Reflection+Writings

=Reflective Writings=

This project has taken shape over the course of different teachings of this seminar. When I first taught the seminar, I engaged students in reflecting twice per week on whatever topics they wished. These journals became good examples of travel logs through the internship year. I learned about what students did and at what time. It almost felt as though we were on an itinerarized vacation, where every step and stop was predescribed and determined. This did not fit what I felt was the purpose of reflection in the course. I struggled with how I could construct the reflections to help create a dialog for the students and me. Teaching up to 25 students each semester makes it difficult to personally talk to each one at great length, and I had hoped that these reflections could help to foster that process.

In readings for my own graduate course work, I came across two papers that shaped my views of reflection. First: Sumara & Luce-Kapler (1996) describe the experiences they had while in an undergraduate preservice teacher education course. They desired to create a space where the students could have experiences similar to the characters in Michael Ondaatje’s novel //The English Patient//. The novel explores the relationships of four strangers who come together in a bombed-out villa in Northern Italy. One of the characters in the novel is a pilot that is burned and chooses not to reveal any information about himself. The others assume he is of English descent and thus refer to him as the English Patient. The other members of the household have nothing but notes in the margins of a copy of Herodotus’ The Histories. Because of the notes in the margins and the suplimentation of the work with things like clippings and other books, The Histories became for the English Patient a “commonplace book.” The other housemates learned about who the English Patient was because of the collection within The Histories. Sumara and Luce-Kapler describe their desires to allow their students to have commonplace books where they could learn about themselves.

This piece influenced my appeals for reflective writing as a dialog between each student and me as a form of teacher identity construct. This piece helped me to recognize the desires to create with my students texts that required deeper thought about what was being considered in the text. Although I recognize that a commonplace book would use the entire class as the commonplace, I was also aware of the desires for the students to be open with their writings. This was a difficult compromise for me: Do I ask the students to write these pieces in a public forum (such as on a blog or a wiki) or do I engage them on a one-to-one basis. I still feel that there are great benefits from opening to the public space, but these writings became conversations between the student and me. I would write questions and comments and the students would them respond to those comments. After having taught the course again, I would be more prone to opening all writing (not simply reflection) to the common, by allowing the other classmates and me to comment and ask questions of the students’ writing. In this way, I would hope that a more shared experience as described in //The English Patient// would be possible.

The second piece that had great impact in my construction of this project looked at the routines of teacher education to use reflection as a common tool. Fendler (2003) offers a genealogy of the use of reflection in teacher education. Fendler looks through different uses of the term reflection and how these current practice influences teacher education. Fendler looks at the works of Descartes, Dewey, Schön, and feminism. This piece helped to shatter my preconceived notions of reflection and autobiography as a teacherly practice. Fendler ends her argument by considering the roles of journals and autobiographies in the classroom. She asks: “What does a teacher have no right to know about a student?” (p. 22). This question still haunts me as I go about constructing requirements. I desire to understand how my students are feeling and approaching a course (and in the case of this seminar: the relationships between the seminar and the field placements), yet what is the cost for such information?

These two readings have shaped this set of assignments. I have in the past provided prompts for the students to use to understand the mass amounts of information that they are seeing in their field placements. The students respond and I in-turn respond to them. Circular reflections and experiences.

See: Fendler, L. (2003). Teacher reflection in a hall of mirrors: Historical influences and political reverberations. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 16-25. [|Fernandez -- Learning from Lesson Study.pdf]

Sumara, D. J., & Luce-Kapler, R. (1996). (Un)Becoming a teacher: Negotiating identities while learning to teach. Canadian Journal of Education, 21(1), 65-83. [|Sumara & Luce-Kapler - Unbecoming Teacher Idenity.pdf]