Writing to Reflect

Reflective Practitioners and Transfer

The idea of a “reflective practitioner” was developed by Donald Alan Schön, culminating in his book, The Reflective Practioner (1983). His early research and writing on reflective practitioners pioneered an entire approach to learning, especially in writing programs, in part because it clearly demonstrates the link between theories of cognition and the importance of certain writing practices. Kara Taczak and Liane Robertson define a reflective practitioner as

[s]omeone who is continually exposed to different writing situations and develops, through those situations, a repertoire of knowledge that can be integrated and repurposed. This characterization allows for reflection as a theory, as a practice, and as a means for encouraging transfer.

If a reflective practitioner learns to re-purpose certain kinds of knowledge for other contexts, this kind of “learning-to-learn” strategy can be distinguished from the default form of learning that many courses encourage. When students commonly prepare for and eventually complete an assignment, they view the prompt as a set of prescriptions that explain how to succeed in that particular task within the course. A “reflective” assignment, however, will explicitly encourage a student to think beyond a certain part of the course, linking it with other units, with other courses the student may be taking, and ultimately with highly disparate contexts and environments. Truly reflective assignments ask students to bridge academic and non-academic situations.

But where does this sort of transfer begin?