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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
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Dr. Christina Gessler
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Dr. Christina Gessler
This episode is brought to you by. Prime Obsession is in session and this summer Prime Originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice off campus Elle every year after the Love Hypothesis point and more slow burns, Second Chances chemistry you can feel through the screen. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and Beyond. I'm the show's producer and your host, Dr. Christina Gessler. And today I am so pleased to be joined by by Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday who is the author of Reflection in Reimagining Reflection in the Writing Classroom. Welcome to the show. Jackie hi.
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
I am so glad that you're here and we get to learn about your book from you. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely. So I am an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. I just finished up my first year here and before that I was at Florida State where I was an assistant professor for the last six years. So I'm going up for tenure at the University of Minnesota this year and fingers crossed on that. I am in the writing studies department at the University of Minnesota. I specialize in anti racist and feminist pedagogies, generally speaking. And I have recently, as you mentioned, finished up a book called Reflection and Motion Reimagining Reflection in the writing classroom. I tend to publish in a wide range of composition studies journals and rhetorical studies journals. And I tend to teach classes that range from first year writing to advanced writing writing in the major courses, graduate student courses as well, whether that's research methods or composition theory or linguistic justice special topics courses. So I have a lot of different teaching experience at the college level in all sorts of writing related coursework.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
One of the things that we're curious about here is your own path through higher ed. You share a bit about that. In the back of the book at the acknowledgments we get a glimpse of who's helped you along the way and some of the things you did as a younger person. But if you think back to 16 or 17 year old you, what did you think you were going to do? And how close is Professor Biscuit's candidate to what younger you thought, oh my
- [04:34]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
goodness, that's a great question. You know, I did not have an exact career path in mind as a young person. I interestingly, I went to this camp, it was called super camp. It was a very academic kind of camp where you could make goals for yourself and think about who you were as a learner. And I had really specific goals about things about like where I wanted to travel, right? So I was like, I'm going to go to Ireland, Australia and Senegal. And I ended up doing all those things right in my, in my early college years and early twenties. So I had this goals of travel and learning and all those kinds of things, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I knew what I enjoyed, which was I wanted to learn, right? I wanted to experience things, I wanted to travel, I wanted to learn. And so when I was in college, I had a really hard time figuring out what that might look like in terms of a specialization. So I actually had declared seven different majors. It was a lot during my four years there. But my second semester, junior year, I finally. They finally stuck, the two that I picked, which were linguistics and English. And the reason for that is my first semester junior year, I took a course with Professor Ann Curzan at the University of Michigan. And her course just really shaped the trajectory of what I wanted to do. The course was a relatively benign title. It's called Intro to the English Language. And in that course, we learned about not just how to teach writers, but also how to think about teaching linguistic awareness, critical language awareness. So we learned about things like phonology, semantics, syntax, thinking about linguistic variation, the ways in which we have stereotypes about language use, whether that be speaking or writing. And I really found that course to be absolutely fascinating in thinking about how I wanted to approach what I was going to be interested in learning for a lifetime. So that class got me thinking. Actually, instead of teaching K through 12, which is what I had kind of landed on midway through my college experience, I thought, you know, I actually want to go to graduate school and teach courses like Ann's teaching, and I would like to do that rather than teach in the elementary or secondary classroom. So I guess that's a long way of saying no. I don't know who I thought I was going to be, but I certainly didn't think I was going to be a professor. And at the same time, it makes a ton of sense because my main goals were just to experience the world and learn. And I feel like I've done a lot of that in my career as both a graduate student and now an assistant professor.
- [08:03]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And we get some of that story. In the prologue, I had flagged that, that the Intro to the English Language was a pivotal course from you, because you say that before you took that class, you were thinking of being a history major. And I was like, oh, because my PhD is in history, and that was the class that kind of was this huge pivot for you. But those of us who are historians, it makes complete sense because we're digging into stories and silences and. And how those are conveyed and who makes the rules about what's a legitimate story and who is the storyteller. And so being curious about the act of writing and speaking and sharing and collecting our thoughts into something someone else can understand is really. There's so much in common between the two fields.
