Get to it!

I had lunch with Fred day before yesterday, and I am still trying to process our discussions. I got the message fairly clearly that I need to push on through and "get it done." This imperative is throwing me off center for a couple of reasons that I think come down to "task representation." My conception of this task of the dissertation may be too grand and large. Fred seems to say that the dissertation is really a smaller task than I may have been thinking of it as. Just get it done.

I have been reviewing in close detail the thinking of the major theorists and scholars related to reflection since last summer. I have about 45K words and I'm not done yet reviewing reflection in the field of composition rhetoric. And now I hear the call to be much more pragmatic and do what I need to do to get the damn thing done. This call is a bit scary to me because it pushes me to the end game earlier than I am ready (I feel), but on another account I am enjoying this close review. I am hammering out and constructing my understanding and perspective on these thinkers and past work on reflection. I've just finished writing 11 pages and 5K+ words demonstrating that we have a "portfolio-centric" view of reflection in our field and that Yancey misinterprets Schon's notion of reflection-in-action when she bootstraps it into reflection in the writing classroom. I don't know, but I feel like I need to earn the right to say some of the things I know I will say in the dissertation by doing this thorough background work. I don't think I can spend twenty pages in my lit review in the dissertation going into comp/rhets portfolio-centric framework on reflection and where Yancey when wrong with reflection-in-action. BUT, I think I will be able to say with more confidence these things in briefer form within the dissertation with this background work behind me.

So what do I do? For right now, I feel that I need to keep pushing on at the cumbersome rate I am going a bit longer. I need to dig into research done on reflection-in-action (the little there is) and especially look at the work done by the cognitivist. I suppose I might be a bit more streamline in places where I might name or point out that there is a bunch of stuff on "whatever" but I don't have to thoroughly dig into it in detail.

As a deadline, I think I will HAVE to finish this first draft of the lit review by no later than the end of Spring Break. I believe I will be well positioned then to "get it done!"

Oh... so what did Yancey get wrong about reflection-in-action? Here is an excerpt:

"It is clear from her use of the term “reflection-in-action” that Yancey is redefining the concept in her own terms. Whereas before she has represented reflection-in-action as the thinking occurring while the writer writes, here she seems to broadly define it as the post-task reflection that occurs on a single text. She offers this definition of reflection-in-action: “Reflection-in-action tends to be embedded in a single composing event, tends to be oriented to a single text, its focus squarely on the writer-reader-text relationship and on the development of that text” (26). Nothing exclusively locates this form of reflection as post-task; however, her portfolio-centric view of reflection leads her conceive of this reflection as a kind of portfolio cover letter but on a single essay cycle."

How this inquiry connects to traditionally important concerns of the field

(draft of introduction to second section of lit review)

I want to turn for a few moments to position this inquiry within traditionally important concerns of composition/rhetoric: namely, the revival of invention and the emergence of what has been called "epistemic rhetoric." Richard Young's 1978 article "Paradigms and Problems: Needed Research in Rhetorical Invention" provides one significant demonstration of the deep roots this investigation possesses.

Coming four years before Maxine Hairston's article "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing," Young speaks of a paradigm shift away from the current-traditional rhetoric's teaching of writing as a product to an emphasis on invention and the teaching of writing as a process. As Janice Lauer has documented, the new focus on invention in the 1960s was the primary means for reviving interest in rhetoric and calling for change in the field (74). Lauer points specifically to Gordon Rohman and Albert Wlecke's 1964 research into "pre-writing" (and Rohman's 1965 CCC article), Edward Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, and Richard Young and Alton Beckers first accounts in 1965 of tagmetric invention as significant milestones in this new emphasis on invention and rhetoric within composition/rhetoric (78-80). Young recounts this time period as a crisis in the field of composition/rhetoric in which the current-traditional paradigm was "repeatedly attacked for its failure to provide effective instruction in what is often called the ‘prewriting stage’ of the composing process and in the analytical and synthetic skills necessary for good thinking" (400).  He blames the failure for the development of the skills of invention on the field's response to the problem from within the paradigm of current-traditional rhetoric. He points specifically to the vitalist, or Romantic, assumption that the creative processes behind the generation of writing "are not susceptible to conscious control by formal procedures" (399). The uniqueness of the creative act cannot be formulated or taught; hence, current-traditional rhetoric's emphasis on the final product and the exclusion of the art of invention (398-99). Speaking in 1978 at the point when this revolution against the current-traditional paradigm was consolidating the writing process paradigm and the new discipline of rhetoric/composition, Young states:

