Reflection in the Writing Classroom

Utah State University DigitalCommons@USU All USU Press Publications USU Press 1998 Reflection in the ritingW Classroom Kathleen Blake Yancey University of North Carolina, Charlotte Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs Part of the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Yancey, Kathleen Blake, "Reflection in the ritingW Classroom" (1998). All USU Press Publications. 120. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/120 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the USU Press at DigitalCommons@USU. It has been accepted for inclusion in All USU Press Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@USU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Reflection in the Writing Classroom Reflection in the Writing Classroom KATHLEEN BLAKE YANCEY University ofNorth Carolina, Charlotte UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Logan, Utah 1998 Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 © Copyright 1998 Utah State University Press. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica. Typography by WoltPack 98 99 00 01 02 543 2 Library ofCongress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yancey, Kathleen Blake Reflection in the writing classroom / Kathleen Blake Yancey. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87421-238-3 (pbk.) 1. English language-Rhetoric-Study and teaching. 2. Report writing-Study and teaching. 3. Reflection (Philosophy) I. Title. PE1404.Y36 1998 808'.042'07-dc21 97-45395 CIP CONTENTS PREFACE VI ONE On Reflection TWO Reflection-in-Action 23 THREE Constructive Reflection 49 FOUR Reflection-in-Presentation 69 FIVE Reflective Reading, Reflective Responding 97 SIX Reflection and the Writing Course 125 SEVEN Reflection and Assessment 145 EIGHT Literacy and the Curriculum 169 NINE Reflective Texts, Reflective Writers 185 WORKS CITED 207 INDEX 213 PREFACE THIS VOLUME GREW OUT OF A FOCUSED INQUIRY: WHAT CONVERSATIONS, I wanted to ask, could we have around texts in order to foster reflective habits of mind? What you'll read in the following pages constitutes my attempt at an extended answer. Because it is a book-length vol ume, I've taken the luxury of thinking about this question in multi ple ways: theoretically, pragmatically, and-I hope-reflectively. I've located my responses to this focused inquiry within my own practice, to be sure, but I've tried both to theorize that practice and to make it visible so that others can read themselves into this story as well. Ultimately, as I hope is apparent, I'm as interested in the questions raised in the process of inquiry as I am in the answers we construct. They are foundation and means of reflection, both. More specifically, what I've done here is to re-theorize Donald Schon's theory of reflection for use in the writing classroom, and in that process to think about how we might use reflection as a mode of helping students develop as writers. I've written this volume, then, because I think through reflection we can change both the teaching and learning of writing. What I also do here is show how we might begin making some ofthose changes, and suggest some ofwhat we teachers and students-could learn if we understood the writing classroom as a reflective practicum, as a new kind of writing class room, one where students are writers, reflection is woven into the curriculum, and practice becomes art. I was fortunate in having the support of many at my institution, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In particular, I want to thank the University, the Faculty Grants Committee, and Dean Schley Lyons for an academic leave to support this work. Preface vii There are several people whose contributions to this project I'd like to acknowledge. Michael Spooner, my editor and friend: (again) thanks. Also: Irwin Weiser and Afhild Ingberg, for reading sympa thetically and resisting helpfully; Charles Schuster, for encouraging me in this intellectual work; Diana George, for helping me see that reflection provides one means of faculty development; Doug Hesse, Jeff Sommers, and Robert Calfee for their responses to some of my earlier work on reflection; the members of Portnet (especially Michael Allen, Pat Belanoff, Bill Condon, Mary Kay Crouch, Cheryl Forbes, Marcia Dickson, George Meese, and Robert Marrs) for listen ing to me talk about relfection endlessly (it must have seemed); Sandy Murphy, who encouraged me to link reflection to assessment more theoretically; Sam Watson for pointing me toward Donald Schon; Brian Huot and Meg Morgan, for keeping me straight; Connie Rothwell, Fowler Bush, and Al Maisto, for encouraging my work in reflection in the honors program; my colleagues Mike Pearson, Christie Amato, and Mike Corwin, for inviting me into their classes and allowing me to work with their students. No