Blog #2: Genre Awareness

After reading Amy Devitt's research article titled, "Teaching Critical Genre Awareness," I realized how completely unaware I was of the problem in genre pedagogy in the first place. English curricula across the board have been traditionally one-dimensional in regards to genre teaching. In her paper Devitt states that if you were to, "Ask students to write about the current candidates for president or to apply feminist theory to a literary work, and many will write five-paragraph themes (341)." This claim is absolutely true since the five-paragraph theme is completely hardwired into students' brains – it’s simply second nature. Students abide by what genres they know, what they've been taught, and what they've been trained to master. Any deviation from the standard genres taught in the classroom, in my personal experience, have generally been met with criticism and negative feedback. This strict regulation demonstrates how current teaching methods are far from fluidity. To be fair, all of the English courses I've taken thus far have been lower division in which the instructors stress proficiency in basic rhetorical devices, strategies, and analysis. The easiest way for professors to teach these basic skills is through repetition of the standard five-paragraph theme.

Upper division writing, however, is a whole different ballpark. Being enrolled in a "W" class means that one already has a good understanding of persuasive writing. Breaking down Devitt's three generic genre pedagogies, I would say teaching genres as particles would be lower division writing, teaching genres as fields would be upper division writing, and teaching genres as waves would be a conduit between the two. Here we see a shift to a higher form of learning by changing our focus to "academic skills (such) as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation" and "to consider how different audiences and contexts shape the rhetorical situations" as described in our course catalog.

This is when critical genre awareness becomes wholly important. As students become more specialized throughout their course of professional development, it’s easy to become engrossed in one or only a few definite genres. We’re intrigued by the things that are pertinent to our specific interests and then render everything else irrelevant. Devitt’s claim that, "When writers take up a genre, they take up that genre's ideology" (339) explains how the genres a person uses help develop that person’s identity whether its personal, professional, or anything in between.

Devitt’s argument about the importance of critical genre awareness is something to take note of. Genre awareness allows people to have a liberal point of view when reading different types of literature intended for specific audiences. With genre awareness we become conscious of the writer’s intentions, are more adept to understanding text, and are more likely to form sensible conclusions and take deliberate action.