A Reflection in Two Parts
Overview
Reflection is an intentional practice where the writer creates or discovers meaningful connections between contexts, experiences, and knowledges promoting self-understanding. It asks that you think about how you performed a task as well as how you might perform that task differently in the future, whether in revision or when presented with a new task. Reflection is a type of deliberate practice that enters into the learning process. Handy, and Dewey before him, conveys a sort of loop of learning, but there are times when a person can enter the loop at any stage because learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum or in a fixed sequence. We can test another’s questions just as we can reflect on another’s theory. So learning, and thus, reflection, is social and individual.
In these assignments, you will be reflecting upon a couple pieces of writing that you are considering for your final ePortfolio. And then you will be creating two different types of reflection in response to these writings. To note: the final artifact that you will produce can look like an essay, but it can be designed to be more visual as well, maybe organized by the questions and topics. As to length, consider your audience: they probably don’t want to read a 10-page reflection on your 10 stanza poem.
One final note. You may have done a reflection like this before because it is has been adapted from a heuristic developed by Professor Taczak whom many of you have had before. You will note, however, some different questions. Please don’t recycle reflections from past classes – the goal of this assignment is for you to be reflective and to create new reflections.
Part 1: The Mind Map
A mind map is also a visual diagramming tool, but it is not as structured as concept maps. Like concept mapping, mind mapping is an active learning strategy to help students construct new meaning to build on what they already know. With mind mapping, both sides of your brain are engaged – the analytical side and the creative side (Kotcherlakota, Zimmerman, & Berger, 2013).
—Cathy J. Thompson
Select 2-4 pieces of writing you are considering for your ePortfolio. Read through them and come up with “subconcepts” that connect the writings together – subconcepts are ideas that stem from a central concept involving “feeling, impressions, thoughts, images, or actions associated with the concept.” Your central concept is obviously writing so you generate subconcepts in response to writing. Once you have your subconcepts, you can create your mind map.
You can create this mind map in whatever way you want to (i.e. the way in which you create the map is up to you, it could be hand-drawn, it can be done using a digital program; it can also look how you want it to look as a literal map, a conceptual map, a diagram, a flow chart, etc. etc.) but in order to fulfill the conventions of a mind map, you need to do the following:
- Center it on one central concept: writing, specifically your writing that you’ve chosen.
- Shows connections and overlaps based on how you understand what, if any, connections and overlaps have occurred from/throughout this learning.
- Uses color
- Uses images (drawn or not), thoughts, feelings, impressions, and actions to help show/express what learning occurred and what it means.
Mind maps use reflection to help evaluate your growth in other words to help you figure out how to move effective forward in your learning. So, you are in many ways evaluating how you understand your own learning from these pieces of writing, but you are doing so in a very visual way.
Part 2: The Written Reflection
Looking at the heuristic below, and using your mind map as a visual guide, please think about the process that you used to create each piece of writing.
| Looking Backward
What previous knowledge about writing did you recall? What previous knowledge about the topic(s) did you recall? What problems or challenges did you encounter?
|
Looking Inward
How did you feel about the writings? What did you learn about writing working on this? What did you learn about yourself working on this? What risks did you take?What was comfortable about it? |
| Looking Forward
What is something that you want to continue working on? What would you do differently if you were to revise it in the future? How did writing these pieces help you in the future? |
Looking Outward
What affect did you want it to have on your audience? What about this piece makes you a writer? |
You don’t need to respond to all the questions, and it should not be a Q/A style of response; however, you do want to make sure you cover all of the categories (back, forward, inward, outward). Feel free to answer additional questions as you understand the categories as well.
The genre and formatting for this written reflection is up to you but taken together with the mind map should be fully representative of how you understand the writing that you, the writer, have completed. In other words, both the mind map and the written reflection show how you understand writing and how you understand yourself as a writer. You can write this as an essay or design it visually as per the constraints of presenting something on the web.
Email it along with a link to or the original file/document of the piece to richard.colby@du.edu by Friday, 11:59pm. You will NOT be posting this (or the Deconstruction) to the blog this week.