Taylor Dilday

RC 2001

Reflective Introduction

April 28, 2020

I want to start my reflection by talking about my discourse community, audience, and

other key points that affected my writing in each of the assignments. My discourse community is

special education and refers to people who have similar beliefs, knowledge, values, and share a

certain type of language within the field of special education. This field consists mostly of

special education professors, teachers, professionals who work alongside special educators, and

student teachers such as myself, and sometimes even parents of students with disabilities. My

intended audience throughout the semester targets people who may have little to no knowledge

about special education, its implications in the lives of students with disabilities and the school

system, and issues surrounding it, such as inclusion. I feel that throughout the course of the

semester I was successful at making content specific to my topic and to my intended audience in

most of the assignments.

Major Issues Project:

One thing I think I have grappled with throughout this semester in my writing is the

organization of my ideas. I seem to struggle with this when writing papers, such as the Major

Issues Project, and often get feedback on this in other classes as well when it comes to my

writing. I really never see my writing as not flowing well and not being properly organized, but

others often think I struggle with it. However, I am really good at finding content and evidence

that supports most of the points I make and the concept is good overall. I am also fairly good

with minor details such as spelling and grammar and never really receive any feedback or
criticism in these areas. I personally chose not to rearrange any paragraphs because I felt that

once I added a few things that were missing in the beginning of my Major Issues paper, that it

would fix that problem. I didn’t want to rearrange any paragraphs because I was afraid when I

read back over it, it wouldn’t make any sense to me and would feel awkward and it would be a

mess. I made a better topic sentence to explain the point of one of my paragraphs that seemed to

be problematic. I also went back to my first paragraph and paraphrased the law regarding the

“least restrictive environment” so that it could be more easily understood by my audience,

considering that I expected the audience to have little to no knowledge of the topic. I also started

the second paragraph by taking a stance on inclusion and the reasons I felt it still needed to

change, regardless of the progress that has been made thus far.

I really wanted to point out that even though you’ve done a good thing and it seems to be

working for some people, you can always improve it and make it better so that it can become

accessible to everyone. Just as smartphone and computer engineers don’t stop coming up with

new ideas for how to make their product better, the field of education should not establish some

level of inclusion and then stop there instead of making it better and more accessible. Although

there are many reasons why a student might not succeed to the best of their ability, I think that

sometimes, even though nobody likes to admit it, the teachers and administrators can be the ones

to get in the way of the education of students with disabilities.

Visual Discourse Analysis:

I think I did a lot better with the organization of information in the Visual Discourse

Analysis because I had to incorporate images as well to support my information. I think this

helped me find a more natural way to organize my points so that they flowed well in my
presentation. I was content with the way my Visual Discourse Analysis turned out and felt that I

did a good job overall. This was my favorite of all the assignments we did this semester

Annotated Bibliography:

I think the quality of my Annotated Bibliography was not as good as other assignments I

have done throughout the semester because I waited until the last minute to do it, and the result

was that I didn’t actually finish it completely. I ended up turning it in incomplete with only 3 of

the 5 sources explained well, which diminished the quality of the final product. I’m also not

totally sure if I understood exactly what was expected for the assignment and if it was supposed

to use sources we planned to use for the other projects in the class, rather than just being on the

topic of the discourse community we belong to based on our major. The misunderstanding was

my fault though because I didn’t ask any questions.

Artifact Analysis:

I think I did a good job on my Artifact Analysis because I already had a good amount of

knowledge on the IEP (Individualized Education Plan), and it is a fairly straightforward

document in general. I started by creating an outline with some basic questions that I knew I

would need to answer to effectively analyze the artifact for my reader who I expected would

have little to no knowledge about the IEP, what it is for and how it works in the classroom (the

who, what, when, where, and why, so to speak). I filled in each section, and intentionally decided

at the end that I wanted to leave my original questions as headings before each section to serve as

a guide for the reader so that they would find it easier to follow along and have a sense of what

they needed to know about each section.

Writing Portfolio:
 Personally, I feel that creating the portfolio, while time consuming, was my second

favorite assignment because it allows a lot of creativity in presentation of content. I really got

into this and on my home page I even listed some key terms and how they relate to this class and

what we have been doing this semester. On my About Me page, I created a section for the class

that highlights all the major assignments, as well as a section that talks about special education

that includes pictures with articles linked to them so that people interacting with the content on

my site could read about special education to get some background. I think all of those extra

small details that I added in really rounded out my website/portfolio as a whole, and helped to

make mine stand out. Overall, I was proud of my work in this project because it looks so good

and it is interactive and gives prompts so the reader knows where to click or if there is an

assignment or article linked to a picture, etc. I WISH I could have made it accessible to someone

who is blind by making it read the text or describe items you clicked on, but with the free version

of Weebly, you can’t really expect that much heavy lifting, unfortunately.

Peer Review:

I think the first peer review was the hardest one we did throughout the semester because I

think most people didn’t have a good grasp on what was expected for the first assignment which

was the annotated bibliography. The peer review for the Major Issues Project went a lot better

for me because I had actually written a substantial part of my article before the peer review

process, and I got better feedback because of that. My peer review partner stated that I needed to

write more about my own experiences with special education and the points I was trying to make

in the article to help people connect with what they were reading. I don’t feel that I was able to

“live up to” this part of his feedback as much as I had hoped to with my final product, but I do

feel like overall I did very well on it and I was able to get some good interviews and answers
from other educators who were able to provide something based on their experience. It can be

tricky to talk about my own experience in education and special education since I am not a

teacher yet and have only seen education through the perspective of the student or the outside

observer. I’m sure there is a lot that goes into teaching that I am ignorant of at the moment, and I

wouldn’t want to step into a territory where I accuse people of not doing the best they can by

their students. I know most teachers really do want the best for their students, even if they find it

hard to relate to the student because of diversity issues, and they often may not have knowledge

of a “better way” to be inclusive and help students with disabilities simply because special

education isn’t “their field of work.” I just wanted to emphasize that in education, it is your job

to create an inclusive classroom for diverse groups of people including those with disabilities and

even those with language barriers, such as ESL/ELL students. It is individually and collectively

our job as educators to make it happen to the best of our ability.

In summary, I feel good about the work I’ve done this semester and I feel that I have

improved my writing, my ability to research effectively and back up my statements, the peer

review process, and other aspects of my writing experience this semester. I learned how to ask

myself guiding questions that can help me make decisions about how to approach writing on

various topics and across context in my field of work. I learned that different audiences have

different needs based on their current or expected knowledge base on a topic and that it is crucial

to establish at the beginning of your process who you intend to reach. I also learned and had the

chance to practice different techniques for appealing to my audience in writing and other forms

of communication.