- [08:46]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely. I agree completely. I feel like, in retrospect, the majors that I was oscillating, like, around, so history being one of them, my first major that I declared was actually anthropology. So really Interested in, you know, different cultures, how they were studied in the world. I actually did an archeological dig in Senegal. That's how I met that goal of being able to go there. And I realized I loved telling the stories about the different cultures and learning the histories of the different cultures. But I did not really enjoy the pickaxing and the dental tool work of actually excavating bones. So I switched from anthropology towards history and then I did women's studies and I did. They had a peace and social justice major. I tinkered with that. I switched to Spanish because I was really interested in. In Latin American cultures. And I had taken a really interesting Latinx history class. So I kind of just kept moving around until I was like, actually, I think I want to do English as it pertains to kind of the history of the English language, thinking about how we tell stories or talk about our identities through language and then history. And then once I took Anne's class, I said, actually, I think I want to do English and linguistics. So I kind of found myself in like a sociolinguistics critical language awareness positioning towards the end of my college career. And I feel like Even in my PhD I'm still at that intersection, but I bring in like feminist theory, for example, and that was from my short stint as a woman and gender sexuality studies major. Right. So it's interesting how the, the kind of interests that I had as an undergrad do come up in my work now.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
I appreciate you sharing your path because I think often young people looking forward or people who are outside the academy and don't really, you know, have much familiarity, think it's a very linear path. You're either, you know, you're cut out for academia or you don't. And so many people have shared what I would call kind of twisty paths at the time they're walking it. They. They don't really know how to explain to someone else why they're choosing what they're choosing. But for them, it is clearly the next stepping stone to step onto. And then in hindsight you can say, oh, yeah, that, that actually all makes sense. But at the time we're doing it, it's really a lot of intellectual exploration.
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely, I agree. I feel really strongly that it's awesome to explore, especially in your first couple years of post high school, whether that means that you're thinking, actually I want to delay under my undergraduate experience and travel, or if that means that you want to take a wide range of courses at first within your undergraduate experience, if you want to Utilize your local community college so you can take different courses while you work. Right. Like, there are a lot of different ways where you can have some breathing room to figure out what you want to do. When I was done with my undergraduate degree, I actually worked as an au pair in Australia. And I felt like that gave me enough space to figure out what would my next steps look like. So I started as a technical writer at an insurance brokerage firm to make sure that I didn't want to do writing in that capacity. And I found that to be really, really rewarding work because being able to translate something like an insurance plan to folks that don't understand insurance is a skill that I still use today. Right. So it is something that is important. It's an equity issue to be able to understand how your healthcare works or doesn't work right for you and how to. How to work through the kind of bureaucracy that health care can feel like and be. And I enjoyed that work. But I also felt like my true calling was to be in a situation where I could keep learning. And I felt like my master's and PhD and working in the academy let me do that in a more supportive environment where I was. That is my job now. Right. I get paid to learn and then teach what I learn. And I'm constantly able to do different research projects or read other people's research projects. And that is built in as part of what my time should be. And I really enjoy that part of our job. But most of all, I really enjoy the teaching part of being able to share about my research and other people's research with the students that I'm working with.
- [13:58]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And this book is the result of a great deal of research. And you take us in the book through your research process. You have one chapter where you really take us fully into how you did the work, where you did the work. But before we dive into that, let's share with the listeners what the book is about. So, professor, how do you describe this book?
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
That's an awesome question. I. I think that sometimes when we're thinking about our own books, we're so into the, like, immersed in it that it can hard to give a short preview, but I'm going to attempt to do so and then we can dive into more details as we see fit. So reflection in motion, Reimagining reflection in the writing classroom is an attempt to capture what reflection is like according to the people that are practicing reflection. So what I mean by that is that the book's goal is not to. Is not to tell us how to practice reflection or the best ways that reflection must be practiced, but instead to explain how students and teachers are doing reflection. And based on what they're doing, what are ways that we can start thinking about reflection and more capacious or more like a more broadened sense that would be better representative of how people are actually doing reflection. So, in other words, reflection a lot of times is thought of as like a very static or like retrospective thing within writing studies. The field that I'm coming from and what I found as a teacher before I did that, even did this research, is that a lot of times that definition was coming into odds in. In the ways that I practice reflection or my students practice reflection. And so what this book attempts to do is to capture the variety of ways that teachers and students are practicing reflection in their writing classrooms and in particular, their first year writing classrooms.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
Before we dive in deeper, I'd like to take a moment to talk about the term reflection in the book. You decline to give it a set definition. You point out that it has many understandings of what it is and what it isn't for listeners. Can you talk about what reflection is?
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely. So I think that reflection is something that it's a. It's a process where we are considering or engaging critically in, in thinking about something, but that thinking or that consideration is something that does not necessarily have to be only in our own heads. What I mean by that is that it can be something that is dynamic in that it could be a conversation, or it could be through writing, it could be through drawing. It could be embodied, like through walking or listening to music or baking. Right. So it is a very dynamic process that is both helping us project forward. Right. So we can use reflection to take an experience and imagine how we might use it differently or use this knowledge to do something differently in the future. Or we might look at a past experience. Experience. And then think about what we might learn from that. That could be reflection. It could be a way of getting us to be aware of how we're thinking or feeling. Right. Kind of like an introspective. And so there's a lot of different rhetorical purposes that reflection can take. But altogether, to me, it's really about that critical consciousness. And it might be something that is past or present or future, depending on the situation. And it might be more internal or more external, depending on the situation, but it's always that critical consciousness.
