70 Reflection in the Writing Classroom In this chapter we'll examine two varieties of reflection-in-pre- sentation: 1) the reflective text that accompanies a classroom portfo- lio; 2) the reflective text that stands alone as a culminating document. Then, in chapter seven, we'll renew the discussion on reflection-in-presentation by examining its role in a more formal assessment context.2 * * * In the phrase reflection-in-presentation, we see its dual nature: it is both a reflection, a " seeing inside" (to use a Yup'ik translation), and a presentation, a public text representing the self. Rhetorically, it is occasioned by a call to explain to someone outside the self how a practitioner-a teacher, say, or student-works to define and address problems, and/or to summarize and interpret what she or he has learned. Learning results from addressing the problems, sometimes from the materials and interactions of a course, sometimes from the teaching enterprise unproblematized. Typically reflection-in-presen- tation occurs in two contexts: 1) as an independent document, in a class at the end of a term as a kind of cumulative event (Marshall; Perl 1997); 2) more commonly, within a portfolio, at the end of a course or at a point of decision-making (eg, placement into a first- year course; tenure and promotion for faculty). In this sense, then, reflection-in-presentation is public and academic, and at the same time, personal and extra-curricular-an explaining both of the self and about the self to an outside audience. Given the rhetorical situation of reflection-in-presentation, it can be seen as drawing on several disciplinary contexts. The first, as we might expect, is the context supplied by reflection itself: its relation- ship to reflection-in-action and constructive reflection. Reflection- in-presentation is very like constructive reflection in that it is cumulative, and as it works from the particular to general and back, it focuses ultimately on what William Gass calls a shaping self (51). It is what we ask of our students when we ask them to draw texts together for review, to discern patterns, to synthesize, even to recog- nize gaps and make sense of those-and then to explain what they observe and understand in a public way. In writing classes, we do this when we ask students to think about who they are as writers, when we ask them to discern patterns among subject positions they have taken, when we ask them to plot their own cumulative development This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsReflection-in-Presentation 71 as an increasing accretion of writing selves-and then to explore and explain all this in a formal presentation to an "other." As important, reflection-in-presentation differs from reflection- in-action and from constructive reflection. For one thing, it requires different skills, as Schon explains: Clearly, it is one thing to be able to reflect-in-action and quite another to be able to reflect on our reflection in action so as to produce a good ver- bal description of it; and it is still another thing to be able to reflect on the resulting description. (31) Reflection-in-presentation is that good verbal description, but with one important caveat: as prepared for an audience. Accordingly, it is a description that must satisfy both the writer and the reader. * * * We can also understand reflection-in-presentation by drawing on its similarity to two fields of work not typically associated with reflection per se: the one, science; the other, autobiography. In separate presentations, faculty advocate and current Carnegie Foundation President Lee Shulman and philosopher and social sci- entist Walter F. Fisher compare the processes employed by scientists with those employed in reflection-in-presentation. Scientists, Shulman says, use a two-stage process to make knowledge: first, they occlude the flow of work; second, they prepare that work for public presentation. The interruption of work allows the scientists to review what they have accumulated, to read the data and begin to make some sense of it. The preparation for a public audience requires that the scientists (working in a Vygotskian manner) explain what they have learned. In forming that explanation for others, they explain it to themselves. Walter Fisher makes the same case for the combination of reflect tion and presentation as intertwined means of learning about, of knowing. In discussing the invention of the double-helix, Fisher explains, Rigorous reasoning obviously was involved in the invention of the dou- ble-helix model, but so was reflection not guided by strict inferential rules but by alternative possibilities and choosing the most apt, persua- sive ones. As the mental processes that produced the model were shaped This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms72 Reflection in the Writing Classroom by choices with an audience in mind, the thinking became rhetorical. (182) Reflection-in-presentation operates on the same principles: like Shulman's and Fisher's scientists, students and teachers interrupt their work, they review it, they prepare what they see for others. The thinking becomes rhetorical. Thus, reflection is both individual and social: in part, it is through the social that the individual comes to know. * * * Both because of its personal nature and because of its representa- tion of the self, reflection-in-presentation also bears similarities to autobiography. For one thing, autobiographies focus on the past, as Robert Folkenfilk points out: they "generally are narratives about the past of the writer," although the past doesn't necessarily "take prece- dence over the present moment or moments, which often