It is no accident that the shift in attention from composed product to the composing process is occurring at the same time as the reemergence of invention as a rhetorical discipline. Invention requires a process view of rhetoric; and if the composing process is to be taught, rather than left to the student to be learned, arts associated with the various stages of the process are necessary. (401)

Speaking assuredly about the importance of "the skills invention is designed to cultivate" for effective writing, Young voices a key question—how are they to be cultivated?(399). He ends his essay voicing the need for more research, specifically stating, “we lack detailed accounts of pedagogical devices associated with theories of invention” (410). Although coming over thirty years later, my own inquiry into the pedagogical activity of teacher-prompted rhetorical reflection can be seen as answering Young’s call for research into just such a pedagogical device.

Although Young can be seen to be influenced by the stage view of the writing process, Flower and Hayes’ (1981) re-conception of the writing process as recursive, and an increasing view of the entire writing process as an inquiry process (Elbow, Odell, Hillocks Inquiry) has led to the belief that invention does not happen only at the beginning of the writing process, but occurs throughout the activity of writing from start to end. Rhetorical reflection, then, represents a pedagogical activity meant to re-engage writers in inventional thinking.  The pedagogical practice of invention and reflection both connect in these areas:

·      Invention and reflection both are heuristics of guided inquiry

·      Productive invention and reflection are both seen as requiring similar states of ambiguity or a sense of a problem to trigger and guide them

·      The prime concern invention and reflection share is an interest in determining and negotiating the writer’s rhetorical stance

Stance is a significant concept because it helps to bridge what Lynette Hunter calls the either/or split she believes rhetoric has suffered from between seeing rhetoric as a “theory of strategy or technique alone” or as a “pursuit of truth or expression of belief” (4). Invention is not just about generating ideas and making meaning; it is about communicating those meanings to someone else within a particular context. As Hunter states, “Stance is a rhetorical term for indicating not what someone believes, … but how he believes. Stance enacts the meeting of the human being with the world” (5). Invention, and by extension rhetorical reflection, are primarily concerned with helping the writer to position themselves and their ideas in order to communicate effectively. Wayne Booth in his influential 1963 article “Rhetorical Stance,” represents rhetorical stance as a balancing of the various elements of the writing situation and claims, “it is this balance, this rhetorical stance, difficult as it is to describe, that is our main goal as teachers of rhetoric” (141). Finding this balance is not limited to any “pre-writing” stage or activities, and rhetorical reflection is one important pedagogical activity meant to help writers find, problem-solve, and pursue their rhetorical stance throughout the writing process.

We see from this brief survey how rhetorical reflection links to pivotal concerns of invention our discipline has had from its inception. However, if the links of rhetorical reflection to the story of invention ended here, my own inquiry would not have adequate relevance for writing instruction today. The answer to Young’s call for research is documented in his 1987 summary of research on invention within the collection Teaching Composition: Twelve Bibliographic Essays. His summary filled thirty-eight pages and significantly was placed first. In the introduction to their 1994 Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Invention in Writing, Young and Yameng Liu declare that developments in theory and research since World War II have “established invention as the central theoretical issue of rhetoric and composition and its study as one of the most fertile and dynamic areas in discourse studies” (xiii). This statement, however, represents the high water mark for invention in recent times.

