Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 11, Issue 1, 2018

Really my contribution to this issue is an artefact – a regenring of Fiona English’s Orientations of Genres framework as a furoshiki, a Japanese wrapping cloth. But as I cannot share this with all of you beyond a photograph, the best way of describing it within the constraints of a (printed) journal is as this article, part origin story, part analysis… but really this is the story of how by applying the framework, I started to understand it much better (and how I now propose to change it)! The purpose of this article is to use English’s Orientations of Genres framework to compare the Genre Furoshiki (a Japanese wrapping cloth designed to represent said framework and to serve as a delegate pack for a workshop on using genre in higher education) to the two genres it grew out of – a summary of the framework itself, namely English’s 2015 chapter ‘Using genre as a pedagogical resource’ (which we included in the material disseminated to delegates after the workshop), and the traditional conference tote bag so often used as a receptacle for a delegate pack. As the framework was developed with mainly linguistic genres in mind, it will be critiqued as to its suitability in discussing artefactual genres, and I argue that Gestalt Principles and Jacques Bertin’s visual attributes make a useful extension to the framework itself.

A commitment to exploring both form and content are the jumping-off points for this article, which examines the howness of the improvisatory rehearsal process known as Active Analysis alongside the howness of writing about something as highly subjective as acting and actor training. Taking the format of the novel as its driving force, with particular regard to the unique ability of the novel to communicate consciousness in a way which more traditionally academic formats cannot, it follows the story of Victor and his struggle to commit to a new way of experiencing his work, a new kind of howness. Along the way he discovers a great deal about the nature of process and how the kind of attention he pays to the world and his work alters the experience of what actually happens.

This article, presented in the genre of a comic strip, reflects on the difficulties of teaching business content in the fashion curriculum through using a traditional linear inductive approach, an approach that students seemed to consider presented content that was completely irrelevant, unengaging and caused them to stop attending sessions. Using the abductive explorative visual learning strategies preferred by the divergent, creative thinking fashion students at Harrogate College, a series of comic books were developed, covering the same content of business studies previously, but in a very different way. The resulting engagement of students shows that it was not the content we were teaching them but how we were teaching them that created the previous lack of engagement.

The learning process involves contextualizing new knowledge with prior experiences and beliefs. In the scientific discipline, the focus of learning is geared towards learning how to do science, but there are significant barriers to learning, including jargonized terminology and excessive use of acronyms. Scientific discoveries are made by experimentation, but science as a discipline progresses through a series of ongoing conversations. Blogging provides a platform that widens access to these conversations by communicating science in a style of writing that sits somewhere in between the formal and informal. Regenring scientific writing as a blog can enhance student learning by breaking down the barriers to learning posed by ‘intellectually inaccessible’ information. Here, I describe an experimental approach to teaching cancer biology by regenring a classic review article in the field as a series of blog pieces, using everyday metaphors and analogies to describe the characteristics and behaviour of cancer cells. Other aspects of discipline, identity, ‘voice’ and communities of practice are also considered. Until such time as blogging is recognized as a valid academic output, however, it will remain firmly somewhere in between.

Academic writing is a staple university practice required across disciplines to determine student success. Despite its ubiquity, however, literacy scholars have long argued that academic writing is both exclusionary and prohibitive. Drawing on the work of literacy scholars we make the case for the use of blogs in higher education as a way of providing a type of inclusive writing or ‘regenring’ that such scholars advocate. To achieve this, we trial the use of a blog in a final-year undergraduate module, employing a mixed-methods approach to explore student perceptions on whether blogging affords them a means to engage with and take ownership of their writing and learning. In keeping with the task we have set our students, we have presented this article using blog-like features.

This text emerges from ongoing research focused on pedagogical developments within the curriculum of the Year 0 Fine Art pathway at Norwich University of the Arts. Within the teaching and learning of Fine Art, students will work between both written and visual genres, often struggling to rationalize the two. As part of our research, we have developed practice-based research tasks that work in parallel to the traditional academic essay, an a-typical visual genre of equal status. We believe that through such dual genring, a more appropriate and wider range of resources will, over time, begin to work symbiotically with the essay. The research tasks serve as destabilizing prompts; they constitute a hollowed-out genre that encourages students to enter into a de-orientated, liminal, conceptual space within their learning. With the introduction of specifically developed reflective models, students are able to navigate this liminal space and are afforded opportunities for developmental reorientations to the threshold concepts inherent with the Fine Art discipline. Drawing upon examples of current practice and student learning, we demonstrate how a process of genring and the use of reflective tools encourage students to both confront aspects of troublesome knowledge and see critical writing as an important facet of their practice.

This article considers my engagement with two contrasting writing practices as part of my doctoral journey. I analyse and reflect upon extracts taken from progression reports and autoethnographic writing informed by work on genre affordances, writer identity and essayist literacy. My analysis indicates that the progression report genre offers limited possibilities for the construction of researcher identity and typically embeds a normative notion of research chronology and temporality. Furthermore, it permits limited opportunity for doctoral researchers to address affective and embodied aspects of their experience. I argue that this generic form of progress monitoring may inhibit forms of exploratory research, particularly those involving creative practice which can be inherently disorderly. In contrast, I explore how writing self-initiated autoethnographic vignettes permitted the construction of a more ambiguous discoursal identity within which I was able to explore aspects of embodiment, hesitancy and ‘not knowing’ as productive motifs. The affordances to explore personal experience, informality, evocation and open-endedness meant that I was able to experiment with the form of the writing (e.g. intertextuality) and narrative genres (e.g. the quest or journey) to approach research issues and dilemmas in an oblique way. I draw on Melissa Trimingham’s ‘hermeneutic-interpretative’ model, Theresa Lillis’s advocacy of juxtaposition and Guy Claxton’s TATE model to suggest that the progression process could be reconsidered, at the level of genre resources, to be better attuned to the rhythms and temporality of a more diverse range of approaches to research.

This article examines the modest state of reflective practice in management education despite the increasing need for approaches that challenge the traditional overemphasis on rational tools and techniques. Business communication and business writing in UK management education generally take a very conventional approach to genre. As an antidote, emphasis is laid here on the use of journaling in business education including the lecturers actually doing it themselves routinely. This article includes as a worked example the creation of a journal at a Genre workshop in Middleport Pottery.