provide the point of departure that organizes the autobiography" (15). The auto- biography is, in another phrase, "retrospective consciousness" (217). But the perspective is not totally inward: like Shulman's scientists and like our teachers and students, the autobiographer looks both inward and outward: Autobiography promises intersubjectivity, not just intrasubjectivity. Because autobiography manipulates the prestige of the self in relation to the other, it enters the play of desire that constitutes the symbolic order. Here the self as a point of reference outside the text and the self as repre- sented, constructed within the text, are in rightful tension. (Folkenfilk 234) The tension, then, occurs between the actual self and the repre- sented self, a tension that is rightful, that is productive. It is perhaps, then, the kind of tension we might expect to see-even desire to see-in reflection-in-presentation. And as important, there is more than a single self, as, as William Gass reminds us: the self divides, not severally into a recording self, an applauding self, a guilty self, a daydreaming self, but into a shaping self: it is the conscious- ness of oneself as a consciousness among all these other minds, an aware- ness born much later than the self it studies, and a self whose existence This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor:org/termsReflection-in-Presentation 73 was fitful, intermittent, for a long time, before it was able to throw a full beam upon the life lived and see there a pattern, as a plowed field seen from a plane reveals the geometry of the tractor's path. (51) Any self we see within text, particularly autobiography but reflection- in-presentation as well, is multiple, is shaped, is constructed; is neces sarily contingent, transitory, filled with tension. * * * In discussing reflection-in-presentation, however, I'm working after the fact. When writing teachers first began asking for reflective text, usually in portfolios, we didn't call it reflection-in-presenta- tion; we didn't see it in relation to other kinds of reflection; we did- n't see it in relation to science or autobiography. All we really saw was a portfolio that made much more sense when it included a stu- dent's narrative or interpretive text, and we saw that, in fact, without such a text-one that came to be called reflection-portfolios were merely folders of work (Yancey; Weiser). More specifically and pretty quickly, we wanted the reflection to perform one or more tasks: 1. create a context for the portfolio documents so that we as reader can understand how they were created and thus should be read, either individually or as composed text; 2. describe (and sometimes assess) the processes that the student used in creating texts, with specific reference to processes that explain how one draft evolved from an earlier one; 3. explain the student's goals and how those were accomplished, by reference to texts within the portfolio; 4. explain the curricular goals and how well those were accomplished. In other words, we wanted the student, at the least, to supply some context, and possibly to assess his or her work. We understood read- ing as contextual. We therefore wanted to students to participate in creating the contexts in which their texts would be read. But we weren't terribly clear about the specifics of reflection: for instance, about how reflection "worked," or about what was most important to our reading, or about what a reflective text might include, or about the form it might take. This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms74 Reflection in the Writing Classroom Without knowing what it was that we were looking for, then, most of us-the teachers asking for this reflection-looked for anything and everything, working under two assumptions: 1) that students could easily have something to say that we couldn't predict; and 2) that we should therefore use directions that were as open-ended as possible. That's what we asked for, just about anything that the writer deemed relevant or interesting-about their texts, about their processes, about them as writers, about them as persons. For example, in a set of directions that has been widely adopted by colleges and universities across the country, a typical reflection-in-presentation- a comprehensive letter that introduces the portfolio-may do any number of things, including describe the process used in creating any one portfolio piece, discuss important pieces in creating the portfolio, explain the place of writing in your life, chronicle your development as a writer, assess the strengths and weaknesses of your writing, or combine these approaches. Your letter should provide readers with a clearer understanding of who you are as a writer and a person. (UNC Charlotte) What we have here, of course, is a cascade of questions, one that in no way prioritizes what is expected or what is valued.4 Interestingly, within the same general period of time, beginning around 1988, faculty were also beginning to create portfolios, teach- ing portfolios, usually for purposes of annual review or, more likely, for promotion and tenure. These portfolios, like student portfolios, also called for reflection-in-presentation. By way of contrast, faculty were provided with both rationale and rather pointed directions. In the first American Association of Higher Education monograph on the teaching portfolio, for instance, Pat Hutchings and her colleagues talk about the rationale for reflection in ways that sound familiar: General reflection, divorced from evidence of actual performance, fails to capture the situated nature of teaching. Work samples [eg, syllabi, assign- ments, sample