In a 2013 study of the reflective writing produced in our department, we found that the best graded reflective projects did the following:
- Gave space for a project of genuine “dialogic inquiry,” allowing students to create new knowledge about academic writing, about the course theme, etc.
- Facilitated a discussion in opposition to that of skills-based mastery
- Required critical engagement with materials (e.g., ask students how their writing problematizes or complicates institutional standards, not measures up to them)
- Engaged with opinionated or provocative texts (e.g., Bartholomae, Freire, Sommers, Elbow) as opposed to prescriptive ones (e.g., handbooks, course descriptions)
- Avoided questions about strengths/weaknesses, telos, skills mastery, etc.
- Did not ask for künstleromans (developmental narratives)
- Did not posit the First-Year Writing course as a requirement to be skipped, or required students to muster a “defense” of their own work
- Asked students to characterize their work rather than simply recount it, deemphasizing process and emphasizing language use
- Provided contexts for the work of the assignment
- Indicated how students can put their own writing in dialogue with other texts (as in “normal” papers, students can default to talking about each text in its own isolated paragraph)
- Maintained an intellectual connection with the course theme
- Indicated audience and discourse community
- Defamiliarized students’ own work by putting them in a discourse they might otherwise be familiar with (e.g., taking the texts out of chronological order, treating texts as objects instead of experiences, shifting into a new genre)
- Modeled generic shifts (e.g., when asking students to write reviews or their own assignment prompts, have students read instances and discuss them as a class)
- Gave a clear route for the process of the assignment
- Required precision (i.e., quotation or paraphrasing of very specific moments in both student writing and assigned texts). No First-Year Writing paper should be without citations
- Didn’t ask students to talk about themselves “as writers,” but to talk about their writing
- Didn’t ask students to perform disparate tasks (e.g., talk about both your experience as a writer and what you thought of the course texts)
- Were mindful of the relationship between task and page length