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?