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.