Books Only Got Us So Far: The Need for Multi-Genre Inquiry
Source: Educational Action Research, Volume 18, Issue 3, p. 337 – 347. (September 2010).
This study examines the instructional steps that the author took, based on gaps between what was happening in a graduate literacy class she taught and what she had intended to happen.
This study describes the ways that the author re-imagined the class and what came about when she created a pedagogical approach that featured multi-genre inquiry.
The author defines inter-discursivity as a signal of learning (i.e. when traces of language from one genre spill over into the language of other genres).
The author also searched for examples of this overlapping language in data.
In doing so, the author found that the multi-genre approach led to moments of inter-discursivity as teachers extended their understandings by appropriating language from one genre into another.