It feels a bit odd to be reflecting on Kathi Yancey’s reflections on reflection, but then again Yancey has a penchant for inviting us to think about concepts (like reflection and knowledge transfer) that, while seemingly familiar/accessible/obvious, are also proliferatively complex the more we think about them. Teachers and scholars will at times offer alternative terms to name and describe these concepts; they will compare them to other terms and explain why the concepts don’t actually refer to the things they represent; they will add multiple dimensions to the concepts. I am going to do that now, in fact. But in the end, we realize that the concept Yancey has been asking us to think about and use, the concept she spent her career enriching, is more than enough if we know how to keep thinking with it and with her.

Following Yancey, scholars in composition studies have long been interested in reflection as a way to access and monitor students’ learning as well as to encourage students to assess their own learning (for example, asking students to produce reflective cover letters as part of writing portfolios). As scholars in rhetoric and composition studies have become more interested in movements across languages, genres, modalities and media, cultural and disciplinary boundaries, and matrialities, they along with those who are interested in “knowledge transfer” have identified reflection as playing a crucial role in helping students see connections and mobilize writing knowledge between and across contexts. The practice of reflection has had and continues to have significant implications for knowledge transfer, assessment, teaching, and learning. Yet, as Yancey and other scholars remind us, we are still learning about it as a phenomenon.

For many, the primary focus has been on what Yancey has called “reflection in presentation,” the products of student reflections that take the form of retrospective accounts such as cover letters, writer’s memos, artist statements, etc. While these reflective performances and artifacts are valuable, we are still learning about what Yancey calls “reflection in action,” including the rhetorical nature of reflection: the way reflection is situated, subject to definitions, shaped by interactions, and exerting force on actions. Yancey and scholars influenced by her have troubled the idea that reflection is an isolated and stabilized phenomenon, one that happens outside of space and time, retrospectively, within an individual.

As Yancey tells us in the accompanying video segment, at its core reflection is a meaning making activity that happens in community (is a collective enterprise) and that draws on the past to imagine a new future. Learning is and has always been the goal and the promise of reflection.

But why does reflection continue to confound?

I would offer that perhaps in a way similar to “transfer,” the word “reflection” belies the complexities of the phenomenon it is meant to explain while remaining the best term to explain it. In the case of reflection, the trouble is inherent in its definition. The two most common dictionary definitions of reflection are 1) “the throwing back by a body or surface of light, heat, or sound without absorbing it” and 2) “serious thought or consideration.” That serious thought or consideration is associated with the way that light bounces off a surface without absorbing it presents some interesting implications for how we understand and practice reflection, for it suggests that reflection as serious thought or consideration is based on separation. Even when our reflective practices and pedagogy avoid the limitations inherent in the definition, the residue of its basis in optics and separation persists in a way that is worth our critical attention.

For example, in the accompanying video segment, Yancey suggests that reflection has a directional backward and forward looking orientation: looking back in order to think about where you want to go. This optical imagery is also present in Yancey’s citing of Lee Schulman’s influential definition of reflection: “Occluding the flow of practice” and “Reviewing.” Here too, occluding (which means to stop but also to hide from view) retains an optical focus on seeing and light: things bouncing off of one another. This idea of things bouncing off of one another has shaped much of how we understand reflection as a reviewing practice.

And yet, amid the prevalence of these optical metaphors, Yancey and others (see Rhetoric of Reflection) have contributed so much by acknowledging and accounting for reflection’s complexity, including the ways that subjectivity, materiality, the variability of context, genre, and situation, new technologies and media, power dynamics, and politics all exert a force on reflection.

In fact, go back and watch the accompanying video segment. The segment opens with the interviewer saying that “R is for Reflection.” Responding with “All day long,” Yancey then immediately glances down at the books she is holding in her lap. She doesn’t just look down, however. With her left thumb she brushes the corner of the book. Her reflections on reflection are not just visually cued but also tactile. She is not accessing something separate from her but something she is also holding and that has co-extensive presence.

Also in the video segment, sitting beside Yancey, are two potted plants. They too, like Yancey, have something to teach us that can expand our understanding of reflection. Plants absorb CO2, water, and light for photosynthesis, and in absorbing them, they transform or convert them to glucose and carbohydrates. They grow by absorbing, not reflecting, light.

What happens if we approach the definition of reflection as “giving serious consideration and thought” in a way that consciously resists the related optical definition of reflection as being the opposite of absorption? That is, what if we understood separation, absorption, and transformation as all mutually at work in reflection? And what happens to our ideas of reflection as a result?

We don’t have to go far for answers. In the video segment and in much of her recent work on reflection, Yancey describes the relational nature of reflection: how reflection is structured by the academic calendar, how reflection has a rhythm within the structures that govern how it works and how we do it. All of which suggests that reflection is not rooted in separation but in being “amidst” or amidstness, a relationality in which all actants are co-constitutive and constantly transformed.

In a recent article on cooking and collaborative writing, Mary Jo Reiff and I write:

Cooking helps make this distinction clear: the ingredients, the cooking surface, the pan do not reflect each other; they diffract and absorb: the heat from the stovetop is diffracted through the pan and then diffracted through the ingredients, which in turn diffracts through the pan. Flavors diffract and absorb one another: the ingredients are not distinct; they are altered through their intra-action.

Nothing is itself by itself. (Cooking Collaborations, p. 5)

Instead of an optical imagery, it might be worthwhile to consider how the image below might better describe how we would want to imagine, study, practice, and teach reflection.

Mary Jo Reiff’s and my understanding of diffraction and absorption is informed by work in Indigenous epistemologies and relationality, new materialism1, and the work of Karen Barad. This work teaches us about relationality and distributed agency—how Indigenous knowledge systems shift the focus from the agency of things to their relationships (Clary-Lemon). We also learn from Laura Gonzales’s work on translation how Indigenous frameworks help us become attuned “to the relationships between language, land, and positionality” (1) so that we move beyond notions of translation as separation and equivalence.

