Rhetorical Reflection's Place in the Writing Curriculum to Promote Knowledge Transfer

In terms of student learning, rhetorical reflection has three main values which warrant its prominent place in any writing curriculum: 1) it helps guide more effective practice for student writers within particular writing situations; 2) it serves as a way for students to derive what Kathleen Yancey calls “prototypical models” that they can transfer to new communication contexts (50); and 3) it helps develop students' rhetorical sensitivity and practical judgment and their ability to flexibly and appropriately apply what they know in different situations (what I will eventually call their “reflective practice”). When we ask what a student learns in a writing class, what “knowledge” they carry with them into the next class or the next writing context they face, I believe all three of the roles of reflection are interlinked as we help students generalize productively from their learning experience.

Two questions need to be examined before we elaborate on reflection's place in the writing curriculum: First we need an understanding of what it means to write. What is writing? Second, we need to define what kind of knowledge we teach? With these two conceptions in mind about the nature of writing and the knowledge about the writing act we need to teach, we can then discuss reflection's role in learning to write.

The grammatical form of the word “writing” as a gerund contains the paradox in what it means to write: writing operates as both a noun and a verb. This paradox of writing was discussed at length by classical rhetoricians as the debate between viewing rhetoric as a subject (or science) and viewing rhetoric as an art (or faculty). As a subject, writing involves knowledge of and control of the sign system of language—referred to in writing rubrics as grammar and mechanics (things like spelling, word form, punctuation, capitalization). In addition, writing as a subject involves what we might call conventions of discourse. The most conventional form of writing in Composition is the enduring five paragraph essay, or at least the concept of the thesis-support essay structure built around the unified paragraph invented by Alexander Bain in the mid-19th century (Halasek 146-154). As an art, writing means acknowledging the full complexity of the writing act as well as the flexible and appropriate application of the “rules” of writing as a subject within particular writing situations. The best metaphor that describes the act of writing is the notion of “rhetorical stance” which describes the complex process of finding, defining, checking, and altering all the various elements of the writing situation: what we mean vs. what we say, the situation, the occasion, the constraints of the particular task (or task schema) , the materiality of writing and process of production, genre, the audience, and purpose (Bereiter and Scarmadalia, Bitzer, Kinneavy, Flower and Hayes, Bawarshi, Ede and Lundsford). Helen Foster's map of “networked subjectivity” provides a compelling conceptual model of all the complexities writers face when they write:

Figure 1: Networked Subjectivity (Foster 113)

As Foster states, “The map attempts to indicate that multiple subjectivities, epistemologies, and literacies are part and parcel of networked subjectivity; the subject and its relation to the networked world, including the classroom and the practices of teaching writing, is shot through and through with discursive relations” (114). Flower and Hayes' 1981 model of the writing process (as well as Hayes' 1996 revision of that model) are two other models of the elements of the writing act. Each of these models of the activity of writing indicate that the act of writing involves a complex managing of multiple factors and constraints.

When we ask what we should teach in a writing class and what knowledge students should learn, I believe we need to teach not just what Linda Flower calls “limited literacy” but “literate acts” (Construction 1-35). Limited literacy narrows the range of the writing situation and privileges rules, correctness, and formal (or surface) features of writing. In Flower's call for teaching “literate acts” we see the exact complaints classical rhetoricians had against those teachers of rhetoric who would reduce it to a science and a form of techne. Isocrates in “Against the Sophists” complains that the sophists taught oratory as if they were teaching the alphabet: “But I marvel when I observe these men setting themselves up as instruments of youth who cannot see that they are applying the analogy of an art [science] with hard and fast rules to a creative process” (73). Similarly Aristotle states, “But the more we try to make either dialectic or rhetoric not, what they really are, practical faculties, but sciences, the more we shall inadvertently be destroying their true nature” (187). When critics like Sharon Crowley and Kathleen Welch condemn “composition” and “current-traditional” practice as teaching such a narrow form of writing as to become “anti-writing” (Crowley 149) and when post-process critics like Kent, Petraglia, Olson, Coultre, and Dobrin (and others) critique writing process pedagogy as teaching a Theory of Writing that is reductive, false, and even unethical, we hear the same critiques made by classical rhetoricians and in the call Flower makes for teaching “literate acts” rather than “limited literacy.”

