Week Three: A (Reflective) Narrative of Progress?

It's difficult, sometimes, not to be caught in a narrative of progress. When we think about the texts we are reading for Tuesday, is our thinking about, theorizing, and practicing of reflection "better" or more progressive than before? If so, how? If not, how not? And where might we go next in reflection when using these terms/frameworks/schemas--thinking, theorizing, and practicing?

Reading Across the Readings: Transfer, Narrative, and Synthesis

Before I move into my notes, I'd like to say that I was also reminded of Lacan when reading the Emmons passage Joe cited. I also didn't fully work through any coherent thoughts about what Lacan has to do with reflection, but it's interesting that we both went to that place.

One similarity that I noticed across the texts is the assumption that reflection and transfer are related, which was surprising to me, given that it seems that connection has only recently begun to be explored explicitly. Burke's critical pedagogy seems to operate under the assumption that students will transfer their linguistic reflection: "Linguistic reflection, Burke points out, is the institutionalizing of an attitude; it habituates students into responding to literature and life with careful and critical thought. Reflection, then, does not just prompt and interpret action; reflection is an action. Reflection is a way to act on and approach the world" (291). What students learn through critical reflection pedagogy is not merely a "habit of mind" but also an action on "the world." Similarly, Bowers and Emmons point to the necessity of students' making explicit connections between their reflections on writing and specific discourse community conventions. Emmons writes, "[S]tudents who can reflect on the rhetorical and social practices of the composition classroom (rather than those who simply reflect on their own internal practices) are more likely to be able to transfer these skills to new writing situations." Similarly, Bower contends that students who do not cite specific examples or provide sufficient details about their thinking are not demonstrating that they have learned:  "This may mean that most students have not gained control over their thinking but are merely paying lip service to the classroom’s values, a move that does not alter thinking about writing on a long-term basis" (60).

Though I agree with Emmons and Bower that students do need to consider the activity systems within which they are working, including the conventions of those systems, I wonder whether Bower and Emmons' claims are applicable outside of the reflection-in-presentation context. As Yancey makes clear in her discussion of the three types of reflection and reflection in the assessment context, there is a difference between tacit reflection, prompted reflection, and reflection for an other. In other words, I'm wondering whether what Bower and Emmons claim might have more to do with what readers value in students' reflections-in-presentation than with what we hope reflection can do for our students. As Yancey explains, "the constrained version of the comprehensive reflective text is constrained for a reason, to produce something predictable" (77). Though the constraints vary, as Yancey points out in her discussion of reflection and assessment, some situations--such as high-stakes assessments--require more direction than others.

However, prompts and scaffolding do seem important for most classroom instances of reflection. Yancey provides several examples of how we might scaffold students' reflection-in-action and constructive reflection. What I find interesting about this discussion of the types of reflection and how we might prompt reflection is the importance of dialogue--between student and teacher, student and student, and a student and herself--and of narrative. Emmons provides one example of narrative--the narrative of progress--but Yancey provides many more. For instance, Yancey writes, "Through reflection, we tell our stories of learning: in the writing classroom, our stories of writing and of having written and of will write tomorrow; in other classes, other stories, often told through writing, too. This story-making involves our taking a given story, and our lived stories, and making them anew" (53). These stories "construct us, one by one by one" and so, Yancey claims, "it's important to tell lots of stories where we get to construct the many selves for us to attempt, some we continue to inhabit" (53). Here, Yancey implies that narrative is not only unavoidable, but that it has the important function of self-making. But the self that is made is not necessarily unitary or stable: "Any self we see within text, particularly autobiography but reflection-in-presentation as well, is multiple, is shaped, is constructed; is necessarily contingent, transitory and filled with tension" (73). Perhaps the problem with the narrative of progress is that readers are not seeing the kind of selves Yancey describes: the narrative of progress paints an overly simplified picture of the student writer, one that cannot coincide with the reality of that students' experiences. Also, as Yancey explains in her work on postmodernism and palimpsest in portfolios, print portfolios constrain the writing in such a way that students must produce linear narratives, whereas web-sensible portfolios create the conditions for alternative self-construction.

I find myself with several questions after completing the readings:

1. What role does narrative play in reflection-in-presentation, and does that role change or disappear once we start thinking about web-sensible eportfolios?

2. Yancey mentioned synthesis as an important dimension of reflection, and though she doesn't use the word "synthesis" in describing reflection-in-presentation, it seems to be lurking there. It also seems to be an important part of constructive reflection, though as Yancey points out, this type of reflection is usually tacit and private. Constructive reflection seems most clearly related to writing transfer, so I wonder if synthesis is necessary for writing transfer (i.e. theory of writing as synthesis of ideas about writing).