graded work] alone aren't intelligible. But work samples plus reflection make a powerful formula. The reflection is grounded by being connected to a particular instance of teaching; the work sample is made meaningful and placed in context through reflection. (9) As with student portfolios, there is a belief that the two kinds of texts-what Anson calls the primary texts (or what Hutchings calls the work samples) and the secondary texts, the reflection-together This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsReflection-in-Presentation 75 provide a more accurate portrait of the phenomenon under scrutiny. Moreover, the view here is decidedly Schonean: the particular instance of teaching, grounded though a reflective context, makes possible some general observations about a faculty member's teaching. But there is a telling difference here as well regarding reflection- in-presentation: while faculty are advised to write a reflection on every work sample, students are typically told to write a general, overview kind of reflection, as we've already seen. In the best known college models-those at Miami University and the University of Michigan for instance-the reflection that is asked for is an overview.5 And in most well-known K-12 portfolio models-the Kentucky model, for instance-again, the larger view is solicited, not reflections on individual texts or work samples. Another telling difference: while students are given wide berth in deciding what to share and how to share it and are explicitly invited to include personal information, exactly the opposite occurred with faculty. The latter are not asked, for example, to explain the place of teaching in your life, nor are they encouraged to provide readers with a clearer understanding of who you are as a person. Rather, they are told quite specifically what is expected of them; information targeted to informing readers in very specific ways about the portfolio com- poser's accomplishments. Hutchings advises faculty. for instance, to include two introductory documents in addition to the individual annotations: The first is the professional biography of the person who is preparing the portfolio. At a minimum, this could be a traditional resume. But it might also be useful to have the person write about key stages in his or her development as a teacher. The second is information about the specific environment in which the individual works . . . what the campus and department expect in terms of teaching, research and service; what specific classes the individ- ual faculty member teaches; and the important details about these classes that affect teaching-such as course size and the characteristics, abilities, and motivations of the students. (11) Much of And Christine Hult, in detailing what an administrative portfolio might look like, offers similar advice: As with the teaching portfolio, anyone compiling an administrative portfolio should guide the evaluators through the materials by means of This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms76 Reflection in the Writing Classroom self-reflective glosses on the contents. A self-reflective overview letter can highlight for readers those items of particular importance, tying documents to their underlying scholarship, for example. Thinking of the entire administrative portfolio as a persuasive document, buttressed by significant evidence (in the form of artifacts) to support the argument, will help the compiler toward a cohesive whole. (129) Several observations are worth noting here. Does it matter that stu- dents are not asked for individual annotations while faculty are? I think it both does and doesn't. On the one hand, if reflection is built into the curriculum so that students continually are engaged in reflection-in-action and constructive reflection, then perhaps reflect tive individual annotations aren't as necessary; students will already have reflected upon these texts precisely because the curriculum includes the processes of reflection. On the other hand, it seems a truism that writing individual anno- tations for a reader, as a kind of presentation, is itself an instructive endeavor precisely because, as Shulman suggests, it changes what you see; it makes the reflection inter as well as intra. Focused on a single work sample and presented to a public audience in a formal way, such a text requires a depth of insight that we want students to have, one that could contribute to the more comprehensive text as well. (This would be true regardless of whether the comprehensive text is attached to a portfolio or is an independent document.) And it seems likely that for many students, this more focused reflection might pose less of a challenge, so that we could build a sequence here: an integra- tion of reflection into the curriculum which culminates in a final reflective document, a means of both process and product. One thing is clear, however: in the literature on reflection-in-presentation, we have two forms-the individual, the more comprehensive. And a second point: the directions provided for the larger, com- prehensive reflective text embody different models, the (student) one very open, the (faculty) one very constrained. Which is better? If the advice given to faculty is restrictive, and if we assume they are the better writers, shouldn't we emulate that in the directions we provide to students? Again I want to say yes and no. Much of my reading of what's called for here depends on context: as I argue in chapter seven, a high-stakes assessment situation demands clear directions. Such directions work toward providing the same oppor- tunity to everyone by framing the task well. Moreover, in the process of