Multigenre Research Projects: An Introduction

This is the first of several posts about a multigenre research project I have just completed in my language and literacy courses with preservice educators, grades P-8. (I teach one class focused on P-5, one class focused on 4-8).

For all of you librarians out there, even though the students I teach are future classroom teachers, please continue to read along. As I’ve gone through this project, I’ve seen numerous opportunities for collaboration between language arts teachers and librarians. (Ironically, there were times when I wished I had a librarian with me as another teacher. Much of my focus was on composition, and a librarian partner might have helped me do more with information literacy and ethics.) Multigenre research, as I see it, lies at the intersection of research and writing, and presents a great opportunity for librarians to collaborate with classroom teachers.

The first several of posts in this series will describe the project, some background, and the process we went through over the past weeks. Then, I hope to share some pieces of my students’ projects so you can get a sense of what multigenre research projects might look like.

I probably should have been writing about this all along, but to be honest I had no idea how these projects would turn out.  This is my first time teaching multigenre research. Now that the finished projects are rolling in, I am thrilled with what the students have accomplished, and happy that a number of them have given me permission to share their work here.

I hope you’ll tune in to see what they’ve done. I think many of the students surprised themselves with what they accomplished, and how “research” became something challenging, creative, and productive.  I feel, in many ways, that the students succeeded in spite of my fumblings as I learned to teach this process. Many of them went above and beyond what I set before them as tasks, and, as they have told me, quite a few wished they had more time to continue writing and research.  How great to hear students say that, especially since, at the beginning of the semester, the words “research project” filled the room with apprehension and dread.

So, to begin, my question is…why does “research” prompt that reaction?  Why does it fill many of us with dread? As an educator who believes that ongoing research and learning is essential to being an effective educator, how can we change the aversion that people have to research?  I’m starting to see some possible answers coming out of this project.  I welcome your thoughts.