3. On p 30-31, Yancey mentions scales that one might use in discussing reflection with students. I'm curious to hear more about how these scales have factored into reflective pedagogies.

Navigating through multiple social worlds through reflection

After reading this week's texts, I'm drawn to a few other readings that come to mind that have helped me think through this content. In particular, I'm drawn to Cooper's ecological model of writing and, by extension, Wardle and Roozen's ecological model for writing assessment--overall, it's that idea of "ecologies" that I'm really interested in and how reflection interacts with that idea.

Through these readings, I've come to see ecological models of writing/assessment intersecting with reflection in two ways: (1) as a way to situate reflection in post-process (something I'm only starting to understand); and (2) reflection as a mechanism for students to navigate through their multiple social worlds and writing experiences. 

This first level, involving post-process, seems most clearly related to Bower's and Emmons' pieces--I really enjoyed both of these. From my (horribly reductive, etc) understanding of post-process, we're supposed to be attended not just to a student's process that leads up to that product, but to attend to how several networks of writing experiences, cultural attitudes, social worlds collide with our student's process and how the products produced in these networks are further functioning within our student's, society's, culture's world (if this isn't what post-process is, then just ignore my use of the term). This, I believe, is why Bower's and Emmons' seem hesitant to accept reflection as readily helpful for learning self-evidently; in particular, Emmons' writes, outright, "while we encourage students to take an active and thoughtful role in assessing their work," through a reflective text, "we paradoxically allow them to remain isolated from the social-interactional nature of that work" (44). Throughout her article, she frequently pushes against ideas from process and expressivist theories of writing which, as she writes, "privilege introspective knowledge over community of practices" (51). Emmons, in other words, is seeing how tacking on reflection to a student is not actually helpful if we as teachers have not expressed to students how they can think beyond the transaction of content for grade and instead reflection (when focusing on communities of practice) allow students a language to talk about--and ultimately understand--how writing operates in contexts beyond the immediate classroom experieinces. Bower offers more specific examples of students using ideographic language to describe their writing (such as using the phrase "critical thinking" liberally without really knowing what it means) or describing growth or learning without contextualizing that growth or learning within their networks of other writing experiences. Bower is recognizing, again, the opportunity that reflection has to allow students to connect to prior experiences to help in future writing activities--she also isn't seeing students doing that or developing a language to talk about it. 

So, then, that idea leads me to the second level of how I see ecological models of writing/assessment intersecting with reflection: reflection, it seems, is a mechanism through which our students can give meaning to their new experiences (in writing and otherwise) by bringing awareness to the meanings that their prior experiences can offer, but ultimately reflection allows to bridge new and old experiences to begin to form a state of mind or being (metacognition, maybe?). Jessica Enoch's pieces--which I also really enjoyed--gets to this point using Burke's use of reflection in his pedagogy. Burke used reflection ("linguistic meditation") in his classrooms to prompt his students to recognize the relationship between language and human relations; Enoch writes, "students should spend their time in school learning to 'meditate upon the tangle of symbolism in which all men are by their nature caught'" (280) There is, of course, a lot I want to say here, but I am particularly drawn to his use of "tangle"--the idea that we need to almost comb through something we already have somewhere in our conscious through these kinds of reflective exercises. But further, Burke is theorizing the relationship between language and human relations--he focuses particularly on how student's awareness of this relationship will aid in understanding the relationships in their everyday lives or their ideology, politics, friendships, etc. This seems to be leading to how reflection can aid in bring awareness to ecologies of writing experiences.

I want to mention one last observation very briefly: Bower writes, "we can not know the world directly; instead we compose our knowledge of the world when we compose with language" (49). And connected to this excerpt I go to Emmons: "self-reflection is a simple mirror of the individual, obscuring the social realities of her writing situations"(60). I connect these two excerpts because in both these sections, I was reminded of Jacques Lacan's Mirror Stage: the idea that to form an idea of oneself, we look toward a mirror, but we cannot understand ourself directly, but we have to look toward the "surround" of ourself--the things that build us (Slavoj Zizek talks about this as well). When we don't provide our students a language that reflects their direct self or we don't allow them to opportunity to access that language, then they cannot represent themselves to understand themselves--and by extension we cannot see them for who they are. I think Enoch further shows us that reflection is important for Burke for that reason: the ways in which students access that language, represent themselves through that language, and use that language to enact change is very powerful--for the individual and the collective.

I haven't really thought through reflections connection to Lacan, but I think there's something really interesting there.

