![]() ![]() For my part, one way I’ve grown-in response to student concerns-is in sharing with them ways I’ve organized a class. An example of Yancey’s “course on a page.” Photo credit: Kathleen Blake YanceyĪll the (many) good teachers I’ve known have grown over time. And that reflection is where you can grow.”įigure 2. And you don’t demand that answer of that person - you reflect. Organizers, too, it seems, as AOC commented during 2020: “I come from the lens of an organizer, and if someone doesn’t do what you want, you don’t blame them - you ask why. Such an exigence provides an opportunity for growth. When students don’t respond as we’d liked or hoped, we have an opportunity to reflect, to consider their concerns in the context of our aims, and to understand what’s going on differently, especially from the perspectives of others who also inhabit our curricular and pedagogical space. What’s interesting about these sets of reflective questions is a point that is obvious: no one can reflect for another each of us, often in community, reflects.Īs teachers, we know about reflection and about the role reflection plays in helping us improve-but again, largely through practice, largely through response to an undeniable exigence. What is the purpose of retirement? Is it to sit back and rest after a lifetime of work? Travel around the world? Is it to care for our families in new ways? Is it to take up a new career or hobby? Is it to serve the public, perhaps by delivering meals on wheels or volunteering for a political candidate? What is the purpose of a good retirement? How would you define family? How does one create a good family? Is a good family a happy family? An extended family? A family by choice? Does one ever leave one’s family, and if so, when? Consider the idea and the practice of family. Still, I wonder: are these the best questions to prompt reflection about writing? Put in terms of the definition above, are these questions that will prompt authentic meaning-making? ![]() All of these forms of reflection, which serve very different purposes, can be quite valuable. ![]() Some of us require students to assess their texts according to outcomes-some of which may derive from a writing program, others of which students may create. Some of us invite students to account for their development as writers-though the drafts and through the quarter or semester and through the years. Some of us ask students to describe their writing processes-in what’s conventionally referred to as a process memo. In writing studies, we’ve long thought about reflection as a means of helping students develop as writers. Reflection doesn’t so much provide answers as point to and open other ways of seeing and being it puts into dialogue the familiar with the unfamiliar, the small in the large, the large in the tiny. Our reflections benefit from being situated in community, from response, from support. Sometimes, that understanding is deeper as a consequence of reflection other times, that understanding changes, sometimes radically. Drawing from experience and more-others’ views, information, intuition, materials, objects in the surround-we engage in a practice requiring attention, multiple perspectives, and time so as to understand anew. So, a definition: reflection, which is both a theory and a practice, is a means of making meaning. I hope it prompts you to think about how you define reflection, how you include reflection in your life, how you include it in your teaching and learning. In advance, though, I think I should observe that this blog post wanders a bit. But I’ll try to provide a point of reflective departure □, at least in terms of my own sense of reflection. The word reflection points in a myriad of directions it means so differently-see, for example, the ways several writing teacher/scholars approach it in A Rhetoric of Reflection-that it can be difficult to define fully. A Rhetoric of Reflection, edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey ![]()
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