Critical Reflection and the Listserv

We began the listserv in a search for ways to encourage more critical thinking about teaching than what we were getting from our teaching assistants in their teaching logs. The entries in these logs tend to the reportorial mode: they tell what happened; they express frustration, or, less frequently, satisfaction, or whatever emotion accompanied the experience; they sometimes announce plans. Much less frequently in these entries, however, do students critically discuss the theoretical, ethical, and political issues raised by their teaching practices and their own professionalization. We hoped the rhetorical space constructed by an electronic list would provide "opportunities for educators to create collaborative learning environments" (Cummins and Sayers). In this space participants could focus collaboratively on "knowledge construction" rather than traditional "knowledge transmission"(Harasim). In effect, they could enter what Donald Schon describes in discussing the development of reflective professionals as a "virtual world," smaller and simpler than the "real" world, allowing them to set aside certain constraints, such as those imposed by time and face-to-face interaction. They would be able to review at leisure, experiment with, and ponder the meanings of their experiences, ideas, and feelings.

There are numerous ways of categorizing and classifying reflective thinking and practice (see R.T. Clift et al). Here we define critical and ethical reflection, drawing on L. Valli’s (in Clift et al) analysis of "moral approaches to reflective practice," as deliberation "on norms and the worthiness of social goals" (p. 42), on affective issues in teacher-student relations, and on critical issues of politics and ideology in schooling and society. As students begin to reflect on such issues, they enter into a professional discourse in which they can participate in the exchange, interpretation, and manipulation of the signs and symbols of professional identity, of membership in a professional community. This professional discourse includes a "normalizing" form of technical communication about how-to knowledge: how to teach, how to engage certain kinds of students, how to deal with community agents and forces that affect teaching, and the like. But it also includes a critical professional discourse that problematizes the activities of the members of the community through what Thomas Kuhn, for better or worse, called "abnormal discourse," that is, discourse that challenged or set aside more conventional modes of discourse within a knowledge community. What better way to invite students into a professional community than to ask them to join in and construct these different kinds of discourse?

The layers of contexts–the local context of their teaching, the wider context of their seminar on teaching, and still wider contexts of institution, profession, culture, and society--through which our students negotiated their professionalization as language arts teachers constitutes a particularly social form of intertextuality. Intertextuality has been defined in a number of ways. For example, Ken Hyland used the term "manifest Intertextuality" to identify texts that are explicitly present in a text under analysis. And drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and others, Steve Witte has written that at its most basic level, intertextuality refers to a social fact, namely that "there is no meaningful utterance without relation to other utterances" (p. 242). Witte argues that the concept of intertextuality "can be seen as an hypothesis about the source of the experience and the prior knowledge critical to the writing and reading processes" (p. 252). Another way to imagine intertextuality relates to Witte’s definition of "covert collaboration," which refers to writer’s uses of "texts" "that already exist, either in artifactual or memorial form or both" (p. 253). More specifically, Witte described this type of collaboration as one in which the collaboration is with other writers through historical or extant texts, texts that may be either remembered or seen; also, the texts need not be alphabetic texts. Used this way, "text" refers to much more than written linguistic texts. With its short and often strongly voiced texts, the listserv provides many individual texts, as well as the larger texts of threads of individual messages, covertly collaborated upon texts that many students read carefully, quote from, and annotate in their subsequent messages, in effect practicing close, critical reading as well as writing from sources, and making the computer mediated discussion itself an intertextual resource.

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