Writing into Awareness: How Metacognitive Awareness Can Be Encouraged Through Contemplative Teaching Practices

Abstract

According to a growing body of research, fostering a metacognitive awareness of the writing process is integral to the development of strong writers. Writing scholars (e.g., Driscoll & Wells, 2012; Yancey, Robertson, & Taczac, 2014; Gorzelsky, Driscoll, Pazcek, Jones, & Hayes, 2017) suggest that developing this awareness can improve rhetorical awareness and transfer of writing knowledge across disciplinary contexts. Many of these scholars also suggest that metacognitive awareness can be fostered through reflective (and—I argue—contemplative) writing practices. Informed by this research—as well as scholarship from the burgeoning field of contemplative pedagogy—I designed and taught an upper-division writing course at the University of Arizona (during the fall of 2014) titled “Writing Into Awareness.” Students in this class (who hailed from a variety of disciplines across the arts and sciences) were encouraged to engage in contemplative writing practices in order to explore what Parker Palmer (1998) refers to as the “inner landscape,” while also being mindful of the external expectations placed on a particular writing task. This essay argues that contemplative writing—as distinct from reflective writing—fosters simultaneous awareness of the internal and external factors at work in the writing process. In this course, such simultaneous awareness of author and audience developed students’ meta-awareness, thereby improving transfer. Metacognition & Transfer in the Writing Class When I try to explain what “metacognition” means to my students, I usually start by giving them the simplest definition I have ever come across—I tell them metacognition is “thinking about thinking.” Eventually, we begin to unpack and then complicate this definition a little bit more. Cognitive psychologist John H. Flavell (1976), for example, describes metacognition as “one’s knowledge concerning one’s own cognitive processes and products” (p. 232). Developing this further, we discuss what this concept means for learners in general, and writing students in particular. Educational psychologist Barry Zimmerman has linked metacognitive awareness to self-regulated learning (1986), and says that selfregulated learners are: metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process. Metacognitively, self-regulated learners are persons who plan, organize, self-instruct, self-monitor, and self-evaluate at various stages during the learning process. (p. 308) Writing Into Awareness 51 While this definition usually necessitates a brief discussion about why monitoring and managing one’s own learning is a desirable goal, it also helps students better understand why metacognition is important, and why all of us—students and teachers—should strive for a learning environment that fosters metacognition. In short, metacognitive awareness allows us to recognize where we are succeeding as learners, where we need to work harder, and how we can go about achieving our goals. Recently, writing scholars have added to the conversation on metacognition and learning by arguing that fostering a metacognitive awareness of the writing process is integral to the development of strong writers. These scholars suggest that the development of metacognitive awareness not only helps to improve writing motivation and self-regulation, but also improves emotional management, rhetorical awareness, and—perhaps most notably—the transfer of writing knowledge to other contexts (Nowacek, 2011; Driscoll & Wells, 2012; Yancey, Robertson, & Taczak, 2014; Driscoll & Powell, 2016; Gorzelsky, Driscoll, Paszek, Jones, & Hayes, 2017; Moore & Bass, 2017). Much of this recent research on metacognition and writing transfer relies on the idea that helping students develop a meta-awareness of genre knowledge, as well as the rhetorical moves or choices they make, will allow their writing knowledge to transfer. As Jessie Moore and Randall Bass (2017) note, university programs can “teach for transfer” by: constructing writing curricula and classes that focus on the study and practice of rhetorically based concepts (e.g., genre, purpose, and audience) that prepare students to analyze expectations for writing and learning within specific concepts, asking students to engage in activities that foster the development of metacognitive awareness, and explicitly modeling transfer-focused thinking. (p.7) Students who are able to analyze the rhetorical situation of a writing task, ascertain the expectations within a given situation or genre, and then reflect on the choices they made in order to meet those expectations are more likely to be able to repeat those steps for a different writing task, a different college course, or outside of academia all together.1 Acknowledging that there is a correlation between the development of metacognitive awareness and writing transfer, and knowing how to best develop pedagogies that foster this kind of awareness, however, are two different things. Nevertheless, many scholars do seem to be in agreement that providing students with opportunities for reflection and reflective writing positively impact their ability to be metacognitively aware. For example, Kathleen B. Yancey, (1998; Yancey et al., 2014) and Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle (2007) have long touted the importance of providing students with opportunities for formal and informal reflection on their writing and writing processes. Basically, these scholars suggest that reflection is a dialectical process that allows students to ascertain whether or not they are achieving the goals they have set for themselves, and devise strategies that may help them better reach their goals in the future (Yancey, 1998, p. 6). Others like Danielle LaVaque-Manty and E. Margaret Evans (2013) suggest that students should be engaged in planning, monitoring, and evaluation activities throughout the entire course to help make these metacognitive concepts explicit to them. For example, one of their activities asks students to type “meta-comments” on their rough drafts before they submit them for peer review. Similarly, E. Ashley Hall, Jane Danielowicz, and Jennifer Ware (2013) suggest that students should utilize a detailed design plan to “achieve prolonged metacognition, or systematic thinking, about composing decisions” (p. 147). Whether engaging in activities like these—or others like outlining, reverse outlining, reflective journaling, peer conferencing, writing center visits, etc.—writing scholars agree that reflection is key to metacognition. The close relationship between reflection and metacognition may beg the question: is metacognition, in a functional sense, just reflection? Naomi Silver (2013) addresses the conflation of these two terms by educators, and suggests that reflection is not necessarily synonymous with metacognition, rather it is a practice that leads to the development of metacognitive awareness. This practice is often introduced and