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A Rhetoric of Reflection
By Kathleen Blake Yancey University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-516-1
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Contextualizing Reflection
KATHLEEN BLAKE YANCEY
In the summer of 2014, I offered an independent study on reflection to three doctoral students in rhetoric and composition, Bruce Bowles, Joe Cirio, and Erin Workman, each of whom brought reflection-related interests with them to the course. Bruce is very interested in writing assessment, especially response to writing. Joe was conducting a qualitative study inquiring into whether students have enough conceptual knowledge, vocabulary, motivation, and agency to participate in creating scoring guides. Erin brought with her a completed pilot project on transfer of writing knowledge and practice highlighting the role of reflection. The question: in this one-hour graduate course on reflection, what might we read?
Had we asked this question in the 1970s at the beginning of the composing-process movement, the answer would have been short and quick, the readings focusing largely on the cognitive role that reflection plays in writing. In 1979, for example, Sharon Pianko defined reflection behaviorally as the "pauses and rescannings" stimulating "the growth of consciousness in students about the numerous mental and linguistic strategies" entailed in composing and "the many lexical, syntactical, and organizational choices" made during composing (Pianko 1979, 277–78). Pianko's claim also included the idea that reflection, as a practice, distinguished able from "not-so-able" writers. And at about the same time, Sondra Perl (1980) identified two components of reflection, what she called "projection" and "retrospection," "the alternating mental postures writers assume as they move through the act of composing" (389). In brief, the emergent literature on reflection at this moment in composition's history was tightly focused on the mental activities of the composer in the process of composing.
Had we asked this question about readings on reflection in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, however, we would have had a second literature to draw on as well, much of it oriented toward designing reflective activity to help make students' thinking external, visible, and available — for both assessment and teaching purposes. Roberta Camp (1992), for example, outlined one use of reflection, for portfolios, explaining how inside a portfolio a student could map the changing shape of a multiply drafted composition in what she called a "biography of a text"; thinking pedagogically, Bill Thelin (1994) explored how responding to writing changes, and doesn't, in the context of a portfolio and its reflection; and Jeff Sommers (1988) created a Writer's Memo allowing students, in a student's words, to go "'behind the paper'" to describe "the composing process which produced the draft" (77). Interestingly, Sommers (1988)pointed out that the memo assists both student and teacher: in Sommers's view, the memo's intent, like that of many reflective practices developed at this time, was twofold: (1) to elucidate student composing activities in students' own descriptions so as to see what was otherwise invisible and (2) to provide a context for an instructor-student conversation about the draft itself. Likewise, also addressing classroom and assessment contexts, I developed a Schonean-influenced practice-based theory of reflection in writing keyed to three related forms of reflective practice:
reflection-in-action, the process of reviewing and projecting and revising, which takes place within a composing event;
constructive reflection, the process of developing a cumulative, multi-selved, multi-voiced identity, which takes place between and among composing events; and
reflection-in-presentation, the process of articulating the relationships between and among the multiple variables of writing and the writer in a specific context for a specific audience. (Yancey 1998, 200)
During this time, reflection was also playing a major role in assessment, first in print portfolios and later, of course, in electronic portfolios, with both portfolio models defined as the result of three processes: collecting a range of texts, selecting from among them for a portfolio composition, and reflecting (Yancey 1992) — though the reflecting on whom or what varied. In some models, the reflective text was supposed to provide a narrative of writerly development, in others an account of process or self-assessment, and in still others an introduction to the portfolio itself. Furthermore, as in the case of pedagogical practice, so too in assessment: the role reflection plays in writing assessment has been both conceptualized and reconceptualized. Early in the portfolio movement, for example, Chris Anson (1994) categorized reflection as a secondary text in dialogue with — but mostly in support of — the primary texts of a portfolio. Later, I theorized that reflective texts are primary texts in their own right, though of a different nature than "primary" writing texts, and that the relationship between these two kinds of texts was dialogic and multicontextual, not hierarchical. More recently, Ed White (2005) has suggested that the reflective text can function as a surrogate for the full portfolio in an assessment context, though earlier research such as Glenda Conway's (1994) has suggested that this cover letter is problematic, much more a performance piece than an authentic expression for students, indeed, something of a mask through which to present the best possible student self (89), which makes perfect sense given the stakes. And other research (e.g., Yancey forthcoming) has observed that the Phase 2 portfolio scoring model mistakes one construct, that of argumentative writing, for a different construct, reflective writing. In general, then, during this second period of scholarship in reflection, the field moved beyond descriptions of mental behaviors to develop and theorize new classroom and assessment practices.