The emergence of postmodernism and its reconceived notion of the subject (that is, the writer who writes) challenged invention and put it on the defensive (Atwill xvi). John Clifford in his essay “The Subject in Discourse” summarizes the 20^th century critique of the traditional humanist view of the writer that underlay many of the assumptions of invention within the writing process held by many rhetoric/composition revivalists of the 60s and 70s. Clifford summarizes this view and the basis for undercutting this view:

For the traditional humanist, the writer has always been seen as a creative individual, the locus of significance, the originator of meaning, an autonomous being, aware of ends and means, of authorial intentions and motivations.  … but rarely is the writer thought of as the site of contradiction, as being written by social or psychological forces that might diminish the clarity of consciousness or the singularity of individual intentions. (39)

The writer is written rather than writing, and agency for determining meaning and intentions is placed outside the individual rather than inside the individual’s consciousness. Clifford summarizes succeeding waves of critique of the autonomous self from structuralism, to psychological criticism, to post-structuralism: “As a result, the independent and private consciousness formerly endowed with plentitude and presence, with a timeless and transcultural essence, becomes in postmodern thought a decentered subject constantly being called on to inhabit overdetermined positions, the implications of which can be only dimly grasped by a consciousness written by multiple, shifting codes” (40-41). Michel Foucault’s statement from The Archeology of Knowledge represents one particularly influential postmodern critique of the “autonomous subject”: “it must now be recognized that it is neither by recourse to a transcendental subject nor by recourse to a psychological subjectivity that the regulation of its enunciations should be defined” (1444-1445). Writing, or discourse, is not created and invented (“regulated”) by the writer; instead the writer and his or her text are determined by discourse and social forces outside the writer. In short, traditional notions of invention heralded by Young and other early rhetoric/composition scholars are impossible from the postmodern position. If a new bibliographic essay on the studies in invention by our field were published today, it would be hard pressed to fill thirty-eight pages as Young did in 1987. Instead, as Atwill notes, interest in invention waned and all but disappeared in the 1990s to the marginalized place it holds today (Rhetorical Invention 2).

The post-postmodern correction to this stripping of the subject’s agency is to return some control to the writer, to acknowledge that in the face of multiple outside influences the writer still shapes and forms their meaning in ways determined (to a degree) by themselves. Helen Foster’s conception of “networked subjectivity” and Anis Bawarshi’s conception of genre’s interaction with the writer present alternative, broader views of the writer who writes and is written.

Figure CVB: Helen Foster’s Networked Subjectivity (Foster 113)

Foster’s aim is to conceptualize a more complex picture of the “relation of the subject to itself, to others, and to the world” believing that this complex perspective still offers significant agency to the writer (and the teacher) who is aware of this positionality. She seeks a point of stasis between traditional notions of the writing process and the radical notions of post-process scholarship with its overdetermined notions of the writer. For her, she finds this point of common concern and assumptions within social/cultural scholarship: “this scholarship effectively moves us off overdetermined notions of the individual and toward theorizing (1) the complex networks with(in) which writers are imbricated by merely being and (2) the complex networks that influence and pressure the act(or) of writing” (Foster 40-41). Figure CVB illustrates her graphical representation of the material and conceptual space of what she refers to as the “writer/writing/network” which she labels as “networked process.” Foster and Bawarshi each present “invention” as a form of negotiation that must be accomplished by the writer as he or she writes, where the writer has a significant role in this negotiated process. Thus, from my perspective we have the reawakening of invention in writing studies, and my own inquiry into rhetorical reflection can be seen as aligning with this new expanded view of the subject and its possibilities for invention.

Closely allied to the reawakening of invention within the field of composition/rhetoric is the emergence of “epistemic rhetoric” and notions that through writing we discover and construct knowledge. Often referred to by influential scholars and teachers like Donald Murry, Peter Elbow, and James Britton as “writing as discovery,” theories of epistemic writing were based on the critique of current-traditional (and modernist) notions of language as a container for thought. Since language is conceived of instead as the substance of thought, our use of language is the way in which we shape and form our thinking. We have already seen this notion expressed in the work of Elliot Eisner who says that through representations of reality we are engaged in constructing that reality for ourselves. Britton presents this view as he summarizes the thinking of Susan Langar: “We give and find shape in the very act of perception, we give and find further shape as we talk, write or otherwise represent our experience” (“Spectator Role” 150). Kenneth Dowst in Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition summarizes what he calls “The Epistemic Approach.” In this description, he voices these same assumptions about the relation of language and thought: “The way we use language, then, seems not only to reflect but in part to determine what we know, what we can do, and in a sense who we are. … our manipulation of language shapes our conceptions of the world and of our selves” (69). This epistemic quality of language use underlay representations of the entire writing process as a process of discovery and, as Ann Berthoff called it, the “making of meaning”: “Composing … is a means of discovering what we mean to say, as well as being the saying of it” (Berthoff 20). This perspective on the power of writing was significantly confirmed by Judith Langer and Arthur Applebee’s 1987 study How Writing Shapes Thinking and would underlie the enormous growth of Writing Across the Disciplines (WAC) programs in American colleges and universities. The concept of “write to learn” is grounded in these assumptions about language and in particular the nature of writing as a means for this discovery and construction of meaning and understanding.  Dowst presents a description of the unique epistemic qualities of the act of writing:

