Content area
Full Text
This ar ticle presents a digital, multimodal reflective essay assignment based on Geoffrey Sirc's "box logic" that asks students to fill a series of boxes with images, found text, and their own commentar y as they critically and creatively engage with their writing experiences through media ar tifacts, digital technology, and design decisions.
In 2008, Robert Grossman asked, "What kinds of structures help students get to the intellectual levels necessary for serious reflection?" (16). I wondered the same thing when I sat down to prepare an assignment prompt for the reflective essay my first-year composition students were required to write as the introduction to their final electronic portfolios. In the sample essays I had read to familiarize myself with the assignment, I was struck by the mechanical, unimaginative quality of reflective writing students were producing. A sufficient number of these essays composed solely with text seemed to be saying the same thing, which amounted to general appraisals of writing experiences contextualized by grades and overall enjoyment of the class and teacher.
What I had observed represents a continual struggle in composition classes with a reflective writing component. Jeff Sommers attributes students' inclination "to generalize or write in vague terms when they reflect" to a lack of sufficient preparation (101). Sommers explores this issue further when he quotes Kathleen BlakeYancey, who identifies a related phenomenon as "'text that parrots the context of the class or the teacher without demonstrating the influence of either'" (qtd. in 110-11). Parroting texts appeared in Laurel L. Bower's analysis of eighty-eight portfolio cover letters as well. Of them, she writes, "students seem more concerned with pleasing the teacher and appealing to his/her set of values than analyzing their priorities and thinking" (60). The shortcoming Sommers,Yancey, and Bower high- light is symptomatic of a finding Grossman discusses from Robert Kegan's research that "students are likely to report, unconsciously, what they perceive others want them to report rather than what they actually think" when they cannot attain the right mindset for reflection (17). Thus in a composition class, when students are unable to "alter the way they organize their minds . . . to report accurately on their thoughts and problem-solving processes," reflection seems to become more of a direct response to course...