Reflective Writing Workshop Reflection
From Mitch:
Thanks again for a great conversation and discussion. We put together some insightful and provocative ideas about how reflection works and how we accomplish reflective writing. I came away with several new ideas and a lot to think about. Monica's facebook status after the session was right on: "Monica is reflecting on reflection. It's all about the meta."
We did spend most of the time together talking about reflection for reflection's sake -- or as its own outcome, purpose, or assignment. We didn't have much chance to discuss how reflection and reflective writing can support and extend other kinds of thinking and writing -- how it can move other projects forward. So please respond to the following questions:
What are some specific larger projects or goals that you have before you (e.g. writing a capstone paper, writing a proposal, teaching or training on a certain topic, applying for a career-track job, etc.)?
How can you imagine reflective writing being a productive part of your process towards those larger projects?
How might you structure your reflective writing in these projects -- which might not require reflective writing at all, leaving your use of reflective writing entirely up to you? How will you design your reflective writing assignments for yourself?
To get credit for this RAP Session please make sure you leave us a summary with how it went, what you learned, etc in a comment on this entry or shoot Laura an email at damm0032@umn.edu.
If commenting, please put your full name and umn.edu email address so we know who to give credit to!
Hope you all enjoyed the RAP session and come to some more, the next is Grants and Other Fundraising Tools on Thursday, April 2nd from 3-5pm at Akerman Hall 225. Sign up at www.servicelearning.umn.edu/trainings!
Comments
I am coming to the end of my junior year at the U of MN, and I am starting to think seriously about my Honors thesis. I have a general topic picked out, but I need to find a faculty advisor, refine my thesis topic, and begin my research. I plan to research and write on a topic that is relatively important to me and about which I am passionate. I believe that reflective writing will be a very important part of my process for refining my topic - which books or authors will I decide to use? What sources of post-colonial feminist theory will I choose to utilize? I think that it will be important for me to separate my emotions from my thesis writing in order to produce a document that is acceptable in an academic setting, so I plan to use my reflective writing to do everything from release my frustrations about the thesis to disentangling my thoughts surrounding it to hashing out my plan for the actual thesis writing and revision. Some of this will take the form of journaling, while the planning may take the form of lists or spreadsheets or concept maps. After the reflective writing workshop, my belief that reflective writing is important has been reinforced, so I am going to be sure to structure my thesis writing to include these elements of reflective writing in order to have a smoother process and a more balanced schedule as well as a more organized and less stressed state of mind.
Posted by: Pammy Ronnei | March 12, 2009 11:39 PM