PB3A: Shakin' Things Up

My scholarly article is titled “How Students Use Prior Genre” by Reiff and Bawarshi; the goals of the experiment were to determine what genres students already know, to observe how students use this prior knowledge when presented with new writing assignments, and to understand student’s methods of transferring genre into new ideas to fit their needs. Reiff and Bawarshi also endeavored to determine how one may predict if a student would be a “boundary crosser” or a “boundary guarder.” Reiff and Bawarshi defined boundary crossers as “students who engaged in high-road transfer as they repurposed and reimagined their prior genre knowledge for use in new contexts”, and boundary guarders as “students who seemed to guard more tightly and engage in low-road transfer of their prior genre knowledge, even in the face of new and disparate tasks.” They identified these two types of students based on their answers to set questions that answered the research questions presented above. Reiff and Bawarshi categorized students who were less confident in their abilities to identify genre, and were more open to new ideas of genre as boundary crossers. They categorized students who were confident in their ability to define and identify genre, and therefore more set in their ways as boundary guarders.

My idea for transforming this article into a new genre for a younger generation, is fairly simple. I am going to adopt the persona of a “boundary guarder” in this experiment and write a letter home to my parents telling them all about my first few weeks at college. This letter will obviously try to depict a first year student writing home to their parents for the first time, so it will not be entirely about their first year writing class, but their first year all together. A good portion of the letter will be how I would envision a “boundary guarder” answering some of the questions presented in “How Students Use Prior Genre.” I will probably exaggerate the confident persona that is indicative of a “boundary guarder” to ensure that my ideas are clear. I am concerned, however, about the length of this letter. I know that I will need to keep it realistic, and therefore can’t be more than a page and a half (what can I say? I’m a bit wordy). I might make the letter longer than realistic to ensure I present as much information as I need to.

I’m fairly concerned about my idea for transforming the article for an older audience. I decided that I’d like to write the script for a gameshow, similar to something like Family Feud. I have absolutely no idea yet what I would call it, but I’m going to try for something really witty. I think that this genre would be appropriate for an older audience because game shows are only on during the day and the only people who have time during the day to watch game shows would be a much older audience consisting of retired persons. In the game show, the contestant will be given a genre and they will have to imagine different ways that some strategies of that genre could be used, for example the genre of “compare and contrast essays” has strategies that could be used to convince your spouse that it really is a good idea to go on that Alaskan cruise, or to persuade the CEO of a company that your product is better and more efficient than the competitors. I am definitely going to play around with this idea and figure out how to make it less complicated, if anyone has any input on that I’d love to hear it! Any other feedback on any part of my ideas would be most welcome! Thanks J