But what are “literate acts” and the practical faculty they employ? A literate act as Flower defines it “is an individual constructive act that does not merely invoke or participate in a literate practice but embeds such practice and conventions within a personally meaningful, goal-directed use of literacy” (Construction 18). She identifies literacy as a move within a “discourse practice” and claims writers through these moves engage “in a transaction with text that is guided (more or less) by a flexible social script for how such things are normally done” (20). Contrary to post-process scholars who would claim that the activity of writing is totally indeterminate and interpretive and would thus “let go the curriculum” claiming writing is unteachable (Breuch 99, 118), Flower states that “becoming literate depends upon knowledge of social conventions … and learning distinctive ways of thinking grounded in the social purpose of the practice” (22, 23). It also involves problem-solving: “By problem-solving, I mean the intellectual moves that allow people to construct meaning—to interpret the situation; to organize, select, and connect information; to draw inferences, set goals, get the gist, respond to prior texts, draw on past experience, imagine options, and carry on intentions” (24). Ann Berthoff makes a similar point when she claims writing as a form of making meaning is not just a verbal behavior (skill) but an activity that “involves the writer in making choices all along the way” (22). Flower's emphasis on literate acts interweaving knowledge of conventions as well as situated cognition complements the point Anis Bawashi makes in her 2003 book on the role of genre and invention in writing: “By encouraging student writers to recognize beginnings as genred positions of articulation, and by teaching students how to inquire into these positions, we enable them to locate themselves more critically and effectively as writers within these beginnings” (170). Thus, we have the creative tension implicit in the nature of writing as being both a subject and an activity; as being a genred act of articulation and an individual act of meaning-making; and as being a body of general concepts, theories, and rules and the flexible application of those general theories in particular contexts. The “knowledge” we must teach as writing teachers is how to critically understand and manage this creative tension implicit in what it means to engage in a literate act.

In summary, reflection as a pedagogical activity within a writing curriculum is a strategic activity that helps writers engage in and problem-solve within literate acts. Reflection also serves as an opportunity for students to construct their understanding (create what Donna Qualley calls “earned insights”) and debrief their learning experience. These two views of reflection match my own description of the two frameworks for reflection in composition: rhetorical reflection and curricular reflection. Since my focus of inquiry is on rhetorical reflection, I will center my discussion on “knowledge” not as a discrete skill or form of knowledge that is retrospectively constructed, but as a capacity or awareness flexibly applied within various writing situations that will enable the writer to write more effectively. As a kind of knowledge Schon would call “reflection-in-action,” this cognitive flexibility resembles the classical notion of phronesis, or the application of practical wisdom and judgment in uncertain or “indeterminate zones or practice” (Schon Educating 6). This “critical knowing” (Pearson and Smith 74) or “meta-awareness about writing, language, and rhetorical strategies” (Wardle qtd. in Anson 124) I will label as “reflective practice” (following Schon). To carry this reflective practice into another writing situation I will call “reflexive transfer.”

It is now my job to describe a composition pedagogy that encourages “reflective practice” and promotes “reflexive transfer.” Such a pedagogy involves two steps: first students must be engaged in writing tasks that call on them to exercise this reflective practice, and second “reflexive transfer” is promoted through reflecting on their reflective practice.

A writing pedagogy that promotes reflective practice, I believe, must be thoroughly rhetorical. I conceived my own framework for such a composition course in a paper I wrote entitled, “Open Spaces: A Heuristic Toward a New Composition.” My own discussion of this pedagogy will draw on ideas and a few excerpts from this paper. Sharon Crowley outlines the nature of the rhetorical principles that form the foundation for this pedagogy:

"rhetoric pays close attention to the given audience, occasion, and social or political situation that has prompted a rhetor to compose and deliver a discourse" (166)
and
"rhetoric tends to prefer a more holistic picture of human motivation than has been traditionally congenial to philosophy" (166-167). [In other words, beyond appeals to reason, rhetoric is open to ethos, pathos, and knowledge built from common places.]
and
"rhetoricians tend to view language as something other than a simple medium of representation. … Language is not always a subservient instrument of thought or reason; indeed, it may shape both" (167).

Such a rhetorical pedagogy engages students in literate acts, calling on them to problem-solve and engage in reflective practice. I identified five heuristics or “spaces” in which teachers could position their students that I believed would call on them to act rhetorically and invent new practice. Only through significant rhetorical experiences which call on students to be reflective practitioners do they begin to learn reflective practice.

The five spaces or heuristics are as follows:
1)Open Genre/New Literacy
—Students are asked to write different kinds of genres that involve them in a variety of writing situations. In particular, I felt that writing teachers should engage students in writing multi-modal, new media forms of discourse because of our changing literacy landscape.

2)The Rhetorical Forum
--The rhetorical forum is a recurring location for communication and argument (Farrell “Practicing” 89). It is a social setting where students must take audience into account and learn that writing is a “two-sided act” (Bakhtin 1215) as well as a performance (Welch).

