Dr Maria Valesia Silva da Silva, Professor at Caxis do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil was the speaker in the 5th session of the International Series which was held on 2 June 2022. The speaker was welcomed by Prof (Dr) Shravan Kumar, Dean of School of Liberal Arts. The event was followed by a brief introduction of the School of Liberal Arts and Uttaranchal University by Prerna Singh, 4th-semester student of B A (Hons) English.
The speaker started the session by deciphering the meaning of genre as a category of the literature identified by form, content and style. She mentioned a definition of genre which says, “Genres are social practices that have evolved to enable us to achieve our goals”. She further emphasized on the importance of genre for students as it allows them to classify compositions within a larger canon of literature and stressed on the importance of teaching genre from the early elementary grades by planning genre-based units which can be based on either genre structure or list of contents. Speaker further talked about how literary genres can be explored to the students at various other levels. She explained how fundamentals of genres should be taught and students should be able to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. The second most important lesson the speaker mentioned in the learning process involves delving more specifically into fiction and dividing it into realistic fiction and fantasy. The next skill that the speaker mentioned that it is equally important for students to identify the characteristics of the other genres too.
Lastly, the speaker emphasised the importance of exposing students to different genres of texts so they can be familiar with a new world of reading. Every genre has its own purpose and set of features which plays a vital role in making the reading process very effective and meaningful all a teacher needs is to keep a research mindset while teaching so as to encourage students to think and analyze critically.
The session was very useful for not only the students of literature but students from other backgrounds as well as every student is a reader and the importance of the genre should be known to every reader which was successfully explained by the speaker.
The session was concluded by various question and answer sessions from the audience and it was followed by a vote of thanks which was proposed by Ms Shikha Bharti, moderator of the session. The event was coordinated by Ms Shilpi Prakash under the convenership of Dr Shravan Kumar.