- [18:19]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And reaching critical consciousness is not necessarily something that people can just force themselves to do. We often, especially if we're in learning settings, try to treat our brain like a machine. I need to turn it on now. I need to do this particular thing with it, and it needs to happen now. And our brains aren't like that. And so reaching critical consciousness can be a frustrating thing for people to do. Like, I have to get my thoughts together, I have to come up with an argument for this assignment, or I have to come up with a synthesis of what I read. We reflect often to create a product in academia, and one of the things that you bring us into right away in the book is you're baking and you're making a pie, and you take us in this ruminative, iterative way through this whole process, where we keep circling back to more aspects of making this pie, and you're just there reflecting as you're doing. And there's a lot of brain science that shows that this is actually a great way to reach critical consciousness, whether it's washing dishes, swimming laps, going for a jog, taking a shower, anything where we're in the midst of a very repetitive motion kind of unlocks that connection to our critical consciousness. There's brain science that supports this. You've named the book Reflection in Motion. You also tell us about how, as a young person, you were very into skating. Did you find rather naturally that when you were in motion, and particularly if you were in a repetitive motion, that you were more in touch with your critical consciousness?
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Yes, for me, that was the case. And so that's why I struggled so much with the kind of quintessential or canonical understandings of reflection within my field of writing studies. A lot of times, people would think about it as something that was, like, in your head and then written out. It was very. It felt very static. Right? It felt like, oh, it's so not easy. That's not the right word. But it's.
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Dr. Christina Gessler
It's.
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
It's something that you can tap into by writing a cover letter or by writing a. A writer's memo to explain what you did in this project. And to me, I find that actually when I'm moving or doing that kind of repetitive motion, that's where it comes to. Comes to play for me because of my history as a. As an athlete, as a. As a figure skater. But I also found that that was true of my students. Right. That I often would have better luck getting them to be able to articulate what was going on in their writing or getting them to articulate what they may have learned from a peer review or talking to them about what they learned from a reading and kind of doing that critical consciousness when we were doing something more dynamic or that involved a movement Girl Winter is so last season and now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders that perfect hang on the patio sundress those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic.
- [21:52]
Dr. Christina Gessler
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
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Dr. Christina Gessler
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
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Dr. Christina Gessler
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
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Dr. Christina Gessler
Last pricing valid May 14th through May 27th. US only exclusion supplies. See homedepot.com pricematch for details. I took a workshop and I cannot remember the exact name of it, but it was something like meditation and writing. And I remember that at one point they had us just all go on this silent walk where we were just meant to be really present, just walking and noticing and just to pick a pace that worked for you. And then we came back, they gave us this writing prompt and so I wrote this poem and it ended up getting published in anthology and the very westernized way of responding to that is oh that's great. You know, you produced this thing and apparently it was quite good. And I remember at the time and since then not having that quite of a connection to it, but feeling really relieved that I had connected with something, I had found a way to talk about it, collected my thoughts and my feelings and that it had made sense to me when it finally came out and then I could just sit with it because it was a meditation class. One of the things that you talk about in the book is that in working with different students and hearing their stories, being able to sit with it is an important aspect of reflection for many people from very different positionalities. But in the Westernized concept of education, how we use language, you're supposed to create a product. Can you talk about the value of sitting with it?
- [24:03]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely. So for me, I come from a very Western upbringing in terms of. And also a privileged white upbringing. Right. And so I really found that I had some lived experiences that made it so that I reflected in certain ways. And that did not map onto all of my students, of course, because we're all coming from a variety of different backgrounds. And I found that what might be helpful or useful is thinking about how reflection is happening in classrooms that are within minority student institutions or MSIs. Minority serving institutions. Sorry, not student institutions. Minority serving institutions, MSIs. And the reason that it was so helpful to do that is it allowed me to see a variety of different ways of doing reflection. And sitting with was something that a lot of my students talked about. And I found that that was really useful in my own research as well, in trying to do ethnographic work. It involves a lot of reflection. Right. Because we have to kind of sit with all of this data and come up with patterns of what's happening. Right. And come up with conclusions of that. So I really enjoyed learning from my participants and how they were doing reflection because it started to influence how I do reflection both as a teacher, but also as a researcher and most importantly, as a person. Right. As a mother, as a wife, as a daughter. Right. The different roles that I play, Reflections plays a role in all of those roles that are outside of the academy as well. And so I learned a lot from that.