Reflection: Triumphs and Perils

Reading across the texts for this week's meeting, I was intrigued by the rather candid discussions of the potential pitfalls of reflection.  When we first learn of reflection (which for many of us is in our teacher training, as Erin's blog post last week alluded to), we tend to be introduced to its potential benefits and transformational power.  Yet, across most of these readings, the authors are quite skeptical about whether this "power" is actually realized in most instances.  Bower and Emmons both view reflection as potentially subversive of its own intentions, Enoch appears to view reflection--through Burke's pedagogy--as beneficial only when it counters typical classroom patterns, and even Yancy, quite the advocate of reflection, views it as only being productive when enacted appropriately.

Also, perhaps due to my own terministic screen(s), the word agency kept jumping out at me, whether it was used directly or was alluded to in a less direct fashion.  However, more on that to come.

To tackle these issues, I figured I'd tackle them in relation to both my classroom teaching and my scholarship (I realize dividing the two is quite a false exercise, yet it serves a purpose here I think).

As far as the classroom is concerned, especially while reading Bower and Emmons, I found myself nodding in agreement with many of the assertions in the readings for this week.  As much as I value portfolios and the reflections my students produce, the tropes these authors point out are, I believe, all too familiar for those who teach using reflection.  Intriguingly, this is always quite surprising to me since my assignment prompt for the portfolio in my classes always addresses directly the "narrative of progress" as well as the "schmooze factor."  Having been warned about these before I ever started teaching, the assignment prompt directly tries to address this, and I usually go over this with the class quite extensively.  And yet, no matter how hard I try, I usually receive at least a couple of reflections that resort to the "I finally saw the light!" narrative and/or the "Let me try to kiss Bruce's rear without it being too blatantly obvious" move.  These tropes seem to have been learned early on by many students.

While I have been told, and tend to believe, that I have a pretty strong BS detector, I must admit that I think we can all fall prey to these tropes when they are disguised in a certain manner.  As Laurel Bower suggests, "For the most part, however, students seem more concerned with pleasing the teacher and appealing to his/her set of values than analyzing their priorities and thinking" (60).  I've started to notice this over my last few semesters; it makes me wonder how sincere these appeals to our values actually are sometimes.  Reflecting on my own career as a student, as bull-headed as I am, even I must profess to appealing to an instructors values from time to time even if I wasn't fully on board with them.  Do our students sometimes just tell us what they think we want to hear?  If so, is any real learning taking place?"

However, these readings did cause me to reflect on (cue Letterman-esque drummer) how I do not always scaffold reflection well in my classroom, and how this might be the underlying reason behind students' reflections appearing, at times, to "parrot" values rather than actually engage with critical thinking.  Yet, I do hesitate with the writer's memo at times due to how it can influence my response; it seems strange, but--in a way--I value sometimes responding to students' writing from the perspective of a reader not clued into their intentions.  In essence, I want to respond without the benefit of knowing what they are trying to accomplish, to place myself in the frame of a reader who is encountering a text without the writer's intentions known to him/her.  This has led me to contemplate using more "talk-back" strategies with my response practices.  In this manner, I could respond in that way yet subsequently let the student inform me about their processes after my response to further promote a dialogue.  This appears like it might give me the best of both worlds.

And, since I have been discussing response, it seems a natural transition into my scholarship discussion.  Reading these texts caused me to question the potential methodologies of my dissertation in a quite profound way.  When I initially asked Dr. Yancey to do a DIS on reflection with me, my intention was to find a way to use reflective writing to code for agency.  Therefore, in my initial research design, reflection is a requirement for any classroom I will study.

Yancey's Reflection in the Writing Classroom, though, caused me to think long and hard about this.  So focused on finding a way to code for agency, I failed to realize I might have frozen an important variable.  Without going into too much detail, my dissertation is trying to look at various response styles and see how they influence student agency.  My theory is that the effect(s) of various commentary styles are highly predicated upon the classroom context; thus, the effects of directive and facilitative response styles on student agency are less determined by the actual written comments than they are by how they integrate into the classroom context. 

Thus, through Yancey and the other articles, I started to question whether reflection might need to play a larger role in my research.  Essentially, I realized that reflection might be, quite possibly, the most vital variable.  Without droning on ad nausea, basically what I'm trying to say is that reflective writing might have quite an influence on fostering agency in our students.  Could a more "directive" response style that incorporates reflection actually be less controlling than a "facilitative" style that
never asks students to reflect (these terms are in quotes since I think the binary is quite questionable)?  I would tend to believe so.  Hence, having reflection as a given in each classroom I study might be quite problematic.

