, they frequently looked to teachers as authorities on what
would be appropriate in a genre. When beginning
first drafts, students can be seen on video asking,
Is this long enough? Am I finished? and Is this
OK? We tried to answer questions like these with
prompts, such as, How long are the examples you
studied? What do you think based on what you
know about? How do you think fans of [your
chosen genre] would respond? For example, when
Sierra, who was writing a song, stalled when describing her plans for revision, Gary stepped in to ask,
How many verses do you have? and How long is
the average song that you hear? Sierra was able to
count her five verses, note that a song is usually two
or three minutes, and set to work revising from there.

531

participate fully as writers in those new settings. In our

one-class community, they began to think of genres
as sets of conventions that are socially constructed for
recurring writing purposes within particular communities, but we wanted them to see that such thinking
would serve them well outside our class as well.
So, we looked together at our state test. Students
read released student essays and the state-provided
scoring rationales for them. We discussed how largescale test essays were actually read and scored:
Anne: How long do we think these people spend
reading the work?
Benton:

Not long enough.

Soren: I would say they read through it twice

probably.

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April 2011

Catherine: I think they probably spend three minutes.

532

This last guess, which we were able to confirm was

about right based on our own experiences as graders
of large-scale assessments, was especially shocking to
our students. They had imagined that a reader spent
1020 minutes on each essay, when in fact it is closer
to 2 minutes.
Gary (third author) told of his experiences applying for a position as an online reader for a testing
company, and the students were surprised at the relatively small amount of training provided for people
in that role. Additionally, we talked about our various experiences in writing for tests. Students shared
their recollections of prompts they had encountered
on high-stakes examinations:
Soren: The prompts a lot of times are really general
and not very interesting. . . . Ive been trying
to remember what I took on the SATs.
Gayle (a senior who had taken SATs a semester before):
I dont remember anything about the SATsat
all.
We discussed the effect that high-stakes situations
had on the way we looked at writing prompts. Soren,
for example, recalled facing a prompt for a scholarship
essay which read, Why do you want this scholarship? He recalled feeling incredulous: Why wouldnt
I want a scholarship? We also shared times we had
seriously missed the mark by writing too far outside

the conventions of the genre to satisfy readers. Anne,

for example, told a story of a time, as a high school
student, when she submitted a poem as her essay
on an application for an academic award and her later
realization that she would likely have won the award
were it not for that choice.
This discussion, which occurred in December,
marked the end of our course. Many of these students (i.e., those taking grade 8 and grade 11 state tests
along with those taking college entrance exams) would
find themselves writing test essays for real that spring.
Although it was beyond the scope of our research agreement with the school district to follow these students
through the spring, we would be eager to know how
they approached the writing situations they encountered there and how, if at all, they drew on our discussions and their experiences with genre study. Our hope
for students is that they see the test essay genre, like any
other genre, not as an arbitrary form to be mimicked
unthinkingly but as a set of conventions for communicating in a particular social context and moment.

Conclusions and Next Steps

Although we see many ways to improve and build
on our efforts, we are hopeful about their potential.
Through our work together, students seemed to see
school genres (e.g., the timed test essay) as typified responses to recurring social situations, just like any other
genre. That is, we hoped they would understand that
writing well, inside or outside of school, is not simply
a matter of writing without errors, as many students
understand writing, or even of following closely the
instructions provided by teachers. Instead, it is a matter
of learning about the writing situation one finds oneself inits participants, its history, and its politics
and responding appropriately using the patterns that
our predecessors in those situations have developed
over time. We think it is our responsibility as teachers
to help students unpack these processes and practice
them in a way that is explicit and self-conscious.
Our students still have much to learn, of course,
but we feel they have at least made advances in thinking of writing as genred and in gaining control as
they move between genres in the various writing situations of their lives. One concrete place we see this is
in the questions they tended to ask us as they showed

us their work toward the end of the semester. Instead

of asking, Is this OK?meaning Can I stop working on it and still get a good grade? which is a reasonable, albeit annoying, question in a classroom in which
the purpose of writing is to fulfill a teachers expectationsthey instead asked, What do you think of
this? or Can you help me with this? Although
these are subtle changes in phrasing, we speculate that
they signal a shift in the locus of students orientations to us as teachersfrom assigners and evaluators
to fellow practitioners, although specially experienced
practitioners, of the crafts of genre analysis and writing, and their orientations to writing, from school task
to communicative task, and from the following of formats to the appropriation and adaptation of genres.
Their sense of what is OK shifted, at least for a
while, from successful evaluation by a teacher to successful navigation of the demands of a given rhetorical
situation by producing texts that regular readers of a
genre would actually recognize and even appreciate.
We want students to become more genre-savvy not
just to write more effectively but also to take ownership of their writing as a tool for social life.

powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing (pp. 6389).

Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Dean, D. (2008). Genre theory: Teaching, writing, and being. Urbana,
IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
Fleischer, C., & Andrew-Vaughan, S. (2009). Writing outside
your comfort zone: Helping students navigate unfamiliar genres.
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Lattimer, H. (2003). Thinking through genre: Units of study in reading
and writing workshops 412. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.
Miller, C.R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of
Speech, 70(2), 151167. doi:10.1080/00335638409383686
ONeill, D.K. (2001). Knowing when youve brought them in:
Scientif ic genre knowledge and communities of practice.
Journal of the Learning Sciences, 10(3), 223264. doi:10.1207/S15
327809JLS1003_1
Ranker, J. (2009). Learning nonfiction in an ESL class: The interaction of situated practice and teacher scaffolding in a genre
study. The Reading Teacher, 62(7), 580589. doi:10.1598/
RT.62.7.4
Sipe, R.B., & Rosewarne, T. (2006). Purposeful writing: Genre
study in the secondary writing workshop. Portsmouth, NH:
Heinemann.
Wing, K. (2007). Turning over a new leaf: Shavers Creek
Environmental Center takes its engagement to new heights.
Penn State Outreach, Spring, 911.

Whitney teaches at Pennsylvania State University,

University Park, USA; e-mail awhitney@psu.edu.

References

Ridgeman is a doctoral candidate at Pennsylvania State

Andrew-Vaughan, S., & Fleischer, C. (2006). Researching writing: The unfamiliar-genre research project. English Journal,
95(4), 3642.
Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (1993). The power of literacy and
the literacy of power. In B. Cope & M. Kalantzis (Eds.), The

University; e-mail mar456@psu.edu.

Masquelier teaches in the Delta Program of the State
College Area School District, Pennsylvania, USA; e-mail

Beyond Is This OK?

glm11@scasd.org.

533

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