articulating those directions, we clarify our own expectations, a This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsReflection-in-Presentation 77 feature that is especially important for high stakes situations, too, given that often both faculty and students are writing to and for the "unknown" reader. Providing clear, if restrictive, directions seems only prudent. On the other hand, students-especially those who are writing reflection-in-presentation in a class for a teacher they do know-are not writing professional documents, nor is a single course typically considered a high stakes assessment.' Within the classroom, then, there is a certain freedom that we can use to learn about reflection- in-presentation-about how a reflection-in-presentation shapes a self, about what we value in such texts, about the forms and metaphors and connections students construct to shape themselves. In other words, it's a design issue. Given an appropriate context, the open design has much to offer it. And in fact, thinking of reflect tion only as modelled on the professional text is a mistake, I think: it's likely that we would lose the chance to learn from it what it can teach us. A comparison shows why: the constrained version of the comprehensive reflective text is constrained for a reason, to produce something predictable. From such a document, we will learn: about the writers individually, about the writers in the aggregate. But we will not learn much about reflection per se, about the forms such a document might take, about what we value in it--precisely because in constraining response, the directions preclude exploration that can teach. In the classroom rhetorical situation, we know more about the contexts the students have been working in; allowing students considerably more freedom-to imagine and experiment and explore, to create reflection as a specific kind of discourse taking place in specific sites-thus seems appropriate. It is through such freedom that we all learn. As is self-evident, however, a large caveat: we have to value and engage in such freedom cautiously. We have to remember that ulti- mately, teachers are responsible for helping students manage this freedom; how we go about doing that in a way that isn't hegemonic, that is respectful, is a key question. We also have to remember that we are the ones who award the A's, who valorize the truths and the selves telling those truths, who compose students in this process. We are the ones who decide which reflections-in-presentation-which plural- ized narratives-will be permitted, will be seen as universal truths. * * * This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms78 Reflection in the Writing Classroom There are many questions to put to reflection-in-presentation. Some of them include: How explicit should the directions for reflection-in-presentation be? Are there specific questions that students should take up? What form/s will be allowed (eg, a letter, a poem, an essay, a web site)?7 What expectations come with this "assignment?" How will one know if it "works?" (Have you ever written one?) (Could you generalize about reflection generally on the basis of your own experience with it?) (What would happen if we began to talk about it?) end to use that * * * is perfect in ence Regardless of the model of reflection-in-presentation we prefer or enact, however, we haven't done a very good job of talking about what we value in such a text. We have scoring guides (e.g., Miami, Michigan) that talk about what's valued in a program portfolio more generally, but we haven't talked about what it is in this particular kind of discourse that "works." This is surprising: the reflective letter, for instance, has generated considerable interest and comment (eg, Sommers et al.; Schultz et al.; Conway), but as we'll see in chapter seven, mostly in terms of individual response or in terms of the kind of author a reader is likely to construct on the basis of this discourse. What's needed is a more generic sense of what is valued in such texts, if indeed readers share certain expectations. I think we do. And perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate that we do is, ironically, to read a text that violates these expectations: by means of what Joseph Janangelo calls an "inverted exemplary narrative" (100), in this case a reflection-in-presentation. The reason I chose this essay is because I felt it was perfect in every way. Even in the preliminary draft stage I felt confident with this essay. I only had two minor mistakes in the rough draft. The final draft was flawless. I can't find any weakness with this essay. One of the reasons it was the strongest is because it came from the heart. When I write from the heart This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsReflection-in-Presentation 79 and deal with my emotions and feelings, I truly am being honest. This story was true and is still vivid in my memory to this very day. If I would have had to make up a fictional story, it simply would not have worked. This essay was strong because it flowed well. The reason it flowed well is due to strong transition. Strong transition from paragraph to paragraph makes an essay easier to follow for the reader. "From Butterflies to Victory" is without a doubt, the strongest essay in the portfolio. The story was true and mean- ingful, flawless, and flowed well due to strong transition. As I said earlier, I am very proud of this essay. I wouldn't change a thing about this essay. I want to point my initial comments toward what I think is work- ing. The student has written an essay that she cares about, and she evi- dences some understanding of textuality, for example