While one in effect composes his or her world by engaging in any sort of language-using, it is by means of writing that one stands to learn the most, for writing is the form of language-using that is slowest, most deliberate, most accessible, most conveniently manipulable, and most permanent. While a person’s short-term memory can hold at any time only six or seven “bits” of information, a written paragraph can hold thousands. It can fix them while a writer experiments in connecting bits in various ways, in replacing some with others, in supplementing them with others, in rearranging them, in abstracting and generalizing from them. (69)

Rather than being the means by which we clothe already-formulated thoughts, writing as an epistemic tool serves as the means for shaping, constructing, and deepening thinking. It is this tradition within our discipline of epistemic rhetoric that I want to connect with my own inquiry into rhetorical reflection. Reflection as a form of thinking about thinking and action happens in many forms either in non-discursive ways (simply in our head), by talking, or by writing. My focus is upon written reflection, and we can see from this brief summary of epistemic rhetoric’s place within our discipline how my own inquiry fits within the same assumptions about the power of writing to form and shape our thinking that have informed our field for many years.

While rhetorical reflection shares in many of the positive assumptions about the value of invention and epistemic theories of writing, it also shares the same questions and ambiguities about these activities. Young in his 1978 article voices the lack of certainty of how to promote the skills of invention and the doubt surrounding invention’s effectiveness, and he devotes special attention to research on competing theories of invention. Interestingly, his questions about determining the adequacy of these theories are the same that apply to current views on reflection:

1.     Does it [the theory of invention] do what it claims to do? That is, does it provide an adequate account of the psychological processes it purports to explain? And does it increase our ability to carry out these processes more efficiently or effectively?

and …

2.     Does the theory provide a more adequate account of the processes and more adequate means for carrying them out than any of the alternatives. (405)

Here we have in a more sophisticated form the “open question” of reflection. Implicit within the use of teacher-prompted activities to promote reflective thinking are “theories of reflection” which contain claims and assumptions about what happens when students reflect and what results will happen (or ought to happen) because of the reflection. Indeed, we can see by a re-examination of the two research questions of this dissertation how much this inquiry aligns with that advocated by Young:

What is the nature of Rhetorical Reflection within the activity of writing, and how does it work in relation to the learning and practice of freshman writers?

Can we generate a grounded theory that offers an understanding of rhetorical reflection and how it works that is useful for teachers of writing?

This research project seeks what Young calls an “adequate account” of rhetorical reflection.

It seeks to answer whether our theorizing about reflection fits with an understanding of reflection generated from grounded theory. It hopes to generate a theory of rhetorical reflection that may offer a theory that better matches students’ actual practice of reflection and proves useful in productive ways for teachers?

What the proceeding literature review will do is describe our field’s development of a theory of reflection, with special attention directed towards in-task reflection. We will see our field’s various attempts to answer the question of the adequacy and effectiveness of this theory. However, as Kimberly Emmons points out, our field has closely examined or questioned how reflection works for writers, “Our attention as theorists has been focused on promoting the habit of reflection in our students rather than on questioning its mechanisms” (“The Legacy of Process: Self-Reflection”). What this review will reveal is how we have built our theory of reflection by importing theories uncritically and crudely into our own teaching practice. We have predominantly based our practice upon theories built from other theories or from classroom experience. The nature of our theory building and resulting practice has resulted in a gap in our ability to account sufficiently for reflection and the persistence of the open question regarding reflection.

Scattered

I've had a full morning of working on phase II of my lit review, and I feel very scattered at the moment. For fun, let me try a few metaphors of how I feel and where I am.

