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.