Want to teach a multigenre essay project? Good!
Our students see story splashed across so many platforms these days. Video, audio, visuals, and words all mixed up together in a daily swirl. Understanding how to tell a story across mediums is a highly relevant skill for students, and one they can quickly see the relevance of every time they switch on their phones or pop in their airpods.
Enter, the multigenre essay project – a chance for students to tell a story of their own through multimedia details that bring it to life.
A multigenre essay project can work in your identity or memoir unit, or provide an alternative path for students who don’t want to write a college essay because they’ve chosen another path.
Today, let’s break down how you might structure a project like this so the tech doesn’t feel intimidating and student stories have a chance to shine.
Mentor Texts for Multigenre Essays
You’ll find mentor texts for this project scattered across the internet, but it can take a bit of wading to find solid classroom options. So let me share a short list of options here:
- Good Morning, my Wife in Heaven, by YingFei Liang and Shumin Wei
- Enryo, by Jessica Bukowski and Kristin Sato
- “I’ve been on a Mission for seventeen years. It’s my holy grail.” From Humans of New York.
Once you’ve taken a look at some examples liked these with students, they’re ready to start thinking about an essay of their own.
Structuring the assignment
When it comes to structuring a multigenre essay project, consider having students weave together three elements in their personal story.
Written Words: poetry (written) or story (written)
Audio: poetry (spoken), recorded conversation or interview, original music, or a recorded story, scene, introduction, vignette, etc. written by the student
Visual: sketches, paintings, cartoons, collage, photography, video, or dance (recorded on video)
Students can have three main sections using these three genres, or dance back and forth in snippets, breaking up their piece into creative fragments that all fit together. It’s up to them.
Here are some example directions: Your story does not need to be about some huge earth-shattering moment in the world. The best stories often spring right out of the everyday. It’s about whether you actually care about the story you’re telling, and how you tell it. A personal essay should be written with vivid language in your own voice, using first person. You’ll need to weave together written, audio, and visual elements to tell your story.
Helping Students Develop their Ideas
A multigenre personal essay can feel pretty intimidating. Helping students brainstorm topics using the mediums of the project can help them start to think multidimensionally about topics. You might run workshops in which students choose photos from their phone that could lead them toward a story about themselves, choose a song or music video that has played a big role in their life, or imagine themselves on a talk show being interviewed.
As they explore different moments in their lives through different mediums, they can narrow in on one story that feels most interesting for them to tell. Now the multigenre brainstorming process begins again, this time with a more specific focus.
From Idea to Multigenre Essay
Once students find the seed of their story, they’ll want to begin exploring it again across genres.
What photos/videos/illustrations help to tell the story?
How might they tell it with pieces of audio – perhaps a recorded conversation, a song, the recorded hum of sound in a room or at a sporting event?
What words would make the most impact? Maybe snippets of narration, a poem, a six word memoir, photo captions, long paragraphs.
As students consider how to share pieces of their story through different mediums, they’ll generate ideas and edit them down to what feels right. A final piece might have fifteen different short elements, three long ones, six medium ones, etc. – whatever tells the story for the student.
Housing a Multigenre Essay Project in Google Slides
One of the potential stumbling blocks for a multigenre essay is the housing. Where can students cleanly knit together all these different multimedia pieces? I suggest using Google Slides to host the project. It’s much easier to manipulate multimedia in slides than it is in Docs. Students can break up their work into sections on the slide, putting lightly colored rectangles behind their sections as a visual divider (see the examples below).
Technology for Audio inside the Essay
Students can record their audio using the simple online recording tool, Vocaroo. Once they’ve got an MP4 sound file (downloaded from Vocaroo), they can upload it to their Drive, and change the sharing settings to “anyone with the link can view.”
Now, in their multigenre essay slides, they can press “insert,” and then “audio,” select their sound file, drag the play button to where they want it to sit in the essay, and resize it to however they want it to look.
Technology for Visuals inside the Essay
You probably already know what’s coming if you’ve been around here for long. Canva is an ideal platform for students to create illustrations, knit together photos into collages or sequences, or edit together videos. If you’re new to Canva you can sign up for my free mini-course for educators right here.
Inside Canva, students can create polished versions of whatever visuals they’d like to have inside their essays. For example, instead of trying to curate six photos together as a sequential visual essay inside slides, they can create a single collage image in Canva and then drop it into slides.
All that’s Left is Telling the Story
Once students have brainstormed topics and multimedia elements to help tell the story, understand their technology options, and know the format of their final piece in Google Slides, they’re ready to work on each piece of the story. Give them workshop time in class and homework time outside of class to create and polish each piece, and keep showcasing mentor texts you love along the way. Videos, audio clips, visuals, paragraphs of writing – pretty much any bit of story that you love could function as a mini mentor along the way in this unit.
Once the stories are complete, I’d suggest a virtual gallery walk party! Link each story from one Google Slide, then let students wander through the digital gallery. Have everyone vote on awards like “Best Visual,” “Best Audio Clip,” “Best Mini Moment,” “Most Creative Element,” etc. as they explore, then come back with award certificates to hand out as you wrap up the unit.