I feel as if I am playing 52 card pick up. The deck has been cast in the air and the cards are strewn all over the place. I am picking up card by card trying to put them into some order.

I am working on putting together a puzzle. There are a zillion pieces all over the table. I have bunches of pieces together that form some coherent pictures, but there are still lots of scattered pieces. I also find pieces that might fit in one place or another or actually do fit in multiple places. It is a three dimensional puzzle.

I also feel as if I am going through old boxes in the attic to see what to throw away. I am going through old articles, notebooks, books, and my notes and it is slow tedious work as I am drawn in to pulling out and examining each treasure in the boxes from the attic.

What is another metaphor for my current state?

I also feel something like I am working on a project with bricks or stones. Let's say I'm building a wall. The bricks are all in a pile in the front drive, but my wall is in the back. As I put together my wall, I have to carry these bricks. Also, as I make the wall I have to handle the bricks. But they are heavy and I can only carry a few bricks at a time. The information is so much that can't retain it all in my mind at the same time. I can't carry the pile all at once to the wall. So I am devising ways to carefully carry bricks, sort and categorize them and place them in certain places I can come back to. I have to set up this wide array of bricks so that I can select and place the brick where I want it to go. But this seems to be my typical way of writing. However, this time I am also working with multiple past sets of categorizes sources, and I am struggling with how to deal with those.

I feel also something like I do as I build a sandcastle via the drip method. I'm cupping my hand into a divit half full of water and scooping out a hand full of wet sand and letting it drip to form a rampart or a tower. Pour, dripdrip, drip, ... drip, higher higher building little by little drip by drip slowly drip by drip but still building and building.

Ok. Enough for now. I have more work to do.

Still prepping for stage 2 of Lit Review

I am still pulling things together for stage two of my literature review focusing on Rhet/Comp-Writing and reflection. As seems typical, it is taking longer than I had thought. I wish I was able to sit down and just have this stuff pour out of my head. It doesn't. As I have watched myself write this lit review, I see a consistent pattern to my writing process. I seem to need to gather all the various pieces of my topic together, and then I sort and order them according to the design/organization I create. Then I can write. I used the analogy of a box of legos to my students. A writer needs to have that ready material from which to construct their written work. Thus, I have been gathering my legos together.

The first stage was to organize my office and put things back in their place after stage 1 of the lit review. I had Schon and King/Kitchener stuff all over the place. I also had scattered articles that I had never really reviewed and put together, so I've been looking at these. The big winner from this batch of stuff is an article from 2003 in Composition Studies by Emmons critiquing reflection, particularly portfolio reflections. I know I will have a number of good reference points to bounce from her article. I also went through all my research on reflection and summarized points for each. I need to do this quick review for other articles and books on reflection and comp. I also re-read portions of Yancey's Reflection in the Writing Classroom. At this point, I am still pulling together all my lego pieces (so to speak). My next step is to sort and order and design my approach to this lit review section.

I know that I will generally follow this plan:

1. Intro--setting course of section II
2. Reflection and Rhet/Comp (central focus around Yancey)
3. Reflection and Cognitive views of writing (centrally focusing around Flower-Hayes and Beireter-Scarmadalia and others)
4. Reflection and Student-Self-evaluations and Revision (I'm going to lump these together)

I have one outlier area of scholarship which I am not sure how I will integrate yet. This is reflection as reflective practice. Typically, this scholarship is either directed toward the education/training of teachers or for professionals (particularly nurses). I perhaps could have had this material in my earlier section on Reflection and Practice, but I held it out because typically this scholarship revolves around the use of writing in this educational process of practitioners. It is also a bit of an outlier because it tends to be post-taskish. Lots use ongoing journals, so this can be considered as in-task, but it is different than the kind of reflection I am talking about. That is why I am considering keeping this section short and generally referential in nature. We shall see.