3)Real Writing
--It is important for student writers to write for real (not practice) writing situations and audiences. In this way, students have more significant experiences with occasion, audience, and purpose than for a classroom-bound only writing assignment. It draws them into the real complexities of writing and thus positions them to experience reflective practice more fully.

4)Collaborative Writing
--Co-creating a text calls on students to think about writing and the production of a text in different ways. Besides providing a broader perspective on the writing situation, collaborative writing also leads students to interrogate the choices they make in writing in more significant ways since the group has to negotiate these choices.

5)Civic Rhetoric
--Having students write about issues of public concern returns Composition to its roots in classical rhetoric and involves students in the role of rhetoric for building a civil society. An important part of having students engage in civic rhetoric should be the study of the way language works for communal good and bad—the ethical dimensions of all discourse.

I will briefly describe two assignments that enact this “New Composition,” and then discuss examples of how reflection plays a role in assisting and creating reflective practice.
The first assignment, used in my Freshman Composition I class last Fall, is entitled “What Really Matters for Election 2008.” Students were asked to profile a person of voting age about what single issue or concern most mattered to them in this 2008 election. These profiles were posted into a “rhetorical forum” I created for the San Antonio College community called “Decision2008atSAC.” The overall purpose of the student writing in this site was to help members of the SAC community become better informed voters. I won't belabor the may ways in which this assignment enacts New Composition in the interest of space (and since my focus will be on reflection within this pedagogical situation.

The second assignment is one I have done a number of times with my online Developmental English II students. I discovered while teaching this class that most of my students had a common story that went something like this: I struggled in and even hated high school. I did poorly, had major problems, made bad decisions, and blew my chance to go to college. But here I am years later, older, wiser, and with a fire in my belly to get my education. I found these stories extremely compelling, and I felt like current high school students needed to hear them. This assignment, then, was designed to give them that chance. This statement from the assignment expresses what the topic was: “Your purpose is to communicate some important truth or principle that you now understand (but that you ignored or didn't understand in high school) and persuade them that it is true or something they should do or adopt.” These essays were then posted on a website (a wiki) entitled “College4U.” As with the previous assignment, I won't elaborate ways this assignment asks students to engage in a literate act and use reflective practice.

The goal of rhetorical reflection in this pedagogical situation is to enter students into a discursive space where they can engage in reflective practice. A look at four different theoretical models of the method or sequence of reflection reveals a general pattern which rhetorical reflection can adopt:

John Dewey's
Steps of “Reflective Thinking”
(i) a felt difficulty
(ii) its location and definition
(iii) suggestion of possible solutions
(iv) development by reasoning of the bearings of the suggestion
(v) further observation and experiment leading to its acceptance or reflection; that is the conclusion of belief or disbelief
(72)

Donald Schon's Structure of Reflection in Action
1) problem
2) attempt at “problem setting/framing”
3) failure to solve the problem
4) reframing of the problem/situation
5) conduct experiment to discover consequences and implications

--appreciation
--action
--reappreciation
(Schon The Reflective Practitioner 128-132)

Kathleen Yancey's Synthesis of Schon's Method of Reflection
To theorize our own practice through reflection--
1) know it [practice]
2) review it
3) discern patterns in it
4) project appropriately from these patterns
5) use projections to hypothesize a new way of thinking about the situations
(12)

David Boud et. al
Three Phases of Reflective Process (from Experiential Learning)
1) Return to experience

2) Attend to feelings

3) Re-evaluate experience


David Grimmett's
Three Conceptions of Reflection in Teacher Education
1) thoughtfulness about action

2) deliberation and choice among competing actions

3) reflection as restructuring experience
(12)


From these different models, we can develop a general template for prompting rhetorical reflection between drafts. These prompts would contain this sequence:
1.Description—where are you, what have you done, how are you feeling
2.Attending to feelings—what feelings or impressions do you have at this point
3.Identify Problems—problem setting/problem framing, exploring difficulties and what may not be working (especially dealing with establishing aligned rhetorical stance)
4.Consider Options—suggest courses of action to solve the problem
5.Future Direction—decide what will you do, why you will do it, and expected outcome

I want to emphasize that this sequence is a general template; each particular prompt for rhetorical reflection should be customized to the essay assignment and to where students are within the writing cycle. However, this general sequence provides a framework for prompting reflective practice.