Our years of cooking and writing together has informed Mary Jo Reiff’s and my understanding of collaboration and reflection as relational, mediated, and codependent with things, places, people, and others. In addition, our experience of cooking and writing together has taught us that we need to develop more robust contemplative literacies to honor the kind of intra-actions that these practices involve—drawing our attention to a posthuman practice of reflection that, according to Casey Boyle “unfolds not through the traditional conception of rhetoric as critical reflection about an object but as an ongoing series of mediated encounters” (“Writing and Rhetoric “ 534). Such ideas have encouraged us to think of reflection as a diffractive phenomenon, in which listening and learning from one another occur in simultaneous and multisensory relation rather than as marked boundaries between actions.

Paying attention to multi-agentive, intra-active, and relational dynamics, scholarship in materiality, posthumanism, ecosystems theory, and Indigenous rhetorics in writing studies has saught to account for the entangled relations between humans and other than humans in the making, circulation, and interpretation of texts. Writing studies scholars (Shivers McNair, Cardinal, Gries, Micciche, West-Puckett) in particular have turned to the work of feminist philosopher and physicist Karen Barad, whose notion of intra-action challenges the idea that things interact with one another, as if they precede and pre-exit one another and remain separate even as they come into contact. As Whitney Stark describes it, intra-action understands agency not as “an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a ‘dynamism of forces’ (Barad, 2007, 141) in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably” (Stark). Offered as an alternative to reflection (in which light or soundwaves bounce off of objects that remain the same), diffraction for Barad is an unfolding process of coming into being as things intra-act and intra-fere with one another in dynamic, transformative encounter.2

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Barad argues that “mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance” (p. 3): how something comes to matter (have substance) is entangled with how it is made significant. In this way, Barad not only draws attention to the entangled relations between rhetoric and matter (signification and substance) but also to the ways meaning-mattering continuously, dynamically intra-act. Barad’s notion of agential intra-action (“Posthumanist Performativity” 814) challenges the idea that things, objects, and apparatuses interact with one another, as if they precede and pre-exit one another and remain separate even as they participate in interaction. In this way, for example, a microscope does not reflect what is on the slide but diffracts it, the same way that technologies of assessment diffract the objects they are assessing. This view that things come to matter through their entanglement is central to post-humanist understandings of action, agency, and the inseparability of ontology and epistemology:

The notion of intra-action (in contrast to the usual “interaction,” which presumes the prior existence of independent entities/relata) represents a profound conceptual shift. It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of the “components” of phenomena become determinate and that particular embodied concepts become meaningful. A specific intra-action (involving a specific material configuration of the “apparatus of observation”) enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut—an inherent distinction—between subject and object) effecting a separation between “subject” and “object.” That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy. In other words, relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions. (Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity” 815)

Cuts are boundary marking practices. Within a Cartesian cut, the distinction between subject and object preexists in a reflective relationship; within a post-humanist agential cut, distinctions or differences between so-called “subjects” and “objects” emerge from/in relation to one another in a diffractive relationship. I am suggesting that the optical, physics-based definition of reflection posits a Cartesian cut that separates the agent and the object of reflection that knowingly of unknowingly continues to haunt how we practice reflection.

So what does all this mean? I am not suggesting we rename reflection “diffraction.” As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Yancey has a career-long penchant for keep valuable concepts in circulation even when the phenomena they describe exceed their technical definitions. This is the case both with “knowledge transfer” and with “reflection.” And the fact that reflection partly means “giving serious thought or consideration” makes it all the more important that we not only retain the term but also expand its scope beyond the optical. Jacki Fiscus-Cannady, in recent and forthcoming work that builds on Yancey’s work, examines how we can study and teach what Yancey calls “reflection in action” as well as what Fiscus-Cannady calls “reflection in motion”--how reflection diffracts, absorbs, and transforms so-called “subjects” and “objects” as they are entangled with one another.

Fiscus-Cannady’s diffractive approach to reflection builds on and extends Yancey’s insights into reflection as rhetorical, suggesting that even when we treat reflection as a situated knowledge-making practice rather than a passive mirror of some reality, and even when we move reflection out of alphabetic text into other media and modes, we need to pay attention to the factors involved in what gets marked as reflection, how reflective practices continue to privilege certain way of knowing and being, the complex ways that reflection is entangled in media, genres, and modalities, and the ways that reflection mobilizes knowledge and identities.

By treating reflection as situated, interactive, ongoing, and distributed, such research continues to help us understand reflection’s value to learning that Yancey has demonstrated and championed from the start. It draws our attention beyond retrospective interviews and text analysis to mobility studies and ethnographical methods. It asks us to account for the complex factors that mark reflection, both within and outside the classroom, including how, why, and when students engage in reflective activities; the influence of motivation, emotion, self-efficacy and confidence, metacognition, task recognition, stakes, engagement, teacher and peer feedback, multisensory experiences, assignment prompting and other affordances; the material relations; and the multi-agentive and distributed intra-actions between humans and other-than-humans, subjects and objects that absorb and transform one another during reflection.

Notes

1. It is important to note that what scholars have called “new materialism” in fact has much deeper roots in Indigenous epistemologies and rhetorics—see for example Clary-Lemon; Hawk; Kimmerer; Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt. Up

2. I was first introduced to Barad’s work by Ann Shivers-McNair, and my understanding of diffraction as an epistemology, ontology, and methodology is inextricably entangled with hers and emergent from our conversations and her scholarship (see Beyond the Makerspace). Up

References