- [26:03]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You take us in the book into how you did this process. Chapter two is called Feminist Methodologies for Researching Reflection and Motion in Writing Classrooms. And while in other parts of the book, you talk to us about what it is that you're doing, this is really where we get to see the nuts and bolts of it. You worked with, I think, three different institutions, all of them minority serving institutions. You had, in person, sit downs with people. You did surveys. You were sort of embedded in some classrooms in a way. You were invited in and you were there. You gathered data. Can you talk about the crafting of this and how you really came about this particular study?
- [26:46]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely. So, like I said, I found as a teacher, during teacher training, I realized that the way that I was doing reflection was not really mapping onto the kinds of reflection that I was seeing as Exemplary teaching practices. And as I went through my graduate career, I noticed that there was overwhelming scholarship about reflection was done such that the researcher would take a definition of reflection, typically from John Dewey, kind of like a John Dewey, and perspective of what reflection looked like, or Donald Scott's reflection, what reflection looked like. And taking that kind of perspective, perspective into where they were looking for reflection. So what I mean by that is they would say, here's the definition of reflection. The reflection might be something similar to like metacognition, so a kind of an awareness of your writerly choices. Or it might be similar to thinking about reflection and service of learning. Right. So I learned from this. Right. Experience were the kind of two most common strands of definitions that I saw. And they would look at reflection through that lens. So they'd say, this is what definition reflection means to me. And this is where I see it happening. So I see it happening in portfolio cover letters, or I see it happening in writers memos, for example. And then I'm going to tell you what reflection is doing in these situations. And the. The concern I had with that is, one, we're predetermining what reflection means, and then we're also predetermining what the genre is that we're going to look at to find evidence of reflection. But two, a lot of the students that they were talking to were what we would consider kind of a traditional college student at a pwi. So these were typically students that were multigeneration college grads in their family. Right? They were typically students that were coming from wealth and they were coming from a very western approach to reflection, much like a lot of the field. Right. And so to me, I was more interested in hearing from the students that we haven't heard from that frankly, we need to learn from. Right. And ask them, how is it that you're practicing reflection? What is it? What does it look like? What is it? How do you define it? How do you identify it? How do you practice it? And so I was really interested in doing that in a variety of different MSIs. I worked at three different kinds of MSIs. So Aanapisi, so Asian American, Native American, Pacific Islander surveying institution in the Pacific Northwest. And then I looked at classes at an HBCU in the south. That's a historically black college or university. And then I looked at an hsi, and that's a Hispanic serving institution. And I looked in those three different types of schools because I was really interested in learning from and with the teachers and students that were present in those institutions because, one, they're underrepresented in our research, but generally speaking, in writing studies, but especially within this question of reflection. And so I was interested in their lived experiences, and I wanted to use my role as a researcher as kind of like a recorder or an amplifier of what they're already doing that's so smart and brilliant and important ways of doing reflection, so that other teachers can be like, wow, this is the kind of reflection that might be possible within my classroom. I want to set myself up to invite students to do that work or for folks to kind of feel emboldened to think about asking their students, how do you practice reflection? And then making space for students to practice reflection in a way that feels authentic and true to them as opposed to performative, which is so often the case when we do reflective pedagogy.
- [31:32]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And you also, in chapter three, Reflection in Motion, Emerging Rhetorics of Reflection within the Writing Classroom, you take us into spaces and places where that reflection can happen. You noted journaling and scrapbooks as well as other places. And when I read that part, I just, I sat and I stopped for a bit because I mentioned earlier, I'm a historian. I look at ordinary women in 19th century America. And so I'm already talking about a marginalized group. Right. And so journaling and scrapbooks were incredibly important sites to sit with in the archives and get to know how people reflected and what they. What they had to say about themselves. And there was interesting pushback from various people in the academy about these being considered legitimate or serious sources. And yet they're so important. When we're looking at how people who are marginalized have spaces that they create for reflection, how was it received when you were talking about the importance of journaling and scrapbooks, were you finding that there was pushback about the legitimization?