project like this-no writer like this-could exist without her students: thanks, most especially to them. No project like this is worth more than those who saw its development, day by day: thanks to my husband David, for his abiding belief in me; to my daughter Genevieve, for her welcome companionship; to my son Matthew, for his always-irreverant appreciation. Ifyou are lucky, you get to write a book that brings together what you believe and what you know, and that connects to what you do: it's a project in reflection. Kathleen Blake Yancey Charlotte, NC CHAPTER ONE On Reflection We come to terms as well as we can with our lifelong exposure to the world, and we use whatever devices we may need to survive. But eventually, ofcourse, our knowledge depends upon the living relationship between what we see going on and ourselves. Ifexpo sure is essential, still more so is the reflection. Insight doesn't hap pen often on the click of the moment like a lucky snapshot, but comes in its own time and more slowly and from nowhere but within. The sharpest recognition is surely that which is charged with sympathy as well as shock-it is a form ofhuman vision. Eudora Welty In sum, no matter how objectively one thinks or writes, one does so in a storied context as a character acting in relation to other char acters in some moment in time and space. Walter Fisher WE'RE THREE WEEKS INTO THE FALL TERM. IT'S STILL HOT AND SUNNY here in Charlotte, and today is Friday: the day when the first formal assignment, a narrative, is due in this course in first-year college composition. We've been writing (continuously, it seems) since the day the class started, but those texts were all preparatory. Somehow, they didn't count. Although the narrative due today won't be graded, it will count. The students understand that. The beneficiaries of twelve years' worth of schooling, they know what's going on, graded paper or not: I'm going to see how they write. Before the bell rings, they're all in their seats, the 20 of them men, women, black, white, Creole, Southern, Yankees, eager, distant. They flip through their texts, read them aloud to hear how they sound, laugh too obviously at nothing in particular. Kelly, the liveliest student, wears a vibrantly colored, bell-ringing jester's cap for the occasion. Although anxious about the impending evaluative moment, the students are also relieved, like runners at the end of a 2 Reflection in the Writing Classroom ten-miler. They've made it. School's about to be out for the weekend, and it's time to do something a lot more fun than writing. Until I tell them: «Click on the word processor. We have one more text to write." A reflection. *** During the 1970s and into the 1980s, students in writing classes across the country were asked to take part in research focused on writing processes. The problem we wanted them to help us address was simple if a little disconcerting: while we in composition studies were supposed to be teaching students how to write, we didn't really know how they learned to write. We'd read how published authors learned to write, of course-or what they'd claimed as how they'd learned to write, usually in retrospective accounts that seemed to offer little if any generalizability. We'd done some interesting experi ments in sentence-combining, hoping that we could change how they learned to write. We'd done a little investigation into creativity theory and thought about how that might be applicable to the teach ing of writing. But ultimately, we didn't know much about the very thing we were supposed to be teaching: writing and the processes that create it. We certainly didn't know much about it from the point ofview ofthose we were daily practicing upon: the students. As Janet Emig put it in outlining one ofthe first texts to redress this situation, The Composing Processes of Twelfth Graders, «The subjects for case studies have always been at hand, but, as teachers ofwriting, we have too often relied on tradition, ignoring the writers we are working with" (49). If we had too often relied on tradition prior to the 1970s, we more than compensated afterward. In a period described by Sondra Perl as a shining moment, compositionists spent most of the 1970s and much ofthe 1980s investigating the composing processes ofstudents. Perl's brief description of her case studies exemplifies the first and most popular approach: To gather my data, I observed five writers at work, and following Emig, I, too, asked them to compose aloud, tape-recording whatever they said. Since my interest was in documenting the sequence and flow ofmy stu dents' composing, I devised a coding scheme to order and systematize what I was observing, which then enabled me to detect patterns of On Reflection 3 composing within and among the students.

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