Reflection Revisited: The Class Collage

Through the regular use of what Donald Schön has termed reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, students can learn to improve their "reflection-in-presentation," in Kathleen Blake Yancey's term. Students are often asked to do this type of reflection-inpresentation as a capstone to first-year or basic writing courses. However, a number of critics have articulated reservations about reflective writing assignments that ask students to assess their progress in writing and, in essence, their cognitive development as they complete a composition or BW course. Laurel Bower (JBW 22.2, 2003), in particular, notes that such end-of-term written work is frequently superficial. This essay focuses on an alternative approach to reflective writing, one that asks students to examine their own beliefs about writing as well as those of their classmates rather than examining their cognitive development. This shift to reflecting on the epistemological grounding of their experiences as writers, coupled with a semester-long practice in reflection, seems to produce rich, fully developed reflection-in-presentation that offers some anecdotal evidence of knowledge transfer by the students as well as providing an informal outcomes assessment of course objectives for the professor.