Teaching Effective Communication Tactics to Your Elementary School Students: The Importance of Genre

In my previous post, we discussed the importance of knowing your discourse communities, those important groups – administrators, students, parents, colleagues – with whom you regularly communicate in your work as an elementary school teacher. In this post, I want to take us further into how to teach effective communication to your students, especially about science and climates change.

In the first chapter of their book, Communicating Climate Change, Armstrong, Krasny, and Schuldt (2018) say, Because environmental educators know their communities, they can play a key role in distilling scientific information and guiding discussion about complexities associated with weather, climate, and climate change. They can also lead their students and communities in taking meaningful action to reduce greenhouse gases” (7).

I hope you are motivated to do just that, distill and guide discussions about the most critical issue that humans have faced in our history on the earth and one that will (and already is) affecting all of us in many ways scientists are still coming to understand. I know you can do this, you’re teachers! You are on the front lines of this effort, because you are now teaching the generation that is going to have to deal with the ramifications of whatever our generation and the generation (or generations, depending on whether you’re a boomer – like me – a Gen Xer, like my sister, a Millennial, or a member of Gen Z, like my two sons and their wives) after us do during the remainder of this critical decade.

Ultimately, we are looking to national leaders, corporation board members and executives, and elected representatives to lead the work to keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees centigrade (less than 3 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2030. That’s basically what the Paris Accord requires. Climate scientists are convinced that going over that limit could lead to a catastrophic rise ocean levels and many other related issues.

Rhetorician Lloyd F. Bitzer wrote, in an important academic paper from 1968, that an exigence “is an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be … An exigence is rhetorical when it is capable of positive modification and when positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse.” I believe that Bitzer, if he were alive today, would agree that climate change is currently an example of a rhetorical exigence because so many people do not understand it, distrust scientists and government leaders who warn us of it’s dangers, and, even when they do understand it and do trust scientists and government leaders, feel rather confused or hopeless about what to do. I can’t give you all the answers, and you can’t give all the answers to your students. But we can improve the overall situation if we help our students and their families understand the climate crisis, trust those who are trying to help, and feel empowered to do what they to move us all forward.

Thus, as scholar Carolyn Miller summarized in a 1984 article in The Quarterly Journal of Speech, “the exigence (the climate crisis) provides the rhetor (the students) with a social recognized way (genre) to make his or her intentions known. It provides an occasion, and thus a form, for making public our private version of things” (158). I added the words in the parentheses.

Genre is important because as citizens in a society, we come to expect that certain forms of communication will be used in particular situations. When someone dies and we attend the memorial service, someone usually provides a eulogy, when two people marry, someone provides the ceremonial talk, and when students enter a classroom, the teacher provides them with a lesson in the form of a lecture, and associated assignments, projects, and quizzes. I’m simplifying this concept, but the important concept is that we need to teach our students to communication appropriately depending on the rhetorical situation.

According to scholar Charles Bazerman, in the first chapter of the book, The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change, “In these ways genre shapes intensions, motives, expectations, attention, perception, affect, and interpretive frame. It brings to bear in the local moment more generally available ideas, knowledge, institutions, and structures that we recognize as germane to the activity of the genre” (14).

How do we put all of this theoretical information into practice in the elementary classroom? For example, the genre of a child’s letter to his or her parents is a genre that our students will be familiar with, and their audience (their parents) will understand that genre as well. We can then encourage our students to write scientific report, in the form of a letter, that will provide their parents with information they are learning about climate change. Do you think this will work. I can tell you that this kind of project has worked for students as young as first graders!

Perhaps some of you have heard or read about an interesting study reported in Research in the Teaching of English, by scholar Julie E. Wollman-Bonilla (2000). She conducted more than 20 years ago with a group of first-graders. Here’s one example of a science report a student wrote about what she learned in class one day. This is the letter as she wrote it, first-grader spelling error included.

“Dear Mom + Dad

I learned that whale sharks don’t eat peepel.

Sharks only atack when they are made or

Hungry. Baby sharks are called pups. Sharks

Can see in the dark. Sharks eyes sumtims

Glow in the dark.

Love, Maryanne.

Wollman-Bonilla found that, “The first-grade teachers in this study had faith from the first day of school that their students could deal with multiple demands at once.” And she concluded from her findings that, “The early years may be a time ripe for teaching and learning, not simply for self-directed experimentation … Children, especially those form non-mainstream homes, must learn the mainstream genres of power to gain access to cultural capital in our society. Whereas some genres will be familiar to children being raised in mainstream homes where conventional literacy is valued and reading materials is plentiful, science genres may be so unfamiliar and so rarely encountered outside the classroom that unless explicitly introduced they will never be mastered … Children become critically literate when they realize that texts are socially constructed, according to genre conventions, to serve specific social functions” (62).

Maryanne’s letter was simple, but it effectively communicated specific scientifically-valid information that she could share with her parents and other family members. Have you tried something like this with your students? If not, could you give it a try? Please let me know your thoughts and experiences.

AMD