From the foundational writing course MAIS 606: Academic Writing for Graduate Students, I included a critical review of Fernsten and Reda’s article “Helping Students Meet the Challenges of Academic Writing.” This article really jumped out at me because it encourages educators to use self-reflective exercises in their classrooms, and I have been doing this type of personal work for many years now. Bringing self-reflection into the classroom appealed to me, and I wanted to learn more about the process, working as an educator myself.

               These self-reflective exercises ask questions like What have people said about your writing? and When was writing particularly successful for you? While answering these questions, students are asked to redefine themselves as writers and identify which areas of their writing are the sources of their conflict and challenge. Instead of being hyper-focused on grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation, students are asked to look more internally to find the solutions to increase their writing capabilities.

               The process of asking ourselves questions that make us ponder something we are struggling with is a method of thinking outside of our limitations and finding new answers to our questions. For example, when we struggle with our writing, self-reflective questions can push us to consider external factors like social marginalization, academic privilege, and multilingual considerations instead of focusing on internal judgments like not being good enough, a lack of skill, or a lack of intelligence. When we can stop blaming ourselves for our perceived failures and start focusing on reasons that are impermanent and changeable, then change can come much more easily.

               After researching and writing this paper on Fernsten and Reda’s article, I felt ready to start using more self-reflective exercises in my own classroom with my students. However, I also determined that the authors took the promise of self-reflective exercises a bit too far: it should be a strong, adjacent part of our student’s experience and not a core process.  The reality is that universities demand extremely high levels of writing, and students must focus on vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, and paragraph structure if they want to find success at the university level. Being a tutor myself, I feel strongly that more grade-level students need access to tutoring: it feels impossible that they can learn everything they need to learn while sitting in a room of forty or fifty students.

               The process of writing this paper was very interdisciplinary for me. I had to consider socio-political and economic factors alongside culture and community. Many families cannot afford to hire tutors outside of the public school system, and some students need to work while they are still in high school and trying to complete their assignments on time. For some students, there are language barriers to consider. Even when they speak English fluently, if it isn’t their first language, there may still be context and framing issues. I also considered factors such as mental, emotional, and spiritual health: asking these deeply personal questions can bring up other issues that need to be processed.  

               One of the greatest impediments to including self-reflective exercises in the classroom may be the teachers themselves. They will need to be well-versed in the subject and have some personal experience with the exercises. Teachers will need to be self-aware enough to help the students learn from their answers and find the big takeaways from their self-reflective process.

               Finally, if teachers are not on board with teaching exercises that are not traditionally academic or pedagogical, they won’t be of great service to their students. Educators will need to think outside of the box and choose to partake in something that has the potential to really help their students with their self-confidence and self-judgement while helping to remove the students’ barriers to successful writing.