| THIS VOLUME GREW OUT OF A FOCUSED INQUIRY: WHAT CONVERSATIONS, I wanted to ask, could we have around texts in order to foster reflective habits of mind? What you'll read in the following pages constitutes my attempt at an extended answer. Because it is a book-length volume, I've taken the luxury of thinking about this question in multiple ways: theoretically, pragmatically, andI hopereflectively. I've located my responses to this focused inquiry within my own practice, to be sure, but I've tried both to theorize that practice and to make it visible so that others can read themselves into this story as well. Ultimately, as I hope is apparent, I'm as interested in the questions raised in the process of inquiry as I am in the answers we construct. They are foundation and means of reflection, both. |
| More specifically, what I've done here is to re-theorize Donald Schon's theory of reflection for use in the writing classroom, and in that process to think about how we might use reflection as a mode of helping students develop as writers. I've written this volume, then, because I think through reflection we can change both the teaching and learning of writing. What I also do here is show how we might begin making some of those changes, and suggest some of what weteachers and studentscould learn if we understood the writing classroom as a reflective practicum, as a new kind of writing classroom, one where students are writers, reflection is woven into the curriculum, and practice becomes art. |
| I was fortunate in having the support of many at my institution, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. In particular, I want to thank the University, the Faculty Grants Committee, and Dean Schley Lyons for an academic leave to support this work. |
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