Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects

Book excerpt: Multigenre research projects affirm students’ home cultures while developing important academic skills consistent with the Common Core State Standards in reading and writing. This book will guide teachers in assigning, scaffolding, and assessing multigenre research assignments, including how to choose a topic, pace the work, and keep writers on track to achieve specific goals. Chapters are arranged by topic with each containing a description of the educational rationale for the topic, an introductory activity that serves as an inspiration for students in selecting a topic, and field-tested minilessons with step-by-step instructions. All the traditional elements of a research paper—quotations from experts, works cited, explanation, synthesis, and analysis—are brought to life as students animate information with emotion and imagination. An additional chapter describes how teachers have adapted this project for other subjects, such as social studies, science, and literature. Book Features: Prompts focused on home culture, inclusive model texts, and support for diverse language proficiencies.Correlations between writing skills and the Common Core State Standards, includingacademic citationandreading historical documents and other nonfiction texts.Practical management strategies for teaching large writing projects, including prewriting, drafting, revising, proofreading, and publishing.Publication options that include everything from paper-crafting to multimodal composition.A companion website with downloadable handouts and additional teaching strategies. “Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects is pedagogically groundbreaking, signaling a critical and principled shift in our understanding of what it means to teach research in the writing classroom. Mack’s approach heralds the beginning of a new era, one that insists on relevancy as the cornerstone to effective teaching and a deep acknowledgment that students bring with them to the classroom valuable resources, experiences, and well-developed literacies—the necessary context for engaging in meaningful research and substantive writing.” #8212;Jacqueline Preston, assistant professor, Utah Valley University “In Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects Nancy Mack is both a scholar and an experienced teacher just down the hall who generously shares strategies, rationale, and teaching tips. You’ll find insightful discussions about the form and function of genres, minilessons to launch students’ writing, and advice about research, feedback, and assessment of projects that meld fact and imagination. She accomplishes this through clear, uncluttered writing that is at once practical and provocative. Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects will help you support and stretch your students. It did for me.” —Tom Romano, John Heckert Professor of Literacy, Miami University