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.