in her references to strong transition. More generally, however, the writer in this text, in this presentation to an audience, disappoints precisely because she vio- lates expectations we bring to such a text. These violations include: First, the writer seems unable to see text as synthetic and to use that as a basis for a discussion about the text. The essay is perfect in every way, she cannot find any weakness with this essay, and it was almost perfect from the start apparently, since the author found only two minor mistakes in the rough draft. Now all writers aren't multi- drafters, as Muriel Harris reminds us; perhaps this writer is a single drafter. But a single drafter is capable of having the same discussion about text that a multi-drafter can. We don't have discussion here; we have a very limited, repetitious summary. Second, as indicated already, the writer doesn't seem able to assess her own text. Even writers who are satisfied with a text can see-in specific terms-how it could be changed, how those hypothetical changes might work and make informed judgments about them. We don't see that here: what we do seem to see is a version of Perry's dualism, the perfect paper implicitly contrasted with the hypothetical imperfect (e.g., one with weak transitions). Third, the writer doesn't seem to understand the relationship between a rhetorical situation and text. We seem to be expecting a self-assess- ment that is related to some notion of context, of rhetorical situation, of audience and how the needs of an audience (fictionalized or not) have something to do with the development of text, how much it sat- isfies them, and so on. Instead of discussing a rhetorically situated kind of judgment, the author keys on a sole criterion to evaluating text: honesty. As the writer says, One of the reasons it was the strongest is because it came from the heart. Without a rhetorical situation that This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms80 Reflection in the Writing Classroom includes an audience other than self, she has no one to satisfy but her- self. This reasoning, we have to say, is perfectly logical. It is not, how- ever, rhetorical, nor is it reflective. What the writer does offer textually is length, and a certain length does seem to be a value we endorse, as it is in many other kinds of texts. That length presumes, however, a kind of development, depth of insight-reflection-that is missing here. I want to think about this refection-in-presentation in one addi- tional way: developmentally. If this text were a reflection-in-action, or a constructive reflection, I'd think the text would provide some start- ing points for us: 1) given the generally a-rhetorical claims here (eg, strong transition, vivid memory), I'd want to know how some of them applied specifically to the (primary) text under discussion: 2) as I argued in chapter two, I think students have to know and like their texts before they are ready to re-work them. I'm not persuaded that this student actually knows her work: I don't see the specifics relating to the primary text that would suggest the writer's familiarity with it. Which wouldn't mean that the student doesn't like it (perhaps has even more reason to like it, ironically). In fact, this student shows signs of being what I call "stuck in like"; that is, infatuated with her own text, she cannot see how it might be changed, much less how it might be improved. Developmentally-for student, for text, for processes-I have a starting point. But we don't expect reflection-in-presentation to be developmental: we see it as one form of summative assessment, a concluding moment. We bring different expectations to it. But it's also true that in a larger sense, such a presentation can become a point of departure, perhaps most especially when it violates our expectations. * * * I'd like to point to two other inverted exemplary narratives as instructive in moving towards understanding what we value in reflect tion-in-presentation. The first has to do with the emphasis we in com- position studies tend to place on revision. According to Elizabeth Metzger and Lizbeth Bryant, students take that emphasis and play it back to us in ways that disturb; the authors quote a student, for instance, who claims "to have botched] a paper so it looked like I revised" and who then claimed that the revision was part of what she should be rewarded for (7), a version of what Irwin Weiser calls 'psyching out the port prof" (299). The question: how important is This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsReflection-in-Presentation 81 revision? Do we believe in single-draft writers, as Harris suggests? Is there a single-draft reflection-in-presentation that will satisfy? The second narrative has to do with the kinds of claims that stu- dents can make but that are generally recognized by faculty as tan- gential (e.g., amounts of effort and time) and as unrelated (e.g., shmoozing). Students often equate (confuse?) sufficient time spent with quality of product, and they associate effort with high grades, not entirely without reason, of course." Shmooz is a more direct appeal, appearing in a text that plays back to us quite explicitly (quite manipulatively?) our own values. As Irwin Weiser explains, "Shmooz" . . . is the often indistinguishable evil twin of "glow," the- telling-the-teacher-what-he-wants-to-hear that students may very well write in their reflective letters . . . . I don't want to suggest that we dis- count or mistrust students' reflective writing; I mean that reflective let- ters, precisely because they do reintroduce the personal, force us to recognize the subjective nature of our readings. (301) For