- [32:44]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
It's really interesting. You know, I've been publishing about reflection and working on pieces about reflection before this book and during the process of writing this book and now after the book has come out. And I have found that either reviewers are really excited about learning about the different kind of literacies, I will say, of reflection that people bring in, whether that be scrapbooking or journaling like you just mentioned, or whether that be something like exercise or kind of that like embodied, like repetitive motion. Right. That we were talking about earlier in, in the podcast. And they're really excited about learning from and with the kind of student and teacher accounts about what reflection means and what it looks like for them. But I've also had People, when they're reviewing my work, be like, I want you to pin down what reflection means and then go study that. So very kind of more in the traditional way that reflection has been studied in my field. So I have seen both in terms of reviewer feedback and reader feedback in the work. But I think people are interested in thinking about different genres and different modalities that they can invite reflective pedagogy in part because they feel as if the ways that they have tried to invite it in have maybe fall like fallen flat. Right? So people that are more interested in the work and aren't as prone to delegitimize or say, no, that's not reflection to me. So therefore it's not reflection. Right. Are people that kind of come at reflective pedagogy with a sense of curiosity or come at pedagogy generally with a very, like, student centered approach, and they're interested in saying, okay, what are students doing or how do they want to learn? What are their past learning experiences? And how can I honor those and incorporate those home literacies or past literacies in the ways that I'm attempting to teach this subject or do this pedagogical, you know, activity, this goal that I
- [35:15]
Dr. Christina Gessler
have for this class that touches on one of the themes that you brought up in the book that I took notes on, which is that rhetorical contexts are haunted by past rhetorical contexts. Can you say more about that?
- [35:30]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Yeah, it's so interesting to me because I found that similar to how I was talking about, you know, I was an ice skater. And so I found that I tended to do reflecting like through. Through, like that repetitive motion.
- [35:46]
Dr. Christina Gessler
And.
- [35:46]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
And that was a past experience or past rhetorical situation that's haunting my current. Right. So what I mean by that is that that was also true of my students. So my focal students, right. So a focal student, for example, said that when her grandma was alive, she was gifted a journal to use, and she never really got into it, but once her grandmother passed, she said, I started journaling because it made me feel close to her. Right? And so that practice was something that she brought with her to college and to her writing classroom experience, such that when she was working on writing and trying to do the kind of reflective work required of writers, right. And of learners generally, she oftentimes wanted to do writing right. And reflect through that kind of personal writing. While another student, right. Might say, actually, I always talk to my parents. I spend a lot of time kind of thinking through papers at the dinner table, right? They. They talked about how as, as non college students, as emerging scholars, they would sit and they would talk to their parents about different things that they were learning in school or different experiences they had or something they were reading. And they would really do this kind of like, dynamic experience. And so the, that student was much more interested in student teacher conferences as a way of thinking about reflection in their writing classroom experience, or they pointed to conversations they were having outside of class, interestingly, also while eating, right. When they would go with a friend to talk about what was going on in their writing class and what their thinking process was for, for an upcoming project. Right. So I do think that it's haunted with our past experiences. That's a big, you know, way that I think about rhetorical haunting. But I also think about it in terms of how past experience, past situations might imbue things like how our, our feelings, right. Our, our affect, our emotions, what kind of experiences we had in the past with reflection are going to also shape whether or not we, we are primed to reflect like we were talking about earlier in the podcast. We can't just like, decide to be reflective. It's very difficult to do that. Right. It's a convergence of a lot of different things. So time, materials, emotions, the interpersonal dynamics. Right. All those things are important in how we're reflecting today. And all those factors have to line up to the ways that we've reflected in the past, too. So if we tend to reflect only when we have a lot of time. Right. Or if we tend to reflect like in crunch time, or if we tend to reflect with certain materials, like we have to handwrite but we can't type. Right. Or if we tend to reflect with kind of more of people that we trust, or actually we tend to reflect better when we're talking to complete strangers. Right. Those kinds of things all shape the ways that we read our current rhetorical situation and whether it's safe or whether it's available for reflective activity.
- [39:48]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You identified a hole in the research and in the field, and this book is really addressing that. But because you're doing something different, you're at points in the book talking to other accepted feelings in the field or other accepted practices in the field. And one is that writers reflecting on their own writing practices don't contribute to broader understanding of writing and literacy, and you push back against that. Can you talk to us about that?
