During the holidays, I spend the majority of the time with my partner’s family, who are predominantly first- and second-generation Polish immigrants. Many of them can speak Polish to each other with ease. Now, I’ve tried a few times to learn Polish so I can participate in conversations (or at least have a marginal understanding of what they are talking about). Really, I can only name a few foods and I can sing Happy Birthday.

But sitting around the table, not being able to speak or understand the Polish they’re speaking, often leaves me feeling isolated and confused. Those moments remind me just how challenging it can be to try and be an active participant in the room, when I fundamentally don’t communicate in the same way.

Of course, as a writing instructor, I know that this isn’t just about my lack of knowledge of the Polish language. Because I don’t have the inside track or vocabulary to participate in their shared community, I feel excluded from it. In my own class, I teach how genre can help us understand these situations.

We traditionally think about genre as something that helps us categorize and understand things like movies, books, and other media. Genres help us understand what is and isn’t expected from something, like a book or a movie. For example, we expect that children’s movies are animated, full of bright colors, and cheery music and we expect that a horror film is dark, filled with jump scares, and suspenseful scenes. But genres exist in just about everything–not just books and movies. Genres can also help us define the expectations of conversations or emails. 

In my class, I encourage my students to think about how we use genre to participate within our communities. This idea of genre as a social action that binds and defines communities comes from Carolyn Miller. Miller holds that genre itself is the collection of social actions that helps us understand how to “effectively participate within a community” I like this expansion of our understanding of genre beyond just categorizing things like books and movies. Instead, this idea of how genre helps us understand what typified actions can help us engage with certain communities. It can help us think about what we expect from those in the community with us; for instance, what method of communication is appropriate or what level of formality we should use with each other. We often know most of this instinctively: we usually know the protocols required for different spaces and relationships. For instance, we talk differently to our parents than we do our friends or strangers. 

Because we all come from different communities and backgrounds, we bring our own understanding of those protocols–whether they are ‘correct’ or not is subjective to who we are interacting with. I see this more and more as we think about generational norms. For example, there was a discourse about millennials using “no problem” as a response to someone else instead of “you’re welcome.” Some viewed this as a sign of disrespect or lack of formality. (If you’re curious, check out this post from a linguist for their perspective.) Lately, I’ve been hearing more woes and concerns about how we communicate with Gen Z.

If you’re teaching students now, you’re most likely teaching to Gen Z (persons born between the late-90s up to the early-2010s). And you may have heard or felt the frustration of communication with them yourself. But I would challenge you to consider your response through this lens of genre.

Gen Z students have predominantly grown up with the internet; they often don’t really know about a time before the internet and Google existed. So the way that they approach digital communication is fundamentally different from the generations who grew up with only snail mail or rotary landlines. They likely haven’t had to think about the fact that email was designed to be a digital version of snail mail, with the functionality intended to be nearly identical. So, if they didn’t rely on snail mail or traditional letter writing, they wouldn’t know some of the conventions that we expect in email, like greetings and sign-offs. 

The generations that grew up in the snail-mail-and-landline era were likely taught these formalities and expectations of that communication. Now, some of these expectations of genre and social interaction are modeled to us at a young age or taught to us in school. Yet, some of the more formal communities that we join later in life (like higher education or careers) don’t explicitly teach you these protocols. Instead, these communities assume you know them already, and that you can communicate in their expected style.

So, rather than being frustrated at what can appear to be a lack of communication skills, instead consider that their communication styles are different (see my colleague’s post about communicating with emojis). When we get frustrated with newer generations of students for not knowing how to write an email in the way we expect, they probably feel like I do at the kitchen table when my family speaks Polish. Instead of chastising them for not trying to learn or not knowing yet, we should be helping them understand.

Better yet, we can model ways for them to learn. Instead of just giving out templates for emails, we can model our expectations. We can talk about the context of email, and what we expect to see and read when we read it. By clearly talking about our expectations and what forms of communication are appropriate, we invite them into our community. This lets them learn how to engage and participate in our social communities, using the protocols that are important to us. 

In the classroom, we see this when STEM classes teach problem-solving. Instructors will often show a problem or equation, model how to work through it and solve it, then ask students to complete one on their own or in homework. As a non-STEM  educator, I want to aim to take this same approach. Instead of leaving students to just complete an assignment based on an assignment sheet, I can introduce the assignment in class. Show them how the sheet and rubric are set up, and define what I expect from their work. I find this shift in thinking particularly helpful when I consider that there is no standard form for how we write our assignments. So helping students understand how to read, interpret, and execute our assignments can help bring them into our community as a group of academic scholars learning together. Then, by modeling how to read assignment sheets and ask questions can help students learn to advocate for their own understanding in other spaces. For instance, they can use the model that you’ve shown of how to read assignment sheets and apply it to their other classes and assignments. 

Moreover, modeling how to read and execute assignments can reduce frustration for both you and your students. Your students will have a clearer sense of the expectations you have for their work and have a better understanding of what constitutes an “A”. Not only that, but you might find yourself less frustrated when your students turn in work that better matches your expectations. I know firsthand how frustrating it can be when the work you receive isn’t what you expected–whether it’s because of the required elements missing or style differences. At the conclusion of Miller’s essay, she notes that when we learn genres, we aren’t just learning patterns and methodologies. We are learning skills and means to better understand the variety of situations we might find ourselves in. Understanding genre in one setting can better prepare us for learning and succeeding in genres of other settings.

As educators, we want our students to succeed both inside and outside of our classrooms, and even beyond the walls of our institutions. By using genre as a lens to understand each other, we can better prepare and model for our students how to engage and join into other communities of practice. We are better preparing them with not only the hard skills they need to complete tasks, but also the soft skills of learning how to communicate with others–whether that’s messaging their future colleagues in Slack or sitting around the Polish holiday table.