readers, reflection-in-presentation, seen in this light, can be tricky to navigate. On the one hand, we create educational environments precisely so that students will be influenced in very specific and (we hope) positive ways. This is the nature of teaching: it's reasonable to think that students will reflect that context back to us in their reflective texts. On the other hand, we don't want to encourage nor reward what a cynic might characterize as obsequience or false compliance. The question seems to be how we would know whether we were reading the product of (genuine) learning or the product of shmooz. How we answer that question depends on our own context for read- ing and the role we are playing. As I'll argue in chapter seven, in a high stakes assessment situation we probably want to be more direc- tive in our requests, precisely because we don't know the student, and we don't know the context(s) the student is working in. The absence of this kind of contextual knowledge can make the task of interpret- ing and evaluating more difficult. (I have to pause, briefly, to note the irony here. It used to be the case that we assumed that the less we knew about the writer, the better a judgment we were assumed to make: hence two "blind" raters in a holistically scored essay exam. But once we began to apprehend the role of context in influencing, if not determining, meaning, we began to ask about what those contexts were, how they do affect our readings, and how we might externalize them in productive ways. Chapter five discusses this more fully.) This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms82 Reflection in the Writing Classroom In the case of the classroom, however, we are talking about readers who teach their own students, who presumably do know them, and who thus can bring multiple contexts to bear in their reading, as we'll see in some detail in the next chapter. For now, it's sufficient to note that in the case of reflection-in-presentation accompanying a portfo- lio, the primary texts and the reflective text relativize each other, hold each other to account. In the case of independent reflective texts, the context of the teacher's experience of the class relativizes the claims in the reflection. Ultimately, of course, determining the value of the student's reflection-in- presentation requires informed, thoughtful, reflective judgment. Textually, there are signs that reflection-in-presentation is not "working" as we'd hoped, that articulated, elaborated, complex learn- ing is not occurring. Indicators include: a text that is too short a text that is uninformed about the composer's work or learn- ing: the student doesn't seem to know his or her texts, his or her own knowledge, understanding a text where the author cannot think rhetorically or syntheti- cally, can read neither links nor gaps a text that parrots the context of the class or the teacher with- out demonstrating the influence of either What we also need is a set of texts that might speak to what can go right. * * * I don't think it's surprising that we've seen so little discussion about what works in reflection-in-presentation. It's always easier, more comfortable to critique. Critiquing is part of our teacherly iden- tity; it's what many of us have been rewarded for our entire academic lives (Elbow and Yancey). But saying what we like, what we value: that's tricky. Having that kind of discussion requires a disclosure that parallels what is asked of the composer of the reflection-in-presenta- tion. Even in the best of circumstances, revealing what we value in such a text makes us vulnerable in ways that discomfit (Allen, Condon, et al. 1997), so much more the case when we go public. 10 But it is also true that without such discussion, we write and read in the dark. This content downloaded from 72.74.170.18 on Sun, 26 Jun 2022 16:19:08 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/termsCHAPTER FOUR les of reflection. Reflection-in- Presentation more formal What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. on its dual nature The end is where we start from. T. S. Eliot An age that has become distrustful of history is still willing to read avidly the first-person account, one .. . by the participant true to his or her subjective response. Robert Folkenfilk IRONICALLY, THE REFLECTION THAT IS BEST KNOWN-WHAT I'VE called reflection-in-presentation-is the least well understood and the least well theorized. It's (also) the reflection that we are most familiar with, regardless of the form it takes: the introductory "Letter to the Reader" that fronts the writing portfolios used for exemption at Miami University (Black et al.); the annotations upon single pieces that accompany selections in the Missouri Western portfolio-in-the- major (Allen, Frick et al.); the final reflective essay that summarizes and interprets the exhibits appearing in the New Standards portfo- lios used in the K-12 context (Myers and Pearson); and the various stand-alone reflective texts that students write to conclude a course (Marshall; Perl 1997). All of these reflective texts are presentational, although as Miami University researchers Black, Daiker, Sommers, and Stygall point out, what's valued in these presentations shifts from context to context. Part of that context is the situation within which a portfolio is read. Is the course or program grounding the reflective text one that favors cultural critique, for instance, or is it oriented more to issues of voice and expression? This context will have much to do with-may even (over) determine-what is valued in the reflection-in-presentation.' This content downloaded from 72.74. 170. 18 on Sun. 2 n 2022 16