- [40:21]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Yes, absolutely. I think that there's a way in which reflection or thinking about your thinking, which is a lot of people refer to as metacognition in my field. Those terms do get conflated a lot. But I think that can be discounted sometimes. That idea of reflection for awareness can be discounted sometimes at times as not valuable for learning about the. The writing process, or not valuable and learning about how to best serve our students. And so I think that using reflection in that way or kind of teeing up reflection to have that kind of rhetorical effect can be really, really useful for students to be able to articulate this is how I'm making the different choices that I'm doing as a writer. And that can allow them to think about what that means for them and their own writing process. Because, as we know, just like our academic journeys are twisty journey, so is writing, right? It can be very twisty journey. What we thought, what we think we're gonna do as a writer is not necessarily what ends up happening with our final project. And just because we had a successful writing experience last time, we did, you know, brainstorming or. But via outline does not mean an outline is always going to work for us, right? And so part of being a writer is being able to practice that reflective muscle so that we can make different choices if we kind of face writer's block or face some sort of adversity or challenge in the writing process. And so reflection can be really useful for helping us understand that with Plan
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Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
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Dr. Christina Gessler
Use as directed. You mentioned earlier that one of your seven majors that you had considered was women's and gender studies and sexuality studies. And a lot of your early foundational work at school in black feminist writing has continued to inform your practice and expand your ways of knowing and being. And you talk about one particular perspective that you learned called Mosaic. Can you talk about that?
- [43:14]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely. So that is a qualitative research approach and intersectional feminist perspective rooted in black feminist theory. Venus Evans Winters has an excellent book where she details this process. And it's basically allowing for a qualitative researcher to use a variety of data in ways that centers the the participants that you're studying and the research questions that you're studying without feeling like you can only draw from traditional ethnographic methods, right? Like traditional interview observation. And that allowed for me to think about the data as something that could be kind of pieced together in quite literally a mosaic, so that I could see a full picture of what was happening within reflection within the writing classroom. So it allowed me to be creative and what kind of materials I was gathering. In the first chapter, I talk about all the different ways that I gathered data, one of which would be through actually sitting through each of the classes. So I sat through all of the classes, was embedded in all of the classes that I was researching. I also did audio recording and video recording, and the. That was used through kind of a GoPro camera so that I could show my own perspective, because I wanted to center the fact that even though I was doing my best to amplify or be a spokesperson for the students and teachers that I was researching, I'm still a conduit of this information, right? I'm still piecing this together and analyzing it. And I wanted to. To acknowledge my role in that. So I have that I also had interviews and surveys and. But most interestingly, I feel like with a mosaic approach, I did a lot of genre analysis of different things that students brought in or teachers brought into the interviews as examples of the kinds of things that they did so as reflective activities. So for example, when I had the student that, that I was talking about earlier that tended to do a conversational kind of approach, she drew a map of what it looked like within the eating location that she tend tended to go to to talk to a friend about her upcoming work, and also of her teacher's office where she did student teacher conferences where she tended to talk about her projects. And so I. It allowed me some flexibility, right, to say, oh, I have another student, though, that was journaling and, and really elaborate mind maps. And that student brought those in, right? So different students brought in things. And it wasn't because I asked them to. They just were like, talking about something, and then I was like, oh, can I see that? Right? And so sometimes that included them drawing an image out so that I could kind of see what that would look like. Because, of course, research ethics, I'm not going to now go sit in the restaurant that the student is talking about. That's not ethical, right? But just so that I could kind of understand what it might look like, she would draw it out, right? Or another student would say, yeah, absolutely. Let me show you this mind map that I used to create this project, right? And this was an Example of reflection for me. Right. So it allowed the flexibility in what it looked like to gather data from my participants such that it was a more interactive and fluid experience.
- [47:22]
Dr. Christina Gessler
The list of the materials and how you gathered them is in Table 1 1. For listeners who want to find it in the book and the student who brought you the map of where she was having her reflective conversations, you'll learn more about her. That's autumn. And she's talked about early on in the book. Another technique that you used is something that you learned from thinker Sarah Ahmed, which is called using feminist ears. Can you talk to us about.
