Reflective Essay 2: Reflecting on Collaborative Interviewing and Research (5% of overall grade)

When you work with a peer to interview someone else,  your team helps make someone else’s story part of the historical record. You identify and select an interviewee based on research questions you hope to illuminate or stories you hope to preserve. Your team becomes the vehicle through which this person’s story becomes part of the public record. You have now gone through this process with a peer.  Consequently, your team made important interpretive choices about how to select the interviewee, how to tailor the protocol template, how to conduct the interview—when to follow-up, when to follow the interviewee’s lead, when to return to an unanswered question. This reflective essay is an opportunity for you to explain how you and your partner made the choices you did, how you negotiated your collaboration with one another as well as with Drs. Fernheimer and Goldstein– what choices you had to make and why you made them. What did this project help you learn about scheduling, professional communication, interviewing, oral history, and Jewish /Kentucky history, culture, customs? What went well, and what, if given the chance would you wish to do differently, and most important—why?

A strong reflective essay makes an argument about what the student learned from the process of scheduling, creating the protocol, conducting the interview and the research for the annotated bibliography. A very strong essay connects the choices the student made to larger questions about information access and/or Jewish, Kentucky, or American history and culture. Excellent reflective essays explain and reflect on why you make the choices you do and how you navigated these choices with your peer, while also connecting what you’ve learned about information access, scholarly interpretation, and the challenges of research to the ethical and research questions a student is exploring in other classes or his or her home discipline.  You read the essay “On Being a Documentarian” by Dr. Moosnick excerpted from her published work Voices of Audacity and Accommodation. Consider this chapter a model for exemplary self-reflection.

Excellent reflective essays make an argument about what the student has learned and why this learning is important. Students support their claims about their own learning with evidence (either specific examples of the choices they made in crafting the protocol, identifying/locating/synthesizing sources, anecdotes about how they negotiated decisions with their peers), and  they quote from and/or include specific anecdotal examples from their experience of interviewing/researching to support their claim. What is most important in a self-reflection essay is admittedly reflection (the ability to look at one’s actions with a critical eye) and  insight. Excellent essays connect what the students  learn about interviewing, interpretation, and research through indexing back to what they’re learning about research and interpretation in other classes.