I was glancing through the new Norton Essays on Composition Studies and found Richard Young's 1978 call for more research into invention. This essay has given me a solid angle for opening this second section because I will use the article to position my study within larger concerns of rhet/comp (namely the role and place of invention in the writing process), and I can use it to highlight two key aspects I will be stressing: 1) reflection as in-task rather than post-task; that is, time or the kairotic elements of invention matters; 2) the open question of whether this kind of teacher-prompted activity is worth it (the "open question" of reflection) because this same question is asked of invention exercises. My goal is to tie my work into a tradition of scholarship on the writing process and on invention and its place and role within the writing process. I also really like Young's discussion of theory and criteria for adequacy and the nature of theory that will be useful. I think I can use this perhaps as a gauge or measuring stick as I discuss the theories and discussions on reflection of the scholarship I will review. Of course, I will attempt to show that these theories may be wanting in certain aspects. Thus we will be wanting a more adequate theory.

I have just about everything ready for the semester, so I should have Thurs. Friday, Sat., Sun, and Monday to get a good launch on this second section. Today is department stuff--ugg. First to gather all my legos. Next, sort and organize. Then write.

Future Post: I plan to discuss in a future post what function this long version of my lit review is serving and how I anticipate I will craft my actual lit review from this extended version.

Launching the next phase--Lit Review Part II

I'm ramping up to dig into the second half of my lit review. I certainly hope it doesn't take as long as part I. I have this feeling that I need to charge through this draft because it is a draft. Also, I need to move more quickly because what will end up going into my actual dissertation will be considerably different and shorter. The style of writing will be different. Right now I am writing in depth summaries and considerations of key points. That's OK. But it isn't the synthetic narrative of the dissertation. If my draft one ends up at 50K or 70K words, my actual lit review in the diss will end up being 12.5 K (50 pages double-spaced). Even if I stretch it to 100 pages, the lit review would be only 25K. I will have a lot of conversion to do; however, I am finding this detailed review of the research and literature enormously helpful in expanding my understanding.

As I dive into this next phase, I am pulling together my sources. It is nice to be focusing on writing! I've started by looking at my summaries of research on rhetorical reflection. Now it the time I can build on previous work--thank goodness. I also have a notebook (actually notebooks) with all the various articles. I need to find my close summary notes on Yancey's book. They are in my box somewhere.

I have a few thoughts right now as I look at the lit on reflection research. First, there is a lot of good material. Many studies are weak in rigor, and I've thought about developing some kind of star system for rating research. I have a number of one star studies, but I have what I have.

Some impressions--
A number of studies point to ability and proficiency with reflection leads to improvement of some kind or correlates with superior ability. Sumsion has probably the most interesting things to say because she is critical of reflection. Her study doubts reflection can be quantitatively measured. It isn't suited for that kind of evaluation. She also noticed that students can be reflective and yet still not academically able. I have certainly seen that with a noticeable number of students. They can write a beautiful reflection in their final portfolio reflection, but their actual writing performance does not match the sophistication of their reflective awareness.

I see lots of influence from Flavell and his notion of metacognition. I struggle in my own mind to pin down a definition of metacognition, or rather I struggle matching exact forms or expressions of thinking with what is "metacognitive." How do I distinguish these forms of thinking we might label as "metacognitive" from those we should label "reflective?" Should I distinguish them, or can I lump them together? Flavell asserted that metacognition could be learned, that it would improve based upon training. Some research has tried to validate that assertion, and there is a group of findings that characterize reflection in the same way--that reflection is a learned behavior/skill. I might mention that this school of thinking counters the findings of King and Kitchener who believe reflective thinking is developmental.

I also see two different views of reflection. One view is based from Dewey and it presents reflective thinking in qualified terms. Reflection is triggered from a problem, exists within an ill-structured situation, and is inquiry based upon seeking a solution to the problem. David Boud offers another school of thinking about reflection that has a broader definition. In this sense, reflection is a form of thoughtful processing of experience with the goal of gaining better understanding that it is assumed leads to improved practice. Boud has a general practice orientation. I don't think these definitions or perspectives need to be exclusive of each other. Boud's allows for what McAlpine saw which is that practitioners engaged in reflection-in-action didn't always reflect around a problem, but they could also trigger significant reflection and resulting action around possibilities.

So much for the moment. I am presently gaining a perspective on the terrain of all this literature and scholarship. I'm gathering all my lego pieces. Once I have them together, I will chart out my game plan for writing and begin.

