It can succeed is my belief, after a bit of reflection! However, teaching self-reflection (like teaching creativity) can best be taught with some warming up exercises. For example, get the students to finish first sentences like "On thinking back over the last five years of my life I think that ..." Then you can get them to find self-reflexive quotes and examples from literature of self-reflections, before writing their own essays. Beware, the paper mills do publish essays.

I think the real goal is discovering how to write, rather than discovering "who you are", which is a side benefit.

Luuk,

An interesting paper. Thanks for providing the link. The effects of "counting one's blessings" have been known for some time, and its good to see how this can be translated into positive writing experiences. I was not able to find a clear connection, however, with self-reflection and personal identity.

Have you tried going to scholar.google.com, and giving it: self-reflection and personal identity ? And what about ERIC?

I have been pleased with the results using reflection assignments related to a service learning component of my class. Teacher candidates reflect on their experiences in working with students who are culturally, economically, and ethnically different than themselves. (We partner with an after school library program that works with families who have recently immigrated to the US). I've found the assignments to be more valuable when they are graded pass/ fail- credit for turning them in. With undergraduates who tend to focus on heavily on grades, removing that focus has allowed for honest, and thoughtful responses. I've found the responses get better with practice. I start the semester with a prompt and the last one is a free write.

Hav'nt tried it yet. any suggestions on what I can ask them to reflect upon considering that they are studying media content.

When I look at the psychological research, I find that self-reflection is so strongly influenced by self-enhancing bias that it seems improbable that assignments that ask for self-reflection will have any chance of helping students know themselves. Dunning et al. (2005), for example, concluded that "people place too much confidence in the insightfulness of their judgments, overestimating the chances that their decisions about the present are sound and that their predictions about the future will prove correct" (p. 73).

From a composition viewpoint, I use self-reflection papers at the end of a semester as a part of metacognition, having students think about their thinking processes as they have developed papers throughout the semester. They choose two papers to revise and then begin to answer a set of questions in four areas: Content Knowledge, Rhetorical Knowledge, Critical Knowledge/Judgment and Self-Judgment (of oneself as a writer). I will attach the project paperwork here, including the breakdown of the specific questions for each area. My students have just completed their freshman year at the university; in addition to their reflection on themselves as writers, they also reflect on the contrast of their expectations for college from their senior year in high school to the end of their first year of college. I have found my students to be brutally honest and quite capable of evaluating their own strengths and weaknesses as writers and thinkers. They have shown little evidence of that expected self-enhancing bias; however, I think the questions guide them and help them to avoid that bias. It is rare to find a student who blames others, including me, for his/her poor grades or other problems. I have been pleased to note students who can honestly say that they learned the most from a paper with a low grade; others are open about their struggles to work through controversial issues and write a strong academic argument.

In response to Qurratulann, I do have a media project that entails analysis of advertisements, but it can be used for films, online materials of all sorts. I have also used it for analysis of the presentation and/or treatment of Muslims before and then after the First Gulf War, 9/11, and Iraq and Afghanistan. If you want to talk more about this type of analysis, please, let me know, and I will dig out my materials.

The Self-Reflection Project is attached.

Aysha Bey

University of Alabama at Birmingham

I think one way to implicitly promote self-reflection in writing classes is to have students create portfolios. In a nutshell, it is next to impossible to have self-reflective students without promoting learner autonomy.

On my thesis paper, I question the efficacy of typical written corrective feedback and one of my arguments is that providing written corrective feedback (teacher-directed) brings about passive students who wait for teachers to correct them. My question is with the advent of new concepts such as learner autonomy, self-directed learning, and even critical pedagogy isn't it paradoxical that prestigious journals don't give voice to opposing views that advocate critical pedagogy!