Reflective Essay Assignment

On Monday, December 13 by MIDNIGHT,  I’d like to collect from you (via email) a blog portfolio and a reflective essay. Please submit:

1. A numbered list of all of your blog posts, with titles and dates of the post. (example: #1, “This is the Beginning,” 8/30)
2. a numbered list of all of your comments with the title of the post on which you commented, the name of the person’s blog to whom it was posted, and the date.  (example: #2, “Woman Warrior,” Lisa’s blog, 8/30
3. A short (4-6 page) reflective essay based on your posts and comments.

REFLECTIVE ESSAY: Your reflective essay assignment is designed to surface and articulate what you’ve learned over the course of the semester by looking back on and analyzing your own writing during this time. Your essay should answer one of two questions (but NOT BOTH):

What important practices have I developed as a reader, or writer, or thinker (or some combination of two of these) over the course of the semester?

OR

What unique skills and qualities does the reader/writer/literary type (whichever of these you would call yourself) activate to come to a sophisticated understanding of  the “post racial” moment?  [Remember that Susan Koshy makes the case for the Humanities scholar at this moment in history.  So, how have your own experiences created a model for navigating the post-racial period?]

HOW TO ANSWER THE QUESTION: you should use the writing that you’ve done over the course of the semester—I’m particularly interested in your blog posts and comments, but your drafts, your expertise projects, etc. are fair game. With the above question in mind, read back over your writing and locate particular sentences and passages that attest to your learning. In your paper, you’ll quote these and analyze them. In what ways do they show what and how your ideas have changed? What terms, concepts, and phrases provide evidence of the complex ways that your thinking has progressed and shifted over the course of the semester? How do they provide evidence that you can use to answer the questions above? Essentially, you’re going to “close read” your own writing for evidence of how you’ve come to terms with the ideas we’ve discussed in class. I’m looking for a deep engagement with your own writing here.

PLEASE INCLUDE THE FOLLOWING:

1. an introduction that contextualizes your main idea(s).
2. an argument about either a) where you are now and how you got there, with reference to particular terms, experiences, actions, skills, etc. that you see yourself working with throughout the course of the semester; OR b) an argument about the particular skills and qualities that you’ve acquired, and how they’re representative of what someone would need to engage with literature in the “post-racial moment.”
3. the “I” voice (I don’t know how you’d do it otherwise!).
4. a coherent structure/approach. You may feel free to use a chronological approach (ex., “when I first started this class, I thought Asian American literature was ____. My first blog post contains this comment: “______.” Here, you can see the ways that I was dedicated to x idea. All I could associate with that x idea was___. In a blog post three weeks later, however, there is a marked shift in my language and tone. “______.”). You may also choose a different kind of structure if it makes sense to you (you could arrange it by theme: “these three quotes show the ways that my thinking changed from x to y about the structures of heterogeneity as a form of analysis.” “These two show the ways that I am a writer that needs a number of drafts to shape a complicated argument”.)