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Drawing from a qualitative study, we share findings that demonstrate how students articulate and express emotion in reflection. As they reflect on their writing identities, processes and products, peer and instructor feedback, and assess their work, the students in our study routinely discuss their emotions. Our essay closes with pedagogical strategies for helping students reflect on their thinking and feeling about writing.
Reflection has become a key component of writing instruction, largely because of its metacognitive potential to enable students to gain more awareness and control over their writing. As researchers such as Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Laurel L. Bower, Dylan Dryer and David Russell, Jeff Sommers, Kara Taczak, Thomas Trimble and Adrienne Jenkins, and Kathleen Yancey have advocated, by taking on reflective writing, students step back from their work with the goal of more deeply understanding not only their composing process and product but also their identity as writers.1 Reflection as metacognition, or "thinking about thinking," asks students to consider what they are doing as writers and why they are doing it (Bower 48). Reflection affords students critical distance through which they articulate the choices they make and the impact of those choices, assess their writing more accurately and capaciously, ascertain and articulate writing knowledge, and identify writing hurdles and map effective paths forward. A maj or premise for this work is that "a more self-aware writer can become a more effective writer" (J. Sommers, "Problematizing Reflection" 272). Extending this conversation, Adler-Kassner and Wardle identify reflection as a threshold concept, asserting that it plays key roles in gaining writing knowledge. Threshold concepts refer to the kinds of writing knowledge "critical for continued learning and participation," and according to Adler-Kassner and Wardle, reflection uniquely "connect[s] across the various threshold concepts because it offers writers the ability to be active agents of change" (2, 79). Still, while the field has mined numerous benefits and possibilities of reflection, Dryer and Russell caution that students may encounter significant obstacles to reflection in practice and argue that the complex cognitive, material, and embodied processes of reflection deserve more attention (68).2
In this essay, we take up Dryer and Russell's call by exploring one particular challenge students may experience with reflective writing: how to engage with their emotions....