Reflective essays --
From time to time in my courses, you will be asked to write a "reflective essay" on the course or some aspect of what you learned in it. Don't be alarmed by the language. "Reflection" is just a $13.95 word for thinking, and a reflective essay is one that collects your thoughts on a subject -- writing the essay is just a way of thinking back on what you learned.
Everybody benefits. You get to think some more about what you have learned over the course of the semester, and it will help you pull it all together at the end. At the same time, your reflections help me assess where I've succeeded as a teacher and where I need to improve. So students who haven't even taken the course yet benefit. You'll probably find you're assigned to write reflective essays throughout your educational career. If you go into teaching, I can guarantee that you'll write even more! They're a powerful self-assessment tool. Most immediately, writing your reflective essay will help you pull together what you've learned so it isn't just a jumble of unrelated techniques or facts. You know more than you think you do, and a little bit of critical thinking about it all will help you realize how much you do know.
In my courses, you'll run into two slightly different types of reflective essays: (1) in skills, or writing, courses like basic newswriting or freshman English composition; and (2) in content courses like introduction to mass communications, poetry or Native American history. In the writing courses, you will evaluate how you have grown as a writer; in the content courses, you will focus on what you have learned about the subject matter. In both, you will exercise critical thinking about what you have learned. Your essays will be graded, but there are no "right" or "wrong" answers. Criteria for grading will be the usual ones: How well organized is your essay? Does it flow smoothly and logically from one point to the next? Do you back up your points with specific examples? Do you identify your sources? Did you read the book? Do you understand the concepts I'm asking about? How thoughtful is your essay? How creative is it? I will use my rubric for grading.
For specific assignments, I will give you more detailed assignment sheets with specific questions you can think about -- or reflect on -- in specific courses. And you will want to consult the statement of Goals, Objectives and Outcomes in the course syllabus. But here are a few general tips.
Writing (skills) courses. A skills course is one where you learn, or practice, a skill like writing. If you're taking freshman English or journalism, you'll be thinking -- reflecting -- about how you've grown as a writer. What was your writing like when you began the course? Is it better now? Are you more confident? Do you know where to look stuff up? Are you mastering the inverted pyramid format? (Basic newswriting is both a skills course and a content course, by the way, so if you're taking COM 209 look at my tips for content courses as well.) Consult the goals and objectives in our syllabus, or the "competencies" in the Illinois Articulation Iniative guidelines for the course. They'll suggest what you're supposed to learn. Be specific. What specific strategies, techniques or skills have you learned? It never hurts to be specific.
Content courses. A "content" course is a course in which you learn about a subject area -- like American Indian cultures and the history of their interaction with European-Americans, for example, or the basic principles of advertising and public relations. So you focus on the course objectives: What did you know about the mass media, U.S. history, the newspaper business, advertising, public relations or integrated marketing strategies at the beginning of the semester? What, specificaly, do you know at the end? What, specifically, have you learned? How does it fit in with what you already knew, as a media consumer or a college student? In Communications 296, our "capstone" course, you will be concerned with bringing together what you've learned in all of your mass com. courses. Again, at the risk of being repetitious: Be specific.
Other good advice. Says Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges of Washington University in St. Louis, who teaches an English composition course that focuses on film: "While your essay should discuss specific skills, concepts and changes in thinking related to your own writing and writing process, you need not limit yourself to a consideration of your growth as a writer. You may also describe learning related to the study of film, collaborative work, library research, or other significant issues." Did you notice, by the way, how that word "specific" keeps coming up? We always want you to be specific. Gillis-Bridges has some other tips you'll find useful, too, no matter what you're writing about. "A successful reflective essay," she says, includes: (1) A title; (2) a thesis paragraph, at the very least a thesis sentence; (3) "[d]iscussion of what you have learned as a result of your work in our writing course linked to the study of film;" and (4) "[d]iscussion of what you would like to learn more about." Good idea. For "film," substitute integrated marketing communications or whatever we're studying in the course you're taking. That helps me plan for the next semester.
In Pittsburgh, where high school seniors have to complete an ambitious research project in order to graduate, the Pittsburgh Council on Public Education has detailed tips you can use for thinking through what you learn in your own research -- or in a college course. They suggest: "Be specific. When writing about 'what happened,' describe your actions using vivid details. If you have interesting quotes from people you interviewed or worked with, use a few of them, or include dialogue from conversations you had." In the same spirit, you can also quote from books, articles, Internet sources or class discussion. PCPE suggests you "stay focused" and think about what you learned: "While keeping the focus on your project, describe what happened to you. What did you learn? How did the actual experiences of researching, interviewing, creating, affect you as a person?" Again, anything that happened in the classroom is also fair game. They add: "Pay attention to the clarity and style of your writing. Get your audience interested by writing a beginning that will catch their attention and an ending that they will remember." In other words, write well. By the way, did you notice the first thing the folks in Pittsburgh said? Be specific.
Remember, as a college student you are a member of a worldwide community of scholars - even if you plan a career in newspapering, public relations, advertising or another field that isn't in academic life. Timothy Ray of Arizona State University, who teaches a course in writing reflective essays, tells his students they are involved in "public discourse" that relates their opinions to the opinions of published writers in what is known as a "discourse community." That's a fancy way of saying you ought to write like you would for publication. Says Ray, "In short, you will be expected to recognize and express your position(s) in relation to the position of others, to juggle and move between various voices and points of view, and to cite those voices, challenge them, and incorporate them into your essays."
But you don't have to be stuffy about it - especially if you plan to write for the public someday.
Liz Somerville of the University of Sussex in England suggested in an assignment sheet formerly posted to the internet that "you should write the [reflective essay] account as if you were reporting back to someone (e.g. a friend at Sussex [or, in our case, SCI]; a friend at another University, a sibling; a parent or other relative; a former teacher." In other words, it's OK to be informal. Use first person. Be specific. Consult your notes. Somerville adds, "'I looked at some books in the library' may be an account of what you did, but it also reveals you as a sloppy scholar if you didn't make notes on which sources looked useful." Again, be specific. Somerville also adds something I like. She quotes Rudyard Kipling, a 19th-century poet who chronicled the British Empire:
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right!
The "tribal lays" Kipling encountered in the British Raj, by the way, were narratives handed down by oral tradition. Since they were oral, the tribesmen who recited them were free to improvise as long as they stayed with the broad outline of the story. In other words, in writing these essays you are free to be creative. After all, they're your essays; they're about what you learned.
Oh, one last word: Be specific. Clobber me with facts. Statistics. Examples. Quotes. Facts, and more facts. Your own analysis of the facts, statistics, examples and quotes. I don't want to be repetitious here, but I do expect you to be specific.
-- Pete Ellertsen, Springfield College in Illinois
References and Additional Reading