Prompts for rhetorical reflection should also encourage what Dewey called the “double movement of reflection.” This double movement is a form of dialectical thinking he describes this way: “[It is] a movement from the given partial and confused data to a suggested comprehension (or inclusive) entire situation; and back from this suggested whole... to the particular facts” (79). He names these movements as inductive and deductive thinking, “the movement toward the suggestion or hypothesis and the movement back to facts” (81). This dialectic movement of reflective thinking is a fundamental dynamic within reflection. Bereiter and Scarmadalia conceived a “dual-problem space model of reflective processes in written composition” where reflection is a dialogue between the Content Space (What do I mean?) and the Rhetorical Space (What do I say?): “The key requirement for reflective thought in writing, according to this model, is the translation of problems encountered in the rhetorical space back into subgoals to be achieved in the content space” (303). A similar back and forth process can be seen in L. McAlpine et. al's “Metacognitive Model of Reflection.” In their model reflection is seen as an iterative process and ongoing conversation: “Specifically, reflection is visualized as continuous interaction between the two inter-related components of action and knowledge” (107). Kathleen Yancey's description of the reflective process offers one more example of this double-movement in reflective thought: “When we reflect, we thus project and review, often putting the projections and the reviews in dialogue with each other, working dialectically as we seek to discover what we know, what we have learned, and what we might understand” (6). It is important within prompts for reflection that we design them to initiate this dialectical thinking.
So far I have described two key parts of developing a writing curriculum that implements rhetorical reflection: first, designing a curriculum that engages students within rhetorical situations and literate acts so that they are more readily drawn into reflective practice; and second, designing the reflective prompts between drafts to engage students into rhetorical reflection in order to critically understand and problem-solve within their reflective practice.

Two other questions remain regarding reflection and transfer:
How do you design a curriculum that encourages “reflexive transfer” (the transfer of the ability for reflective practice in new writing situations)?
How do you measure whether these efforts are effective?

In order to encourage “reflexive transfer,” we must provide opportunities for students to reflect upon and process their reflective practice. That is, we must ask them to reflect upon not just what they learned, but upon their rhetorical action—the moves, choices, and decisions they made and strategies they employed. Linda Flower believes the essence of transfer is “the ability to use old knowledge in new settings” (290). Learning and the knowledge we may gain from experience, however, are entwined within context. For transfer to happen, these contexts must be tapped into: “effective transfer of knowledge is possible when people recognize—actually attend to the fact—that features of this situation fit prior situations, and as a result they adapt old knowledge and strategies to fit these new contexts” (290). When Yancey discusses the main goal of “Constructive Reflection” after a writing cycle to be the development of “prototypical models,” it is important that these reflections embed these models within the context out of which they came. We must get students to answer questions like: Why because of this particular situation were these problems encountered and these solutions most appropriate? As students begin a writing task, we need to ask them to reflect critically on the task and locate it in reference to past reflective practice. In this way, we don't promote the notion of a formula for writing but a tool box of adaptive sets of goals, strategies and problem-solving techniques to fit each particular writing situation.

If we design reflection to encourage “reflective practice” and the “reflexive transfer” of that practice as I have been discussing, how would we measure its effectiveness? The task of such measurement is complex, and I can't say that I have an answer for it. The task is complicated by the fact that reflective thinking is not just a discursive act—people also think internally and talk about their writing task in reflective ways. Also, there is often a wide gap between what we can think and conceive and what we are able to do. A deep understanding of the rhetorical complexity of a writing situation and what needs to be done to meet it does not mean a student writer is able to. Developmental factors as well as previous knowledge and experience come into play too.

To measure “reflexive transfer” would seem to involve a matter of multiple evaluations—each of which is problematic:
Step #1: Develop a baseline of reflective practice level
1.measure the level of rhetorical reflection
2.measure if level of awareness of and engagement in reflective practice transferred into important action within the writing cycle
3.measure the “prototypical models” for practice derived by the student
The end point would be a measure of the students ability at reflective practice on a scale

Step #2: Measure the student's reflective practice in another writing context
1.measure the level of rhetorical reflection
2.measure the level of awareness of and engagement in reflective practice transferred into important action within the writing cycle—And what understandings and strategies of reflective practice are brought into this writing experience from a previous one
3.measure the “prototypical models” for practice derived by the student—And how these these models connect to models from previous writing experiences
The end point would be both a second measure of the students ability at reflective practice to compare to the first measure, and a measure of reflexive transfer.

To be honest, this form of assessment would be incredibly hard to create and administer and fraught with inaccuracy. Theoretically, we can believe that reflection can promote transfer, but checking that this transfer happens encounters the same problems that checking to see if reflection promotes better practice within writing situations. Perhaps a Grounded Theory research study on reflexive transfer could reveal the dynamics at work.



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