Excerpts from On Reflection: The Role of Logs and Journals in Service-Learning Courses
Chris M. Anson,
from Writing in the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-Learning in Composition
American Association For Higher Education

Theories of service-learning value reflection for helping to create the connection between academic coursework and the immediate social, political, and interpersonal experiences of community-based activities. Reflection is supposed to encourage a movement between observation and intellectual analysis or consciousness-raising, and conversely to apply abstract concepts (such as citizenship, public ethics, or social justice) to contexts beyond the classroom.

. . .Service learning also pressures us to reexamine the functions of journal writing. The use of journals in classroom instruction often borrows, sometimes tacitly, from three traditions (Anson and Beach, 1995). The expressivist tradition, with roots in 19th-century romanticism and the rugged individualism of American pragmatism, emphasizes the expression of an individual voice and the development of identity and self-awareness of an individual voice and the development of identity and self-awareness. In writing classrooms, this tradition takes the form of journals that exist for their own sake--sites for experimentation and the free expression of ideas. The scientific observation log, exemplars being Darwin, Edison, or Mead has affinities with the expressivist journal in its emphasis on associative, exploratory writing, but it has developed into a more clinical space for jotting down empirical data from close observation. This tradition often appears in writing classes where students are asked to record sensory data, perhaps for later use in a formal paper. The prewriting journal, with antecedents in the world of art and creative writing, is a repository of ideas, musings, doodling, free writing, and other kinds of brain storming preliminary to a formal paper. The journal becomes a place for blueprints or rehearsals of refined writing. In contrast to the expressivist journal, it appears immediately useful, always looking ahead to a finished product. .

"The point of reflection is, in some ways, focused inward: What does this mean to me? How do I make sense of it? What am I going to do with what I think or feel?"

. . .Dewey, in what has become for many scholars the genesis of the concept of reflection, describes reflective thinking as a "special kind of intellectual activity different from other kinds of thinking; it begins with a question, hypothesis, or 'perplexity' and leads a person to an inquiry to resolve it. Experience, relevant knowledge, and reasoning ability are all important in this activity. In contrast to routine or impulsive thinking, reflective thinking, according to Dewey, is disciplined and orderly." Reverberating with sis on intellectual puzzling, most definitions of reflection stress the process of learning through experience. Reflection involves accommodating the unfamiliar into the familiar in an effort to make sense out of what is personally observed or experienced. Morton (1989) adds that "the point of reflection is, in some ways, focused inward: What does this mean to me? How do I make sense of it? What am I going to do with what I think or feel?. . .I believe the most important outcome of reflection is that participants can answer the question, 'What has your experience taught you about yourself.

References:
Anson, C.M. and R. Beach. (1995). Journals in the Classroom, Writing to Learn, Norwood, MA: Christopher Gordon. Morton, K. (1989). "First Steps in Doing a Reflection Component." In Digging Deep: A Guidebook for Developing a Campus Service-Learning Initiative in Your City, State, or Region, edited by M Langseth, Roseville, MN: NYLC