WRD/ENG 401: HIS 351: “Composing Oral History”
Professor Fernheimer
Spring 2019
Research in education and pedagogy demonstrates that reflecting on what we do helps us to learn more about our process and ourselves as learners. During the course of this semester, you will write three reflective essays. The first one will respond to your process of indexing an original oral history interview with a peer. The second will reflect on your process of creating an original oral history interview protocol, conducting an original oral history with a peer, and performing research for the annotated bibliography. The third will reflect on your learning process for the semester as whole. Here are some ways of thinking about the reflective essays to help you write an excellent one. Remember, they are relatively short, about 750-1000 words.
Reflective Essay 1: Indexing due Tues. Feb. 12
When you create an index, you become the middle person who creates a way for the interview to be discovered and found by a broader public. You have now gone through this process with a peer. Consequently, your team made important interpretive choices when you decided where to create index points and how to summarize interview content. The reflective essay is an opportunity for you to explain how you and your partner became that middle person when you created the index – what choices you had to make and why you made them. [ Note: As a peer reviewer of someone else’s reflective essay, you aim to provide constructive feedback on whether they’ve explained this thinking and writing process well.]
A strong reflective essay makes an argument about what the student learned from the process of indexing/writing the summary. A very strong essay connects the choices the student made to larger questions about information access and/or Jewish, Kentucky, or American history and culture. Excellent reflective essays explain and reflect on why you make the choices you do and how you navigated these choices with your peer, while also connecting what you’ve learned about information access, scholarly interpretation, and the difficulty of summary to the ethical and research questions a student is exploring in other classes or his or her home discipline. You read the essay “On Being a Documentarian” by Dr. Moosnick excerpted from her published work Voices of Audacity and Accommodation. Consider this chapter a model for exemplary self-reflection.
Excellent reflective essays make a case for what the student has learned, and why this learning is important. Students support their claims about their own learning with evidence (either specific examples of the choices they made in indexing, anecdotes about how they negotiated decisions with their peers), and they quote from and/or include specific anecdotal examples from their experience of indexing/summarizing to support their claim. What is most important in a self-reflection essay is admittedly reflection (the ability to look at one’s actions with a critical eye) and insight. Excellent essays connect what the students learn about interpretation and research through indexing back to what they’re learning about research and interpretation in other classes? Feel free to offer sentence level feedback about syntax, style, and general proofreading, but make sure you answer the larger questions above first.
Note: Reflective essays will be turned in as shared Googledocs (with links posted to the appropriately labeled discussion forum on Canvas) and in hard copy.