Reflection-in-Motion: Reimagining Reflection in the Writing Classroom

Reflection-in-Motion considers how reflective practice is embedded in daily course happenings, centering the experiences of students and teachers in Minority Serving Institutions to amplify
underrepresented viewpoints about how reflection works in the writing classroom. Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday examines how its availability is subject to teacher/student power dynamics, the literacies welcomed (or not) in the class, the past and present pedagogies that students are engaging with and attending to, and the interactions among humans, materials, and emotions within the rhetorical context. She adopts an intersectional feminist perspective for an inclusive view of how practitioners name, identify, and practice reflection in the everyday moments of writing classrooms.

Fiscus-Cannaday invokes a Black feminist qualitative research method that Venus Evans-Winters calls a "mosaic." When researchers collect both traditional and nontraditional texts to create a full view of students' and teachers' interviews at three institutions (a Hispanic Serving Institution, a Historically Black College and University, and an Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution), she finds that practitioners often build definitions from past experiences with reflection-and then use those definitions as terministic screens to decide if an activity can be named, identified, and practiced as reflection. These definitions hold different rhetorical effects: reflection-for-introspection, reflection-for-learning, reflection-for-mindfulness, and reflection-for-awareness.

Reflection is used for these different rhetorical effects, but because classrooms so often focus on the Westernized view and its emphasis on growth, reflection has the underused and undertheorized potential rhetorical effect of helping students investigate their identities and positionalities, acknowledge deep-rooted ideologies, and consider new perspectives so they can better work across difference. Reflection-in-Motion will inspire teachers and writing program administrators to listen to how students define and practice reflection and why-thus making room for more capacious definitions of reflection and student-centered practices of what reflection can do and be.