Literature for the North Woods Project: Reflective Essay

To capture and preserve the hard work, creative process, and learning that surround and inform your Literature for the North Woods Project, each of you will write a reflective essay that will accompany the final version of your project.

The act of reflecting, in its simplest form, is an act of looking back, and clearly you will want to engage in that retrospective task in your Reflective Essay, recounting the choices you made, the processes you followed, the successes and frustrations you encountered. Reflection, however, extends more deeply beyond the narrative. Reflection involves thoughtful, analytical, creative, and deep (re)consideration. In addition to addressing the "what" and "how" of your project, it also and more importantly engages the "why."

Your Reflective Essay is a way of making visible the invisible of your project. These elements may include how the personal shaped your project or how academic experiences outside our class influenced your project. As the writer Henry James put it, each piece of writing has two dimensions: the donee and the execution. The donee is the vision in the writer's mind; the execution is the product that emerges. For a variety of reasons, donee does not always match the execution. Sometimes that mismatch is motivation for revision and reengagement; other times, it is the healthy result of creative thought. And yes, sometimes it is due to limitations of time, space, funding, and, let's face it, ability. Your Reflective Essay is a space to dwell on the donee and execution of your project: what was the initial vision? did that vision evolve over the course of the semester? how so? why? what is the connection to the execution? what of the vision might not be readily apparent to the viewer? does this matter?

More specifically, here are some questions you might want to consider when composing your Reflective essay:

What were your goals for this project? How did they change? How were they realized?

Why did you choose the particular focus of your project?

Which of our readings--implicitly or explicitly--came to bear on your project? Why?

How did creating your project allow you or require you to revisit or re-engage in the texts? What did you discover?

How did you consciously transpose what you found in the literature to your new medium? What was this process like?

What medium did you choose to present your project? Why? What strengths does this medium bring to the project? What limitations did it confront you with?

How did creating the Toolkit Snapshots, reading others' ideas and writing and receiving peer feedback assist you in developing your project?

How did your project affect your awareness, perceptions, and/or appreciation of the North Woods?

 

In addition to the KEEP Toolkit Snapshots which we will be making and commenting upon throughout the semester, as many artists do, you may want to keep a notebook to record your ideas as they occur and then use this notebook as a resource for writing your Reflective Essay, rather than having to re-imagine your thoughts.

You may compose your Reflective Essay as either a traditional paper or as a KEEP ToolKit Snapshot (addressing the same materials) of your own design.