Persuasive Developments: Reflective Judgment and College Students' Written Argumentation

2003 Dissertation by Amy Overbay--available

Excerpts from  Conclusions Section

"However, the majority of the essays written by both groups of participants used onesided
positions, and did not examine or respond to objections in a sustained way. In most
cases, participants used evidence that was not examined critically, and offered unqualified
claims. Participants in both groups appeared reluctant to concede contested points, and in the
majority of their essays failed to address the fundamental conflict underlying the rhetorical
problem. These characteristics have been identified in other studies of students’ persuasive
writing (Crammond, 1998; Hays, 1988; Hillocks, 1995)" (202).


"The results of this study provide substantiation for Davidson et al.’s (1990) prediction
that reflective judgment may play an important role in how some students construct solutions
to the dilemmas they face when writing arguments. Given these findings, assuming that all
freshmen come to the first day of classes equipped with the necessary repertoire of cognitive
skills for dealing with ill-structured problems in writing may problematize their ability to
produce the kinds of arguments we want them to write" (207)

"The instructor in this study voiced a widely-held belief that students’ difficulties with written arguments pertained to their lack of preparation for college writing, or to their lack of intelligence. The possibility that some writing behaviors may be related to the developmental nature of students’ beliefs about knowing and justifying provides an important alternative explanation for instructors searching for ways to clarify for students what they expect from them" (208).

*************************************************

Discussion and Implications of Overbay's Study

I have taught Freshman Composition II, the class that focuses most explicitely on academic argumentation, for almost twenty years, and I have from the start noticed the difficulty freshmen have with what I term the "critical essay." Students that might do well in Freshman Comp I where the writing is more expressive in nature fall flat on their face when confronted with this task of forming and supporting an argument. From the start, I have noticed the high failure rate (if I could call it that) on the first essay which typically has been to form an argument supporting an interpretation of a work of literature, so I have my students rewrite the first paper. Overbay states that most instructors believe that lack of familiarity with academic conventions or a students intelligence are the prime causes for this difficulty in writing. However, her research confirming the presence of the expected stages of development within freshmen writer's arguments indicates that cognitive development issues may be more important. Students are not ready for the kind of reflective thinking we set as our learning objectives for this kind of writing assignment. It is like we are asking them to jump and touch a ten foot high basketball rim, and they are only able to jump and touch a six foot rim.

Two things about these findings jump out at me:
1. Deterministic view
If we carry these findings too far, we fall into what we might call a materialistic view of human behavior (in this case the learning and performing behavior of freshman writers). The hard-wired nature of the mind's development shapes, then, what these individuals are able to think and do in terms of their writing tasks. For those of us who ascribe to the outside influence of society and language upon our thinking and consciousness, this sort of fundamental determinism below this level of social influence is disturbing and hard to swallow.

2. Modifications
Maybe we can see the teaching practices that have been labeled "current traditional" in a new light based upon these findings. In many ways, the formalist impulses and of current traditional pedagogy might be seen as modifications made by generations of teachers to create writing tasks that are more developmentally appropriate for students at this developmental level. Such formalist tasks tend to make writing into a "well-structured" problem; whereas, the new rhetorical pedagogy that emerged since the 1960s emphasized the rhetorical, and thus "ill-structured" aspects of the writing task. Perhaps freshmen writers are not yet ready for the full blast of rhetoric's ill-structured nature? We might ask why after all these years of critiquing writing forms such as the five-paragraph essay do they persist. The work of King and Kitchener may offer an interesting explanation in this sort of writing's developmental appropriateness.

In my own thinking about reflection, I have come up with a number of different metaphors to explain some of my assumptions about its nature and role in learning and writing. My favorite is the Superman telephone booth. Clark Kent sees a crisis or problem, jumps into a near by phone booth still clothed in his newspaperman suit, and then after moments emerges as Superman in his superman suit. Reflection is like that phone booth--students enter it and become transformed. The act of reflection is some kind of catalyst for change or development in thinking (and by extension action). It is nice to leave the booth as a black box where unknown and unidentified things happen, but many thinkers on reflection have anatomized the thinking that goes on within the reflection telephone booth. This reflective thinking is described as a method or even as a sort of formula or perhaps you could call it a dance. We can map this thinking and it exists as a static model representing a form of mental activity.

