VII. Gaming the Frame

Challenge: Create opportunities for situated writing.

Move students away from the spectatorship encouraged by reflection essays and design writing projects that disrupt, habitual teacher-oriented reflection essays.

The "Ethos" skit: Design a public relations announcement for your not-for-profit organization that emphasizes ethos.

Students then had to imagine ways to work with the genre, activate classroom learning (ethos), and demonstrate deep knowledge of their organization's community of practice.

Even in the classroom, then, students can be active participants who use language to shape reality.

And that's a wrap!

VI. Reflection Takes on Metalepsis

Metalepsis is a rhetorical device (similar to others that involve substitution of a part for a whole).

Our use of metalepsis derives from current and postmodern sense of it as a transumption, a moving across the borders of reality as Sugimoto did with his photograph.

We are asking students to move across time and conventional genre borders (leaving behind the reflection essay and its 5 paragraph thematosis.

V. How do we undo the punctual self?

That is, how do we help students to learn how language shapes (rather than represents) reality? We can learn a bit from a contemporary photographer who creates photographs that upend our expectations.

Well, let's stop to ask "So What?"

Here's the problem:

Reflection essays, when written by the student within the classroom's habitus and rolled out in first person narrative, enact Locke's punctual self -- one who observes, controls, and uses language as a transparent window on reality. For service learning -- this means using the reflection essay as a vehicle to demo learning.

Here's our solution:

Writing in particular situations, both in and outside the classroom, and in a variety of genres allow students to see themselves as agents who 'participate in' rather than 'write about.'

IVc. The Contradictory Logics of Reflection

John Locke's 'punctual self' exemplifies the responsible human agent who, through his disengagement, gains a kind of control.

The 'punctual self' uses language to take pictures -- ghostly snapshots -- of external nature.

Remember Joan Scott's metaphor of visibility as literal transparency?

The romantics then use language for its expressive qualities. The punctual self looks within and expresses meaning without distortion.

. . . .and so here we have one of great paradoxes of modern philosophy!

IVb. The Contradictory Logics of Reflectiion

John Dewey's legacy teaches us much about the inherent contraditions in reflection. (REALLY?)

Learning requires a personal sharing of experience

but also (little noted)

An ability to detach from the data.

IVa. The Contradictory Logics of Reflection

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, what reflects us best of all?

Even from Chaucer's time we see a core contradiction in the way we understand reflection:

Reflection is inner awareness

and

Reflection mirrors the real world

III. The Status of Experience

Joan Scott explores how historians document individuals' experiences as evidence that contributes to historical renderings.

Experience, conceived through the structured reflection essay rests on "a metaphor of literal transparency" (775) in which the essay provides a window on the service learning experience.

flickr.com eyebrow antics

II. The Classroom's Genre

The tradition classroom, with its habitual activity systems, provides situations in which students typically produce only certain kinds of writing, notably the reflection essay.

Zorger.com

What is a structured reflection essay?

Reflective Essay Writing

Structure

Thesis statement
Introduction
Body paragraphs
Conclusion


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How we think of everyday reflection

Alice in Wonderland: Reflection, Contemplation, and Creative Thought

The Core Argument: Here it is!

Reconfiguring ordinary, everyday reflection as a written classroom genre creates two problems:

1. It makes our students think that they can represent experience simply by translating thoughts into language.

2. It obscures the crucial lesson that reflection, is itself, a rhetorical device, a way of shaping knowledge and making meaning.

Road Map for This Talk

I. Everyday Thought and Service-Learning Pedagogy

II. The Classroom's Genre

III. The Status of Experience

IV. The Contradictory Logics of Reflection

V. Undoing the Punctual Self

VI. Reflection Takes on Metalepsis

VII. Epilogue: Breaking, No, Gaming the Frame

Learning Sciences Brown Bag Colloquium

A presentation by
Ann Feldman
Department of English
How Reflection Undoes Service Learning
Date: Friday, January 30, 2009, 12 – 1 PM
Location: 2087 SEL

This talk, which is based on a paper-in-progress, examines what happens when a cultural commonplace (even a God term) like reflection is reconfigured into a writing-based pedagogy. This paper seeks to solve a curricular dilemma that emerged for a UIC team of faculty, graduate students, and staff as we developed curriculum for an undergraduate civic engagement program, The Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program (CCLCP). Many service learning scholars advocate for a curriculum based on reflective writing, which we found inadequate. Instead, we argue for “situated writing,” which places students as active participants who shape and reshape their world through language.