- [47:49]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely. So I thought that this was a really helpful way of thinking about what it means to be a listener when you're. When you identify as a feminist researcher, especially in an ethnographic experience, like an ethnographic research experience. Right. So feminist ears is a term that was coined by Sarah Ahmed. And it's basically when you're trying to observe with a critical stance such that you can understand both what is being said and what is not said. So what I mean by that is that sometimes, especially within a research setting, that is with first year students or students that have never been part of a research study and teachers that have never been part of a research study, there is always going to be kind of this research, a researcher participant kind of divide in which there's kind of different levels of comfortability of what they're willing to share or talk about. And it's important to respect those boundaries, of course, but it's also important to recognize our positionality. And so not only was I a researcher, but I'm a white researcher going into a predominantly minoritized population and saying, hey, can I learn from you? Right. And that can feel really voyeuristic and that can feel like I'm here to learn from you and then do nothing to return, like do nothing to help the community that I'm researching. Right. It can feel really unethical. And that was something that was really on my mind when I was designing this. I ultimately thought that amplifying our minoritized students voices and the teachers that teach our students in msis was really important work. And I have the resources as a researcher at an R1 that make it possible for me to do this research. Right. And so I wanted to use my positionality to amplify student voices and teachers at msis where there's not as much support for these kinds of really robust research projects that I have a smaller teaching load so I can accomplish. Right. So sitting in all of these classes took a tremendous amount of time. And so that only was made possible because I'm not teaching a three, three or a four, four words. Teaching three classes each semester or four classes or even sometimes five classes each semester, which is often true within msis. Right. A lot of the teacher researchers have a higher teaching load and can't do this kind of a research project just because of time constraints. Right. So one of the things that I thought about was adopting a feminist or ethical approach in terms of both how I was listening to my participants. So taking up these kinds of feminist ears and doing rhetorical listening or really trying to hear my participants and what they were trying to say and also not say. But also I wanted to be really careful about the way that I was thinking about reciprocity within this project. And so I was careful to think about both what I was offering students. So I was trying to monetarily compensate them when I was able to do that. And I was also trying to give them tutoring because I. If they wanted it. Right. Because I was basically a writing studies instructor sitting in their classroom every day. So it was kind of like having an embedded writer, writing center consultant.
- [52:01]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Right.
- [52:02]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
In some ways. Right. I knew everything about their course, so I offered that, and I also offered to the teachers that I'd be happy to work with them on any data that emerged from their classroom. If they wanted to co author or co work on any of the research, they would. I would be happy to do that with them. So I was really cognizant in the research design of. Of thinking about that. To be clear, the feminist ears part does not have to do with the reciprocity. But once I started talking about that, I realized that it kind of was part of this broader web of thinking about how can I do this work ethically, given my positionality as a white researcher moving into different MSIs around the
- [52:45]
Dr. Christina Gessler
country and talking about positionality. Your work is written and researched in English, and you talk about confronting how writing standards and grammar standards are white. And we get that early on. And it sounds like a lot of the pre work that you did before you came to this project, and so you introduce us to that, you name it. But one of the things that then would be intrinsically tied to that is if the writing standards are white and the grammar standards are white, and this means a particular type of the way that English is expected to be used. Otherwise people's grammar gets, you know, written up, you know, in the margins or circled, or students are corrected even while they're speaking in class. And in naming that out loud, then what is intrinsically tied to that is that racism is embedded in theory, pedagogy, course design. All is an unconscious bias. If you've gone through teaching programs to help people with their written, unspoken English, which you and I both have, one of the things that we're encouraged to do is flag that. And it's one of the things that I didn't do. I always encourage people to use authentic expression, but that requires then pushing back against the academy.
- [54:04]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Yes, yes, absolutely. And so that's why it's really interesting because some people might think, okay, you're coming from this, you know, English linguistics, dual major in undergrad. You see yourself as kind of positioning yourself as a feminist and anti racist scholar. And yet this book does not necessarily advocate for certain kinds of reflection to be practiced as a means of doing critical pedagogies. What I'm trying to do is hear what teachers and students are doing so that they can, you know, my readers can think about how they want to enact reflection, but what you just talked about made me think about like, reflection is so integral in any sort of critical language awareness. That was one of the reasons why I got interested in reflection in the first place, is because I identify as a critical pedagogue. I identify as a feminist and anti racist pedagogue who is really invested in getting students to think about. These are the choices that I'm making in my writing. This is what the effects are going to have on my rhetorical situation. And you know what, I might get some pushback, but I'm okay with that. Right? Or I might get some pushback. And actually I want to change this. And this is why. And you know, and I think that that is why reflection can be so powerful for students, especially when we welcome it in ways that feel authentic or feel true to the rhetorical hauntings that they have of what reflection looks like for them. Right. It's really difficult to help students be reflective or kind of practice that reflection muscle if we continuously ask them to reflect in ways that do not feel like ways that they have done it before. Right. And it, it's like, it doesn't feel. It feels more like a performance for the teacher or a performance for this particular assignment, rather than something that is truly reflective to them and worthwhile. Right. So that's why I think that it can be really, really helpful for those of us that want to do any critical language awareness or have students start to think about why they might bring their authentic voice into the classroom, or why they might rethink deep rooted ideologies that they have, why they might think about sexism or racism or xenophobia or different ways that we have experienced system systemic oppression in the academy. All that requires reflection, right? It all requires us to do that kind of critical consciousness kind of kind of work.
