All reflection begins with an experience that stimulates thoughtful exploration of an assumption, attitude, idea, belief, value, philosophical stance, or aspect of human nature. The experience may consist of a personal incident such as an observation, conversation, or event. It may consist of exposure to ideas in your academic readings or from mass communications such as film, the Internet, magazines, newspapers, radio, and television. Or, it may consist of exposure to ideas from popular culture such as entertainment, fashion, music, sports, etc. Something about the experience sparks an interest in thinking more deeply about it from a personal, cultural, or societal perspective. In general, reflective writing uses vivid sensory images to recreate the original experience to the greatest extent possible within the constraints of the overall length of the piece and to convey the philosophical journey from the experience to a new understanding, a modification, or a clarification of a previously-held stance.
In English I, your primary sources of reflection prompts are your personal learning experiences in the class and the texts and multimedia we study, though you will have many opportunities to draw on your outside personal experiences, previous study, and mass media/pop culture. Some times, you will address specific reflection questions as part of an assignment. For instance, you might be asked to reflect on your writing process for a major composition or on what you discovered about your learning style during a group project. The bulk of the reflective writing for the course, though, is more open-ended: you select the ideas you want to pursue from the texts, the films, and the discussions or you select a prompt from your other studies or an outside source.
Most of your short pieces for the class will be featured on your Reflective Journal, an online blog with a portfolio component. Much shorter #PolyWITT (Poly What I Think Today) will be posted on your ThoughtWave. You will write a number of different types of assignments, most of them reflective in nature, from short, free-writing responses to formal essays:
- Quick Response (QR): a short, informal reaction to a passage from assigned reading or to a class experience
- Open Prompt (OP): a short, informal reaction to any appropriate, outside experience
- Peer Comment (PC): short responses to the ideas, examples, and arguments of your peers’ work
- Portfolio Process Reflection: a medium-length reflection on learning with accompanying artifacts
- Reflective Essay: a longer, formal, multi-draft reflection based on a previous QR or OP
- Creative Piece: a short creative writing in any genre stemming from your associations with a vocabulary word or from another type of prompt