In the end, I wound up drastically shifting my beliefs about the role reflection plays in developing agency in young writers.  Intriguingly, though, I always thought I placed such a heavy value on it until I actually reflected (Have I used up my reflection "pun" quota yet?) on how I integrate it into my teaching and how it is handled in my research design.  Once I brought my thought processes to the surface, it became quite apparent that I still have much to learn.  While this might seem like cause for concern, isn't making our thought processes and assumptions more readily apparent to ourselves one of the primary goals of reflection?




 

Reading across the Readings

We have four readings for our meeting on Wed; there are several ways we could read across them, as experts. Reading across them, what similarities do you see? What differences? And what difference do those similarities and differences make?

What Reflection Makes Possible

The thing about reflection, in my view, is that it makes possible a meaning that is impossible otherwise. I'm not precisely sure how we do this. I do think some people are more disposed toward reflection: that is, they seem to have a reflective temperament, to take up questions that may be insolvable, to entertain conflicting ideas, and to sort them out in a process of meaning-making that is, of course, contingent. In that sense, reflection is an optimistic act.

But even for those who are not so disposed, they can learn. They can be prompted, they can be responded to, they can see other examples of reflection, and they may even catch themselves reflecting. How we go about this--the prompts, for example, and the responses--that's a work in progress, which of course is really a way of saying that we don't know. Given that we don't know, we hope.

I do think we--those of us in writing studies--are moving to some shared understandings of reflection.

One: that to think of it only as a mechanism for evaluation is to waste its potential.
Two: that in our instruction, we have focused only on pedagogy, not on curriculum.
Three: that a focus including curriculum would allow us to think more broadly about reflection--about outcomes and readings and class assignments. The stand-alone letter of reflection becomes a portal for a much more robust sense of reflection.

For me, there are two other pieces to this new sense of reflection. One is that reflection, in my mind, has a social life. We share what we learn through reflection; and we often reflect collectively. Two: one purpose for reflection that is undertheorized and underpracticed is its use to synthesize from various sources a new meaning.

Baby steps, quilts, and reflection

Being that this is my first foray into thinking about reflection, I’m taking some baby steps. I’m still trying to develop a definition of reflection and metacognition that still allows them to overlap but can also be speaking about two different ideas. I may not be offering anything groundbreaking or new, but I want to outline what I’ve been picking up through my experiences and through these readings.

So, fundamentally, I recognize that metacognition and reflection are speaking to two different ideas—the difference between these two terms is how I’ve been developing my definition of the two. I first think about metacognition—“thinking about thinking one’s own thought processes” has been tossed around quite a bit. But I think about metacognition through “being metacognitive” which, to me, centers on an awareness. And through this awareness, we are able to self-regulate. LaVaque-Manty and Evans map out a pretty succinct way to understand the process of self-regulating for one’s learning:

Planning one’s learning: Plan for the task by thinking about what one already knows or can do and what else one needs to complete the tasks

 Monitoring one’s learning: Pay attention to one’s execution of the task and somehow communicate what one takes oneself is to be doing

 Evaluating one’s learning: Evaluate how one did, particularly in light of external feedback on the execution and what one learned from the execution and the feedback

Metacognition, then, seems to be this awareness—or consciousness—that allows someone to access a network of ideas to move forward, to solve a problem. Reflection, then seems to be how to access that metacognition, but also help scaffold that metacognition.

I agree that reflection is both a product and a process. In terms of process, reflection seems to be that process that allows us to acknowledge our thought processes and connect those processes. One way to connect those processes is to name the experience that a person is having in order to categorize that experience against other similar experiences. Connected to that idea is how, I believe, reflection is necessarily an articulation—we often ask our students to write a reflection or to make one and I think that’s important to the process. To be able to have the reflection to manipulate those thoughts and to see them allows those ideas to be organized, arranged, and accordingly categorized to understand how ideas are networked against one another. In the WEPO piece (written by Dr. Yancey and our lovely colleagues) portfolios are allowing reflection to be a normal part of class. These portfolios, which obviously have written reflections, also allow for design: the design of those portfolios contributes to how students are representing how they’re connecting ideas visually.

I had a student last year that made a portfolio with the theme of quilts: the visuals she used and how she constructed the theme allowed her to understand the material as constructing a whole: what an interesting way to think about the course content that allows her to connect ideas together.

So, reflection, of course, is a process of connecting ideas from the past and present, but it’s also important to point out how it’s necessarily an articulation. And reflection then allows us to become metacognitve or, in other words, develop a consciousness of thought that can help us solve new problems.

