During the course of this semester, you will write several reflective essays. The first one will respond to your process of indexing an original oral history interview with a peer.  Here are some ways of thinking about the reflective essay to help you write an excellent one.  Remember, they are relatively short, about 750-1000 words.

Reflective Essay

When you create an index, you become the middle person who creates a way for the interview to be discovered and found by a broader public.  You have now gone through this process with a peer.  Consequently, your team made important interpretive choices when you decided where to create index points and how to summarize interview content.  The reflective essay is an opportunity for you to explain how you and your partner became that middle person when you created the index – what choices you had to make and why you made them. [ As a peer reviewer of someone else’s reflective essay, you aim to provide constructive feedback on whether they’ve explained this thinking and writing process well.]

A strong reflective essay makes an argument about what the student learned from the process of indexing/writing the summary. A very strong essay connects the choices the student made to larger questions about information access and/or Jewish, Kentucky history, 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 difficulty of summary 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 a case for 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 indexing, anecdotes about how they negotiated decisions with their peers), and  they quote from and/or include specific anecdotal examples from their experience of indexing/summarizing 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 interpretation and research through indexing back to what they’re learning about research and interpretation in other classes? Feel free to offer sentence level feedback about syntax, style, and general proofreading, but make sure you answer the larger questions above first.

Indexing Feedback 
Upon first glance, does looking at the list of segment titles of all the index points give you an overall sense of what the interview is about? If yes, describe what that impression is. If not, why not?  Do the titles do an appropriate job of mapping content to general concepts and subjects?

Is the number of index points appropriate for the length of the interview? (Remember Dr. Boyd and the Nunn Center recommend 12-15 index points per hour of interview time). Do the time stamps reflect appropriate lengths for the segments (no more than 5-7 minutes each)?

Do the titles for the index points follow the Nunn Center’s conventions?

Are each of the requisite fields filled out appropriately for each index point, following the Nunn Center’s conventions?

Do they include an accurate partial transcript, a useful segment synopsis, descriptive

keywords, GPS coordinates?

Is the segment synopsis detailed enough?  (It should be more than one sentence).

If there isn’t a GPS coordinate filled in for a segment, suggest an appropriate way to include one.

Do the keywords seem appropriate?  Are ideas missing that could be provided in the keywords?

Summary
The overall interview summary should be 200-250 words long. Does the summary give you a good sense of what the interview is about? Does it capture the essence of the interview? Is it too detailed? Not detailed enough?  What else did you hope to learn about the interview from the summary? What information is included in the index but not reflected in the summary?