Introduction

Contextualizing Reflection

KATHLEEN BLAKE YANCEY

In the summer of 2014, I offered an independent study on reflection to three doctoral students in rhetoric and composition, Bruce Bowles, Joe Cirio, and Erin Workman, each of whom brought reflection-related interests with them to the course. Bruce is very interested in writing assessment, especially response to writing. Joe was conducting a qualitative study inquiring into whether students have enough conceptual knowledge, vocabulary, motivation, and agency to participate in creating scoring guides. Erin brought with her a completed pilot project on transfer of writing knowledge and practice highlighting the role of reflection. The question: in this one-hour graduate course on reflection, what might we read?

Had we asked this question in the 1970s at the beginning of the composing-process movement, the answer would have been short and quick, the readings focusing largely on the cognitive role that reflection plays in writing. In 1979, for example, Sharon Pianko defined reflection behaviorally as the "pauses and rescannings" stimulating "the growth of consciousness in students about the numerous mental and linguistic strategies" entailed in composing and "the many lexical, syntactical, and organizational choices" made during composing (Pianko 1979, 277–78). Pianko's claim also included the idea that reflection, as a practice, distinguished able from "not-so-able" writers. And at about the same time, Sondra Perl (1980) identified two components of reflection, what she called "projection" and "retrospection," "the alternating mental postures writers assume as they move through the act of composing" (389). In brief, the emergent literature on reflection at this moment in composition's history was tightly focused on the mental activities of the composer in the process of composing.

Had we asked this question about readings on reflection in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, however, we would have had a second literature to draw on as well, much of it oriented toward designing reflective activity to help make students' thinking external, visible, and available — for both assessment and teaching purposes. Roberta Camp (1992), for example, outlined one use of reflection, for portfolios, explaining how inside a portfolio a student could map the changing shape of a multiply drafted composition in what she called a "biography of a text"; thinking pedagogically, Bill Thelin (1994) explored how responding to writing changes, and doesn't, in the context of a portfolio and its reflection; and Jeff Sommers (1988) created a Writer's Memo allowing students, in a student's words, to go "'behind the paper'" to describe "the composing process which produced the draft" (77). Interestingly, Sommers (1988)pointed out that the memo assists both student and teacher: in Sommers's view, the memo's intent, like that of many reflective practices developed at this time, was twofold: (1) to elucidate student composing activities in students' own descriptions so as to see what was otherwise invisible and (2) to provide a context for an instructor-student conversation about the draft itself. Likewise, also addressing classroom and assessment contexts, I developed a Schonean-influenced practice-based theory of reflection in writing keyed to three related forms of reflective practice:

reflection-in-action, the process of reviewing and projecting and revising, which takes place within a composing event;

constructive reflection, the process of developing a cumulative, multi-selved, multi-voiced identity, which takes place between and among composing events; and

reflection-in-presentation, the process of articulating the relationships between and among the multiple variables of writing and the writer in a specific context for a specific audience. (Yancey 1998, 200)

During this time, reflection was also playing a major role in assessment, first in print portfolios and later, of course, in electronic portfolios, with both portfolio models defined as the result of three processes: collecting a range of texts, selecting from among them for a portfolio composition, and reflecting (Yancey 1992) — though the reflecting on whom or what varied. In some models, the reflective text was supposed to provide a narrative of writerly development, in others an account of process or self-assessment, and in still others an introduction to the portfolio itself. Furthermore, as in the case of pedagogical practice, so too in assessment: the role reflection plays in writing assessment has been both conceptualized and reconceptualized. Early in the portfolio movement, for example, Chris Anson (1994) categorized reflection as a secondary text in dialogue with — but mostly in support of — the primary texts of a portfolio. Later, I theorized that reflective texts are primary texts in their own right, though of a different nature than "primary" writing texts, and that the relationship between these two kinds of texts was dialogic and multicontextual, not hierarchical. More recently, Ed White (2005) has suggested that the reflective text can function as a surrogate for the full portfolio in an assessment context, though earlier research such as Glenda Conway's (1994) has suggested that this cover letter is problematic, much more a performance piece than an authentic expression for students, indeed, something of a mask...