Firstly, I would like to commend Andaiye on her selection of articles for this week. The interplay between Kim Jaxon's "One Approach to Guiding Peer Response" and Kathleen Blake Yancey's "Reflection in the Writing Classroom" really gave me a lot to think about and chew on. From the content in these articles, I am able to infer that there are two primary ways in which writers prepare themselves for productive revision: reflecting on their own work and conferring with peers about their works. Though these actions are separate and unique, many teachers are creating ways to blend them, allowing student writers to "get the best of both worlds." Though scholarship does show positive results from this, my own experience leads me to disagree with the practice. I would even venture to say that reflection and response are distinct stages of the writing process and should be treated as such, with reflection preceding response.
An example of combining reflection and response in the composition classroom can be found in Jaxon's article when she explains her peer-to-peer memo assignment:
"The purpose of the Peer to Peer memo is to guide the responder to
specific places in the essay that the writer is concerned about and also
to give some idea of what the writer is trying to accomplish with the
essay" (2). She also states that this memo is created "on the day a first draft is due in class" (1). The student writer must reflect in order to identify areas of concern in his/her draft and to come to a detailed understanding of just what their writing is trying to accomplish. Most students will have completed that first draft the night before it's due in class. Yes, I know Jaxon says that "in order for this activity to be successful, the writer needs to come to class the day a draft is due with two copies of a thoughtful, 'best first effort' of an essay" (2), but in freshman composition courses how realistic is this expectation of a "best first effort"? Is less than twenty-four hours really all the time student writers need to reflect on their work? Schon, the philosopher cited in Yancey's article, would likely disagree since he defines constructive reflection as "the generalizing and identity-formation processes that accumulate over time, with specific reference to writing and learning" (13, emphasis added by me). Yes, reflection may be taking place as a part of this response exercise, but it is likely more shallow, surface level reflection. I think this is what Schon meant when he talked about "reflection-in-action." That's all well and good, and it's better than nothing, but I think if student writers were given more time for reflection, in which they could evaluate their own work before asking a peer for response, they'd grow more as writers, become more aware of their own process, and become more self-sufficient.
A probable reason for wanting to combine reflection and response in the classroom is time constraint. Professors only have a few hours a week, for one semester, to get through an enormous amount of content, and there may not be time for constructive reflection or more than a handful of peer review workshops. This problem could be solved by altering the break-down of freshman composition classes. Instead of working one paper through from draft to completion and then moving onto another, perhaps the response stage for one paper could be sandwiched between the draft stages of two different papers, with constructive reflection occurring privately and quietly (Yancey 14) "between and among composing events" (Yancey 14). In my own personal fiction writing, I am able to reflect more productively on one project (Story A) when I have begun drafting my next project (Story B). It allows me to compare and contrast the two stories, and it makes me feel like there is less pressure on Story A to be perfect. Paradoxically, this allows me to more fearlessly and objectively evaluate Story A for what works and does not work because I don't feel like my entire identity and value as a writer rests on the content of Story A. If Story A isn't perfect, okay, so what? At least I've got Story B! Identifying and lancing out flaws feels less like a masochistic exercise in self-loathing and more like the productive part of the writing process it's meant to be. Then, after I've gotten the project as far as I can get it with my own reflection, I turn it over to friends and colleagues for their responses. Those responses facilitate a second wave of revisions, which are in turn followed by one or more extended periods of reflection (sometimes lasting over a year), which are followed by revision, and on and on.
Perhaps my experiences are anomalous, or perhaps they're not applicable to academic writing, but regardless of how many in-class peer reviews or mandatory reflection essays I have written, most of my growth as a writer has occurred in the reflection stage, more specifically the constructive reflection stage. The input of my peers is necessary and helpful, but I find it most useful after I've already been chewing on a piece of writing, by myself, at my desk while working on something else, in the shower or driver's seat of my car, for at least a few weeks. To try to mush reflection and response together in the classroom is doing student writers a disservice; we're preventing them from taking the time/thought required to really reflect on their work, and stranding them on a shallow, surface-level sand bar. We're arresting the development of their identities as writers.