Into the twenty-first century, the scholarship on reflection is in a third phase or generation, with the list of readings we might consult now both wide and varied. Seen through Perl's (1980) formation, current interest in reflection is an exercise in both retrospection and prospection, with teachers and scholars returning to earlier practices to revise them, considering those practices in larger contexts for critique and theorizing reflection in new ways and for future use. Jeff Sommers (2011), for example, has revised his Writer's Memos into a semester-long reflective project focused on students' individual and collective beliefs about writing and the ways those beliefs do, and don't, change over the course of a term; Anne Beaufort (2007) has pointed to reflection as a key component supporting transfer of writing knowledge and practice; Kara Taczak, Liane Robertson, and I have theorized reflection as part of a new writing curriculum we call Teaching for Transfer (TFT) (Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak 2014), and Cathy Leaker and Heather Ostman have documented the epistemological nature of reflection, demonstrating how reflection contributes to and provides evidence of knowledge developed experientially (Leaker and Ostman 2010). During this time, there has also been a different kind of return to the past, with scholars expressing concerns and raising questions. Tony Scott (2005), for instance, has raised red flags about what he perceives as a Foucaultian dimension of reflection; other scholars have questioned what they see as a presumed relationship between reflection and the unified self — or the possibility of such a self — with reflection serving as something of a flashpoint. Thus, while scholars like Pat Belanoff (2001) contend that reflection "can enable the reconstituting — if only momentarily — of a unified self, which certainly enables one to act more effectively" (421), Glenda Conway (1994) and Kimberly Emmons (2003), taking another tack, agree with Julie Jung (2011)that, in Jung's formation, reflective writing tends "to legitimize liberal constructions of the writer as a single, unified self" (629) and that "reflective writing pedagogy, which aims to help student-writers assert authority as writers ... reinforc[es] some students' sense of themselves as 'only' students" (642; italics in original).
In higher education more generally, however, both reflection and metacognition are increasingly identified as important for learning. In writing studies, reflection has been the key term, while in higher-education contexts, reflection and metacognition are often used interchangeably. As constructs, reflection and metacognition have some overlap, but they also are assigned different attributes and roles in supporting learning. In How Learning Works (2010), for example, Susan A. Ambrose, Michael W. Bridges, Michele DiPietro, Marsha C. Lovett, and Marie K. Norman define metacognition and reflection conventionally: the first, metacognition, as thinking about thinking associated with planning, self-monitoring, and self-regulation; the second, reflection, as oriented to self-assessment activity occurring at the end of a learning cycle, though capable of prompting a new one.
