In this article, I discuss an alternative way of conceptualizing and
structuring essay assignments in political science courses. Generally,
political science teachers have tried to encourage critical thinking about
political issues by assigning essays that ask for argumentative
writing. An argumentative essay format asks students to present several
positions or concepts covered in a course, analyze them, and argue for their
own position on the issues at hand. A better format, I suggest, is to ask
students to engage in reflective writing. Reflective writing has
four basic stages. First, students are asked to explain course materials.
Next, they are challenged to reflect explicitly on how this material calls
into question their preconceptions about the topic. Third, they analyze the
conflicts, confusions, or questions that arise from engaging their
preconceptions. And finally, they formulate plans to use the knowledge
gained by the reflective process. In short, reflective writing invites
students to search for the truth rather than develop rhetorical skills. My
case for reflective writing is made here in the form of a reflective essay,
so readers can take from this essay both a demonstration of the reflective
process as well as an explanation. Thus, I will explore my pedagogical
preconceptions and experiences with student writing, explain my initial
understanding of reflective writing and my first attempt at using reflective
writing in an introduction to American government course, and, finally,
refine my pedagogy by analyzing the success of the assignment in light of a
deeper reading of John Dewey and other theorists of reflective
reasoning.
Exploration
I have been teaching sections of the introductory American Government
course for eight years, and in that time I've been fairly disappointed
with the quality of essays I receive. At the same time, however, I have
always been rather proud of what I took to be a rigorous and effective
10-page essay assignment. These essays follow what I had always presumed
to be the standard essay format, the argumentative essay. I
assigned students to explain Republican and Democratic ideologies and
answers to public policy problems and also argue for their solutions to
these problems through the institutions of American national government.
I expected the assignment to test the ability of students to read,
understand, and analyze what they had learned about public policy and
then apply it in a way that demonstrated further knowledge of how the
institutions of American government work. The assignment also expressed
my notion that students would be better citizens if they understood the
platforms of the political parties and could, therefore, make a critical
choice about whether to identify as Democrats or Republicans. But my
most basic assumption was that this assignment would harness the
students' analytical abilities by asking them to make an argument for
what they thought were the best solutions to America's problems. I
assumed that a desire to formulate informed opinions or defend cherished
ideological points of view would drive my students toward feats of
analytical rigor and rhetorical creativity.
This argumentative essay format did produce some successes, but in my
more honest moments I have always been vaguely unsatisfied with the
results. But lacking any alternative I was only left with a vague sense
that my students' laziness and intellectual unsophistication were
responsible for any failures of the assignment. The essays failed, I now
think, largely because students did not take responsibility to deeply
analyze the issues at hand. Instead, they either unthoughtfully deployed
their existing partisan predispositions or (even worse) relied on their
common sense understandings of political issues to get the assignment
done rather than done well. The challenge to develop and argue for their
own views did motivate some students, but not enough. Some students did
clarify their partisan predispositions, but often the conclusions of
students' essays were strangely disconnected from their analyses. Even
when they happened to hit upon a careful explication of, say, the role
of federalism in influencing the character of welfare policy, they had a
difficult time integrating such an analysis into their overall political
view. Proponents of a state's rights approach would bemoan that ending
the federal entitlement to welfare would cause a race-to-the-bottom.
Strong advocates of a free-market approach to school vouchers concluded
that Democrats were right to use federal grants to reduce class size and
raise teacher salaries. In general, I was disappointed with students'
ability to analyze and integrate ideas. They could explain what a
reading said, but it was difficult for them to analyze that reading with
others, integrate their critique with their personal political views,
and then use that knowledge to make plans for how to act in the future
as a citizen.
Explanation
The impetus for reevaluating the role of the argumentative essay in my
pedagogy came from my involvement on a committee that redesigned a key
general education course to teach reflective rather than argumentative
writing. At my college, our general education curriculum includes a
program for fostering liberal arts learning called Personal Development
Portfolio. The signature aspect of the program is the yearly requirement
that students produce a portfolio documenting their personal development
in four key areas that the college has defined as contributing to the
“whole person”: intellect, emotional and physical wellness, ethical and
spiritual growth, and citizenship and community responsibility. The
center of the portfolio is the Personal Reflective Essay, in which
students reflect on their development in these four areas and their
goals for the future. When the quality of these reflective essays was
found lacking, the college decided to revise its required first-year
course, Personal Development and the Liberal Arts, to teach
distinctively reflective writing.
The committee I served with began by reviewing some of the literature on
reflective writing, most of which has been developed in conjunction with
teacher education and service learning programs. Perhaps our most
important starting point was to buy into the fundamental distinction
made in these articles between reflective writing and critical thinking
or argumentative writing. Argumentative writing, these authors suggest,
emphasizes traditional logical skills such as marshalling evidence and
avoiding fallacies. Such a focus, they argue, insufficiently engages the
personal feelings and values that affect learning and the application of
learning. Reflective writing, on the other hand, encourages the student
to critically and explicitly explore these personal responses by
developing her responsibility and capacity for acting based on what she
learned (Scoggins and Winter 1999; Barnett 1997). In short, whereas argumentative
writing emphasizes the logical analysis and construction of arguments
for the purpose of persuasion, reflective writing critically evaluates
and develops personal judgments for the purpose of applying the analysis
to future action and goals.
Most of these advocates for reflection begin with the work of John Dewey;
thus, Dewey's views became the basis for the specific format of our
reflective writing program. From the beginning we wanted to construct a
format or model organization of the reflective essay that could be used
to teach and to consistently evaluate reflective writing across the
numerous sections of Personal Development and the Liberal Arts. Articles
about Dewey and reflection led us to identify five elements in such a
model.
