1 Reflection and the Self

When I was a kid I had several diaries tucked between the many books on my shelf, diaries in which I aspired to write each day. The thought of having a record of my life was so romantic and quaint to me, probably because I was an enthusiastic reader of historical fiction novels in which the heroine wrote daily diary entries telling the story of her riveting life. Unfortunately, I didn’t like to journal — it didn’t come naturally to me and it wasn’t something I felt compelled to do, even though I loved the idea of doing so. All told, I can find only a handful of diary entries from my entire life up until January 2021, at which point I finally made a commitment to myself — at age 30 — to try to journal each morning as a method of managing anxiety. I always wanted to be the person who kept meticulous records of my life and thoughts, but it was never something I managed to habituate until my therapist prescribed it as a tool to work out my anxieties, as a way to be honest with myself about what I am fretting over and why. What I’ve come to find about the benefits of journaling, which is an inherently reflective genre of writing, is that it forces you to pause and consider what you’ve recently done, learned, and experienced and what it means to you — why it matters to who you are.

Reflective writing begins as a recounting of what has occurred and quickly turns into your own rich and insightful analysis of what the event means within its larger context. For example, when I journal about a conflict with a family member, I begin by reflecting on what occurred and then naturally transition into analyzing why the conflict happened and why it matters to my understanding of myself and my family member. The act of journaling allows me to move past the anxiety cycle about the interaction because it provides me with a tool to describe exactly what happened, how it made me feel, and what the conflict means within the larger context of my relationship to that person. Reflecting with purpose gives me agency: it transforms me into an active analyzer of my life — rather than a mere passive participant.

This agency that reflection affords is precisely what makes it such an important learning tool and why it is an integral part of your General Education at UA: reflecting on your learning enables you to explain to yourself what you learned and how you learned it. In the same way, reflection allows you to think about and become aware of your own thinking, also known as “metacognition.” As you reflect on your learning, you are giving yourself an exam of your own making: you are testing your ability to both teach yourself and internalize the ways of thinking, knowing, and doing that you are taught in a given course. When you engage in sustained and purposeful reflection about your learning, you simultaneously take on the role of student and teacher and compose proofs of what you know and how you know it.

As fate would have it, my fraught childhood relationship with journaling came full circle when I went to college. My liberal arts college required students to write a reflection at the end of each course as well as a summative reflection throughout our college career, a document they required us to submit before graduating. Therefore, a great deal of my time in college was spent reflecting on what I learned, how I learned it, and what that learning meant within the context of my education and growing academic interests. Because of this, I have awkward records of my thinking process and its ebbs and flows from the age of 19 to 23. In these clunky reflections I can see my understanding of concepts developing but I can also see my knowledge of myself and my direction and place in the world evolving. When I reflected on my learning by writing ungainly sentences like, “As I researched Herman Melville I learned how to use the library and also how to close read a critical text effectively by paying attention to what the language is doing” I also came to a richer understanding about my own passion for humanities research and how it taught me about the history of humanistic thought — no pretty prose required. Reflecting on my learning allowed me to make connections between courses and draw conclusions about my own academic interests. I was able to trace my thinking in order to find common threads that pointed to my particular academic passions and personal aspirations. Rather than finding myself adrift in an ocean of diverse content from my many courses, reflective writing afforded me the ability to find connections between ideas and to identify patterns in what matters to me.

Now, as my PhD is nearly complete, the reflective writing I am doing right now — as I write this! — takes on new meaning. This very act of reflection has enabled me to see the connection between my failure to keep a diary as a kid, my compulsory regular reflection in college, and my voluntary daily journaling as an adult: it has all been part of a larger process of becoming, and creating, who I am. My morning journaling is something I have come to look forward to, something I wake up excited to do (well, at least most of the time). I think this is because I know it is my fresh opportunity to make sense of my anxieties, to give myself the benefit of my own patient, listening ear. My kid-self would be proud of how far I have come in getting comfortable dialoguing with myself — and I think my college-self would be, too. In fact, I think that the act of reflecting — whether in a personal journal or for your Gen Ed classes — is a gift you give your past and future selves: it provides you with a narrative of who you have been, who you are, and who you will become.

About the author

name: Sovay M. Hansen

Sovay Muriel Hansen is Assistant Professor of Practice with the General Education program and the W.A. Franke Honors College at UA and is an affiliated faculty with the Department of German Studies. She earned a PhD in English and German Studies and her interdisciplinary research investigates the way material culture and female desire commingle in British and German modern novels. In addition to editing Wildcat Perspectives and Wildcat Reflections for the Office of General Education, Sovay teaches UNIV 101/301 and has also taught first-year English courses, for which she has won teaching awards. Sovay grew up near the Rillito River in Tucson, went to college in the mossy forest of the Pacific Northwest, and lived on the canal in Berlin, Germany for a time. Sovay enjoys truly terrible and quality period dramas alike, cooking overly complicated dishes, attending art events, hiking, and stressing over the small things.

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