Researchers have proposed various models to describe how learners ideally apply metacognitive skills to learn and perform well (Butler 1998; Pintrich 2000; Winne and Hadwin 1998). Although these models differ in their particulars, they share the notion that learners need to engage in a variety of processes to monitor and control their learning (Zimmerman 2000). Moreover, because the processes of monitoring and controlling mutually affect each other, these models often take the form of a cycle. Learners
• assess the task at hand, taking into consideration the task's goals and constraints;
• evaluate their own knowledge and skills, identifying strengths and weaknesses;
• plan their approach in a way that accounts for the current situation;
• apply various strategies to enact their plan, monitoring their progress along the way;
• reflect on the degree to which their current approach is working so that they can adjust and restart the cycle as needed. (Ambrose et al. 2010, 91–92)
Most theorists agree with this definition in that metacognition includes self-monitoring, but the role of reflection in learning, or coming to know, has received less attention from scholars in cognitive psychology. Others interested in learning writ large have focused on reflection: notable among them are John Dewey (1910) and Donald Schon (1987). Drawing on both Dewey and Schon in accounting for reflection more fully, for example, Naomi Silver (2013) agrees with the general definition of metacognition while widening reflection's scope to include "conscious exploration of one's own experiences" (1). The construct of reflection, she says, "as theorized by John Dewey is broader in its scope, and also more rigorous" (6). In his landmark book How We Think, Dewey defines "reflective thought" as "active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends" (Dewey 1910, 6; emphasis in original). Deweyan reflection is more sustained than a general stocktaking, then, and perhaps closer to the much broader concept of critical thought itself. Reflection, for him, constitutes a meticulous process of evidence and implication seeking, with the aim not only of understanding more fully by means of creating connections and relationships within experiences, but also of transforming experience and one's environment as a result (Dewey 1910, 1916).
In contrast, Donald Schon's approach, as Silver (2013) observes, is located more in professional practice, which allows him "to define a framework that describes how professionals' tacit knowledge of their work may be more deliberately mobilized and taught to learners in the field, ultimately resulting in a curriculum for a 'reflective practicum' to form the core of professional training" (Schon 1987).
As important for both theorists of reflection is the role of a real problem in a context of uncertainty. As Silver (2013) explains, because the thinker feels "discomfort or uncertainty, what Dewey calls 'a forked-road situation, a situation which is ambiguous,'" there is "'a dilemma, which proposes alternatives'" (Dewey 1916, quoted in Silver 2013, 11). This dilemma, according to Dewey, is fundamental. Likewise, according to Silver, Schon identifies a "confrontation with confusion or ambiguity" as the exigence for reflective thinking and the opportunity for "a professional practitioner's tacit knowledge [to be] challenged," (8) the challenge then prompting the practitioner to "name" and "frame" the problem and to begin to make explicit the tacit knowledge aligning theory and practice.
As A Rhetoric of Reflection demonstrates, the Deweyian-Schonian construct of reflection as a synthetic knowledge-making activity keyed to uncertainty and ambiguity is critical for scholars in writing studies focusing on reflection, as it is for scholars currently studying learning in many other contexts, including general learning contexts; preprofessional and professional contexts ranging from medicine and education to engineering; and assessment contexts, those including electronic portfolios. The research on how students learn, for example, compiled in the National Research Council volume How People Learn (Bransford, Pellegrino, and Donovan 2000) and documented in more reflection-specific studies like the Harvard Business School's recent working paper "Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance," points to reflection — defined in "Learning by Thinking" as an "intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience" (Di Stefano et al. 2014, 3) — as critical in helping learners secure their learning. The theory outlined in "Learning by Thinking" is particularly interesting. Building on Dewey's concept of learning by doing (1933), Giada Di Stefano, Francesca Gino, Gary Pisano, and Bradley Staats make two provocative, empirically validated arguments (Di Stefano et al. 2014). First, for learning to take hold, we must "do," engaging in experience, as Dewey said, but we must also think, or reflect, on that learning for it to make sense, and when we do, our performance improves. Second, such reflecting contributes to self-efficacy precisely because it helps us understand that we have learned (even if not always successfully); how we have learned; and how we might continue to learn. Likewise, in numerous professions — including medicine (e.g., Gawande 2002), teaching (Brookfield 1995; also see Pamela Flash's chapter in this volume), and engineering (as demonstrated in Virginia Tech's NSF-funded engineering project employing reflective practice to support the development of engineering faculty and researchers) — reflection provides a mechanism for professional development, for professional practice, and for the making of knowledge. The same is true for assessment: drawing on and synthesizing research sponsored by the Inter/National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, for example, I have theorized reflection's potential to help students not only to invent the university, in David Bartholomae's telling phrase, but also, and rather, to reinvent it (Yancey 2009), a point I return to below.
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Excerpted from A Rhetoric of Reflection by Kathleen Blake Yancey. Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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