The assumption has been that if we could only engage students in this type of thinking (because it is out there as a method or model to perform)--if we could only shove them in the Superman telephone booth--good things would happen. The magic powers of reflection would create change and transformation and all sort of good things.

King and Kitchener's work, as well as Overbay's, tells us that we might shove students in the telephone booth, but they are not able or ready to engage in the kind of reflective thinking we assume they will do. No wonder we are disappointed in the kinds of reflections our students do. No wonder we don't see the results of this kind of reflection that we might expect. No wonder suddenly all our students don't have superman caps and are flying through the sky after we ask them to reflect.

My sense is that the take away from asking students to engage in reflection is more than what can be summarized in the capacity of their epistemic cognition. As Boud as discussed, the outputs from reflection are multiple and varied. However, I believe this research is significant and can help me understand better what expectation I might have for my students' reflections (as well as their abilities as thinkers and writers in my class)

2009 Dissertation Progress Report

1/5-1/9         Qualifying Exam taken

1/20             News of Passing on Qualifying Exam

2/20             Dissertation Proposal Submitted (accepted)

3/13            Paper presentation 2009 CCCC in San Francisco “Researching Rhetorical Reflection” –involved updated review of research

March-May        Review and Preparations for Engaging in Grounded Theory Research
                          (see blog for posts)-- http://thespeculum.blogspot.com/

5/15            Slice 1 of data analysis completed

5/31            Slice 2 of data analysis completed

6/13            Slice 3 of data analysis completed

6/15 – 8/4          Work on Lit Review

8/5-8/15            Slice 4 data analysis Phase I

8/15-10/7          Work on Lit Review

10/7-11/9            Slice 4 data analysis Phase II (completed)
--completion of Open Coding and identification of categories and properties near complete

11/10-            Return to Work on Lit Review

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Additional professionally related tasks:

Spring 2009—acted as peer reviewer for two articles submitted for publication to Voices in the Middle

Spring 2009—revised and resubmitted Writing Program Profile accepted by Composition Forum twice. Article finally accepted and published in the June issue.

June 2009—published “The Activist WPA in Action: A Profile of the First-Year Writing

            Program at Eastern Michigan University.” Composition Forum 20, Summer 2009. 

July 2009—led 1-week Open Institute on College Readiness for the San Antonio Writing Project (19 high school teachers attended)

Summer 2009—textbook chapter accepted and draft written for Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing (Edited by Charlie Lowe): “What is Writing? What is ‘Academic’ Writing?” Draft available
Dec. 2009--peer reviewed article submission for CCC

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Details on Lit Review and Research Work

Literature Review progress

As of 12/21, I will have completed my review of scholars and research on rhetorical reflection OUTSIDE of Composition/Rhetoric. These include the work predominantly of Dewey, Moon, Mezirow, Boud, Schon, and King and Kitchener. The draft of this section of my literature review is approximately 35 thousand words.

Beginning promptly on 12/22, I will begin my review of the scholarship and research on rhetorical reflection within the field of composition/rhetoric or writing studies broadly speaking. The general areas I will cover are reflection and composition, cognitive views of the writing process, student self-evaluation/assessments, and revision.

Projected completion date for Lit Review Draft #1:  March 15^th

Research Work progress

For now, I plan to focus on the lit review. If I bog down earlier, I may take a break by focusing on Slice 5 analysis, but in all likelihood this analysis will begin in Mid-March. This last slice of open coding will a “draft cycle” view for eight to twelve “cycles” containing these items: draft #1, peer responses on draft #1, Writing Review of draft #1, draft #2 (or it could be between draft two and three).

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Projected Timeline of Work

Goal: To have my lit review and open coding completed by May Seminar. Focus on May Seminar for Axial Coding and revision plans for Lit Review. It would be nice to have the data analysis completed earlier, though.  The projected timeline is deliberately conservative.

Late Spring-Early Summer: Complete research data analysis (Axial/Focused)

Summer: Submit draft chapters of Dissertation

Fall: Drafting and revision of chapters

Late Fall 2010-Early Spring 2011 Dissertation Defense