Blended Genres: Pairing Picturebooks and Poems Across the Curriculum

This article reports on a classroom-based, action research project conducted by a teacher educator in literacy education in a graduate course entitled Reading and Writing across the Content Areas. The purpose of the project was to actively engage graduate students, all of whom were pre-service and in-service teachers, in developing and implementing blended genres across the curriculum. It begins by situating blended genres within the traditional notion of paired text as a curricular resource and instructional strategy to support the process of intertextuality. It provides a brief overview of the course-related project, followed by an introduction to the concept of blended genres as rooted in paired text, but a new and innovative way to develop paired text. It shares examples of blended genres and samples of instructional strategies that graduate students developed and implemented in their own, a friend’s, or a colleague’s classroom at different grade levels and across different content areas. It ends with student reflections on the whole experience and concluding thoughts and questions for future research on blended genres.