"It is important to engage in the metacognitive process of reflection if you want to change and grow. Metacognition is thinking about thinking. It empowers you to know what you know and know what you don’t know. Once you engage in this type of reflection about your own thinking you can be deliberate and focused in your planning. The metacognitive process helps us move toward evaluating what we currently think and move beyond it. … It is an agent for deliberate and strategic change." (“Topic 7: Reflect on Learning.” Instructional Design Workshop. 2002.
Does reflection really work as this "agent" for growth and change? For reflections done IN-TASK (within the midst of a writing process), what sort of growth and change do they encourage? What sort of knowledge does reflection "empower" the writer to know? What sort of planning does it help the writer be deliberate and focused about?
This nature of agency found within reflection for writers is what I am interested. My previous case study suggested that the most significant focus for productive deliberation for writers was reflection upon their "rhetorical stance." This deliberation represents a heuristic extension of invention throughout the writing act.
How do I study this agency in reflection?
2 comments:
I wonder if reflection is really something that is apart the presence of the teacher and the student. That is, we think of it as something that happens--does it happen without a grade? Without extrinsic motivation? That's where one gets deep reflection--truly meaningful reflection. But does it happen in the composition course? Does it need to?
I have pondered this question. What you are getting at is a definitional question of what we consider reflection. Not just WHAT is it, but WHEN and HOW does it happen?
Reflection is a slippery, imprecise term. I'm going to lean on Jennifer Moons thinking here from her book Reflection in Learning & Professional Development. She summarizes various interpretations of "reflection" to come up with a general definition of reflection that represents common views on reflection. Here's her composite definition:
"[Reflection] is a mental process with purpose and/or outcome. It is applied in situations where material is ill-structured or uncertain in that it has no obvious solutions, a mental process that seems to be related to thinking and to learning. It is suggested that the apparent differences in reflection are not due to different types of reflection--in other words, to differences in the process itself, but to differences in the way that it is used, applied, or guided. The term 'framework' is applied to these uses or applications or means of guiding the activity" (5).
Reflection certainly can happen in many different ways and in many different contexts--it doesn't just happen in school. We can do it via thinking, talking, talking to ourselves, or in writing. Moon's notion of "framework" being what distinguishes differences in reflection, I think, is key. What I think is interesting is reflection done via writing--discursively. The epistemic nature within language meshes with the epistemic, revelatory, transformational potential within reflection. They seem to go together, and I'd love to get at this discursive nature of reflection more (somehow).
Motivation is key also. Notice the two qualifiers--purpose and uncertainty. Reflection won't go as deep without purpose and some sense of uncertainty and a problem. The difficulty in prompted written reflections within a comp class is to get students to truly enter the "rhetorical situation."
These are good questions. Since I see invention and reflection as basically continuations of the same kind of "invention" work, we could ask the same questions of invention--does it need to be prompted? does it need to be in a comp class? (I think so...)
L
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