By Sara Austin, AdventHealth University

Bridget’s piece was written for my Advanced Composition class, which was grounded in rhetorical genre studies with additional attention to Ohio’s Learning Standards for English Language Arts. As everyone in the class was a pre-service teacher, I wanted to incorporate the genres they would be expected to teach —argument, informative, and narrative— while basing them in rhetorical genre studies.

What I enjoyed so much about this class, and Bridget’s piece in particular, were the ways in which students brought in their literary understanding of genre, and how bringing literary ideas about narrative together with a writing studies background created rich, creative projects. Although the course was largely structured around genre, it was heavily multimodal, and all of the major projects were videos, sound recordings, posters, performances, etc.

Bridget’s project, a literacy narrative, took an approach that completely shifted the way I had previously thought of literacy narratives. While I tend to think about literacy sponsors and how they shape one’s literacy journey, her use of the manuscript as narrator really helped to highlight a more literary understanding of narrative within the piece. As an instructor, I appreciate how this project incorporates concepts that we discussed in class while still emphasizing the personal impact this piece of writing had on shaping Bridget’s understanding of, and appreciation for, reading, writing, and composing.