Contract Faculty CoP | Reflective Writing: An Essential Assessment Tool in Academic Writing

This is a multi-access event.

Recent pedagogical studies have pointed out that online learning during Covid-19 has had a negative impact on first year university students’ reflective thinking (e.g., Farahian et al., 2021; Salim et al., 2021). They have also suggested that higher education students’ reflective writing tends to be superficial. In a demanding, exam-heavy curriculum, setting aside time for reflection may not be a priority for busy students. In order to help the students, whose reflective thinking has been impacted by online learning, benefit from the well-established usefulness of reflective learning (e.g., Ambrose et al., 2010; Bowen, 2012; Brown et al., 2014; Yancey, 1998; 2016), it is imperative for university instructors to emphasize the impactful role reflective writing can play in enhancing students’ critical abilities. This is necessitated by the fact that many students do not even read the feedback from their instructors on their assignment and exams (e.g., Laflen & Smith, 2017). This makes reflective learning/writing doubly-important. In my field of Writing Studies, researchers have long argued for the value of reflective writing as a way for the writer to know more about themselves, the topics about which they write, and their process of writing (e.g., Berlin, 1987; Britton, Burgess, Martin, McLeod, & Rosen, 1975; Flower, 1979, 1989; Graves, 1983, 1984; Moffett, 1968; Murray, 1968, 1980). Writing Studies has taken a turn from the process approach to Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), in which teaching writing means “raising students’ genre knowledge of the following dimensions: form, rhetoric, process, and subject-matter knowledge (Tardy, 2009). We don’t know whether reflective writing will promote genre knowledge or not; this project seeks to throw light on that question.

Facilitators:

Nazih El-Bezre, PhD, School of Journalism, Writing and Media

Sarika Bose teaches in the English Department and is the Chair of the UBCFA’s Contract Faculty Committee, which represents 8-month, 12- month and all other non-tenure track faculty at UBC.

Judy Chan is a sessional lecturer with the Faculty of Land and Food Systems since 2010 and an educational consultant with the Centre for Teaching, Learning and Technology.