- [56:56]
Dr. Christina Gessler
You also push back on writing as product. One of the ways that we see that is when you're considering the types of materials that students are submitting, how they're doing their work, how they're having these reflective conversations with their professor, it necessitates a generous understanding of the rubric rather than a very traditional one. The traditional one, again, being embedded within conscious bias. That if we have a more generous understanding of the rubric, we see how the students are genuinely doing the work, engaging with it, doing something that's meaningful to them and that comes out of their own traditions, which then informs better who they are and what it is that they want to do. And so you talk about those things in the book. You also outline a number of ways we can understand reflection. One is reflection for introspection. Two is reflection for learning. Three is reflection for mindfulness. Four is reflection for awareness. You also invite us again and again to understand that reflection takes time. Rather than being a product or something that we can create, that it's a process and it's going to take time. In chapter five, which is called Reflection Research, Reflective Pedagogy, where do we go from here? You talk about how you want to inspire change and the pedagogical implications of your work. Work. We're starting to get to the end of our time together, and I want to give you an opportunity to talk about some of the important takeaways from chapter five.
- [58:19]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, it's. It's really important to me that we think about the ways that we can invite students to tell us how they're doing reflective work. So when I think about, you know, what to take away from this, that is my biggest takeaway, which is, hey, what are your students actually doing? How are they defining and practicing and identifying reflection? And how may or may not those practices of reflection map onto the way that you define reflection that you're trying to cue for reflection from students to take up, and whether or not they're actually finding that to be meaningful or useful. One of the most important things about that is actually finding both points of, you know, connection, but also where there's tension or moments where there's, you know, disagreement. Right. Because I think that one of the things that was so interesting about my findings is that students are willing to try on other definitions of reflection that do not meet their own. So they are willing to do that. Now, whether or not they feel as if that is actually, you know, something they want to continue to do or not, that is dependent, of course, on. On student. And, you know, the. The different ways that their learning styles are, or, you know, the. The other kind of competing factors within your pedagogy. But they are willing to hear other definitions and at least try them on. And so I feel like as instructors, we can also hear their definitions and try some of theirs on. Right. And so seeing this kind of moment of mapping and listening to each other and doing that kind of rhetorical listening of, like, what is said, what is not being said, what are some genres that we can imagine mapping onto the ways that they're already thinking reflection might work for them, but also what are some new ones that they might imagine given some new definitions that they could try out, too, to see the different ways that reflection might work for different rhetorical purposes. Like you say, I identify awareness, perspective, introduction, et cetera. But those are probably not all the rhetorical effects that your students might name and you might learn that they find reflection doing different kinds of rhetorical work that I haven't found yet. Right. Or I didn't find within these. My case studies here. And so making space for those so that you can learn with them and help. Help broaden both what they might do for reflection within your class, but also what you might do once you kind of see the benefits and limitations of doing that kind of definition or trying on their definition yourself and your pedagogy to see. See what that emerges for you as a teacher, too. So I think that is my biggest takeaway from chapter five.
- [61:43]
Dr. Christina Gessler
It seems throughout the book, one of the outcomes is that these practices and this type of reflection that the teachers can use to understand why they're assigning what they're doing and what their expectations are for reflective practices in the classroom is that it liberates the teacher student power dynamic in a number of ways.
- [62:05]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Yes, absolutely. And I try to. I try to think about the ways in which the dynamics that we have as educators, as researchers might be redistributed or might be thought of differently if we start to think about students as authors, right. As writers who are knowledgeable in this practice of reflection, because it is something that we are always already doing before we enter the classroom, and so on. In the first chapter in page 21, I kind of tried to map out what, like the space for that. Right. And thinking about that reflection is always happening. It did. It's, it's always an entanglement or like it's always a distributed agency of how time and current events, materials affects emotions, dispositions, past experiences, interpersonal relationships, and so much more play a role in shaping reflective activity. And so I think that we can really start to think about how our students can teach us what it might mean to do reflective work if we're willing to listen to them and hear how that distributed agency is working for them.
- [63:38]
Dr. Christina Gessler
What do you hope this episode sparks for listeners?
- [63:41]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
Oh, that's a beautiful question. You know, I would say I I hope this gets you excited about being reflective about your own kind of incorporation of reflection in your pedagogy. I think that I'm hopeful that people are interested in thinking about what it is that they currently do and then opening up that conversation with their students to hear about how they're doing reflection outside of class and then kind of thinking or rethinking about how they might shift their pedagogy to invite or cue for different kinds of reflection. I think that's my hope here.
- [64:29]
Dr. Christina Gessler
Thank you so much for being here today, Professor Jacqueline Fiskes, Canada and sharing from your book Reflection In Reimagining Reflection in the Writing Classroom, you've been listening to the academic life. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler inviting you to please join us again.
- [64:57]
Dr. Jacqueline Fiskes Canaday
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