Writing for and beyond the academy: An exploration of multi-genre pedagogy

Research Project, 2024

The purpose of this international project is to explore the potential of multi-genre pedagogy to develop flexible writers, across a range of academic and outreach genres. Usually, writing for non-experts is taught separately from traditional academic writing which targets disciplinary experts. A more novel approach is to adopt multigenre pedagogy. This approach entails training different types of genres (academic genres such as abstracts, research articles; and outreach genres such as blog posts and tweets) in the same writing pedagogy intervention. While research on writing expertise development suggests that the integration of academic and outreach genres would be beneficial, evidence of the effectiveness of such an approach is lacking. The aims of this international project are to a) develop pedagogical tasks for doctoral students that combine writing for research purposes with writing for different kinds of readers and audiences; b) evaluate and explain the learning generated by of those tasks through the analysis of metacognitive reflections, textual products, and post-intervention interviews.