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.
No comments:
Post a Comment