This may not have been helpful or new to you guys, but (in the spirit of reflection) I think I needed to think through what I was reading by writing it down.

A Narrative of Progress in Which Progress is Not Actually Made

Though I'm not positive how generalizable this experience is, I was first introduced to the concept of "reflection" in my Teaching College Composition seminar. My professor had us read the first chapter of Yancey's book on reflection because we were encouraged to ask our students to write reflections throughout their semester in FYC. Regardless of whether students were prompted to reflect during the course, they were required to submit a reflection with their final portfolios. In addition to reading Yancey's chapter, we were also asked to write reflections on an almost-weekly basis. Thus, we were provided with the practical experience of writing reflections, and we were provided with vocabulary for describing reflection. What we were not provided with were opportunities to read and respond to student-created reflections, a problem aligning with Bransford et al.'s discussion of content knowledge vs pedagogical content knowledge (45): We understood what reflection meant in an abstract way, and we also knew how to compose texts referred to as "reflections," but we didn't know how to teach reflection.

Uncertain of how to approach reflection in my first semester teaching FYC, I did the thing that made most sense to me:  I had my students read Yancey's chapter and discuss it. I remember thinking at the time that it was the most successful discussion we had that semester (though this can also be attributed to the fact that I was teaching a McCarthyism themed course). A student with whom I had been struggling all semester made the claim that the portfolio assessment was requiring students to produce like texts, and that reflection was highly individual. She didn't understand why the professors in charge of the portfolio assessment would ask students for reflections when they were also demanding that students produce nearly identical texts. I was excited by this insight, though I didn't know what to do with it. I wasn't sure how to respond.

After teaching for two years and participating in the portfolio assessment for four semesters, I came to understand that not knowing how to respond to student insights, particularly contained within reflective letters or essays, was a problem the entire program was facing. This problem was compounded by the fact that new teaching assistants were trained to understand reflection as a crucial part of the composition classroom, whereas part-time faculty who had been teaching in the department for 15-25 years had gone through training long before reflection was commonly discussed in the field. These groups had conflicting views of "reflection": the part-time faculty saw it as a document that introduced readers to the portfolio texts, which were most important for determining whether a student should pass ENG 101; many of the teaching assistants, however, viewed reflection as both a process and a product, and because of this understanding, the TAs had different expectations for reflective portfolio texts.

These different understandings guided the approaches that these instructors took in the classroom. Those who viewed reflection as a product assigned students to write a reflection--or, more commonly, a reflective introduction--at the end of the semester (which, as we know, is not productive for students). They often provided no written prompt, models, or sample texts. Instructors who viewed reflection as both process and product not only provided students with written prompts and examples of reflective texts at the end of the semester, they also incorporated it throughout by having students draft writer's memos (J Sommers), or respond to questions like those Yancey presents throughout her book, or participate in conferences scaffolded by questions prompting reflection. Thus, these instructors understood reflection to be a habit of mind that develops over time and through practice. Only after developing (or at least working toward) reflective dispositions could students produce a document called a "reflection."

However, working this view of reflection into our portfolio assessment documents proved to be troublesome. The short version of the story is that we included a section on the portfolio assessment rubric specifically devoted to a "critical reflection" text, though this addition did not, of course, solve the problems we had with divergent understandings of reflection. It did, however, catalyze some important conversations about why reflection is important, why we ask students to do it, and how we might respond to it.

Since my work with reflection/portfolio assessment, I've come to understand reflection as being even more complex than a process and product. As I alluded to above, reflection seems related to student dispositions (e.g Wardle's work on problem-exploring vs answer-getting dispositions; Driscoll and Wells' work on dispositions and motivation; and Reiff and Bawarshi's work on boundary-guarders and -crossers), motivation (as Bransford et al. discuss 60-61), engagement (Yancey 14), and prior knowledge uptake (Robertson, Taczak, and Yancey; Rounsaville; Reiff and Bawarshi). This body of research, along with my personal experience in teaching reflection, leads me to believe that we can scaffold reflection, though I don't believe that there is necessarily one process that works for all students in all contexts. Given the complexity of factors influencing students' approaches to reflection, I believe we must take a more personal approach to scaffolding students' processes. For instance, if we are able to determine that students seem to be operating under an assemblage model of prior knowledge uptake, or that a student is boundary-guarding, it seems as though we could make targeted interventions into that student's composing processes. However, what I'm currently struggling with in this line of thought is the issue of reducing students to types, much like the portfolio assessment seemed to do (you're either reflective, or you're not). I'm hoping to work through this issue over the next six weeks.