The first of these, exploration, arose from Dewey's distinction
between reflection and conventional belief. Dewey thought that belief
was an inferior mode of thinking, devoted to applying “prejudgments”
instead of reasoning more fully on the values, evidence, and context
surrounding an issue (Rodgers 2002, 850). Such
prejudgments always affect thinking, for “we do not approach any problem
with a wholly naïve or virgin mind; we approach it with certain acquired
habitual modes of understanding, with a certain store of previously
evolved meanings.” The trick of reflective thinking, then, is to check
this habit of simply applying prejudgments (Dewey
1998, 147). Thus in the exploration stage of a reflective
essay we meant for students to explicitly state the prejudgments or
beliefs they held about a particular issue so they could hold these up
to more critical examination. Whereas in an argumentative essay such
unstated premises are hidden to maintain rhetorical conviction, in a
reflective essay they are explicitly revealed and questioned.
The second element of the model, explanation, expressed Dewey's
view that reflective reasoning was prompted by some sort of perplexity
or disequilibria caused when an individual is not exactly sure how to
respond to a situation (850). This stage of the reflective essay
explains the readings or concepts encountered in the course that might
occasion such perplexity. In explaining, students engage in a kind of
comparison/contrast exercise in which they not only elucidate a
challenging set of concepts, but also clarify how these concepts
challenge the beliefs identified in the exploration stage. Therefore,
this kind of explanation is very different than the sort that
characterizes an argumentative essay, for the goal is to practice
openness to new material rather than exercise persuasive skill.
We included the third element of the model, the conjecture, to
express Dewey's characterization of reflection as analogous to the
scientific method. From the initial state of perplexity, Dewey suggested
that individuals formulate hypothetical solutions to their difficulty,
which they can then test in some way to check their validity (Rodgers 2002, 854–855). Therefore, in this stage
we directed students to formulate a conjecture or question that might
help them resolve or at least further explore the tensions created
between their presuppositions and the course readings. Such a conjecture
might resemble the thesis statement of an argumentative essay, but a
conjecture preserves the exploratory purpose of the essay: intellectual
reconnoiter.
The analysis involved in this inquiry constituted our fourth
stage. This element of the model reflective essay required students to
test or answer their conjecture by engaging in a deeper re-examination
of their presuppositions, life experiences, and the course readings. As
Dewey put it, “Through judging, confused data are cleared up, and
seemingly incoherent and disconnected facts are brought together. The
clearing up is analysis” (Dewey 1998,
148). Such a reflective analysis openly searches for truth, rather than
argues for a particular position.
The final stage, synthesis, followed from Dewey's concern that
reflection is always directed toward taking some concrete action that
resolves the state of perplexity that initiated the reflective process
(Rodgers 2002, 855). This is the crucial
stage of the reflective process, in which practices and understandings
are restructured and new actions are put forward (Schön 1983). In our model, the synthesis stage encouraged
students to draw out the implications of their analysis. Whereas an
argument requires merely a pithy restatement of the author's conclusions
(and is thus invariably the most boring and inconsequential section of
the student essay), a reflective synthesis requires that the student say
something important and new at the end of the essay. This could entail
an explanation of how their beliefs or presuppositions have changed as a
result of their reflection, or a discussion of how their inquiry
directed them to apply what they learned from the reflective process
toward new goals or specific actions. As Dewey summed it up, this
“bringing together or unifying is synthesis” (Dewey 1998, 148).
Together, these stages, we hoped, would guide students to engage in
deeper reflection about their presuppositions, the readings, and their
goals and actions. On the one hand this entailed teaching the stages of
reflection, but more importantly, we thought it would be crucial to
write essay assignments (what we called prompts) that were
specifically designed to explicitly require explanation, exploration,
analysis and synthesis. Appendix A
(www.apsanet.org/ps/oct05/josefsononline.pdf) demonstrates the kind of
detailed assignment prompts that are necessary to lead students through
the reflective process. And, since students are (sadly) primarily
motivated by grades, we explicitly evaluated student writing through a
rubric (see Appendix B) that is structured around the reflective writing
model.1
The five elements of our model
of reflection correspond closely (with the exception of the
conjecture) to the four-scale instrument for assessing
reflection developed using confirmatory factor analysis by
Kember et al. (2000).
This
rubric is given to students with the assignment, so they know they will
be held accountable for each stage of the reflective process.
Conjecture
After being a member of the committee that formulated this reflective
writing program and foisted it upon the unsuspecting corps of 22
colleagues who would teach the redesigned Personal Development and the
Liberal Arts course, I decided to demonstrate my faith in reflection by
redesigning my introductory American government course to include a
10-page reflective essay.2
Reflection and
reflective writing have been given limited attention in
political science. Reflection is advocated in discussions of
service learning programs, but no detailed model for teaching or
assessing reflection is developed (Patterson
2000; Hepburn, Niemi, and Chapman
2000; Ehrlich 1999). Brock
and Cameron's (1999) article on Kolb's
learning preference model advocates something like a model of
reflection, but the author's do not provide an accessible way to
implement their model into the political science curriculum.
Canfield and Reeher's (1998) shorter
essay “response papers” are similarly designed to stimulate
ongoing reflection in an introductory American politics course.
Political scientists looking for better ways to teach social
science writing (Zeiser 1999; Bob 2001) tend to focus on argumentative
writing skills rather than reflection.
The prompt for
this essay is available online
(www.apsanet.org/ps/oct05/josefsononline.pdf). It demonstrates both the
detailed nature of the prompts required for reflective writing
assignments and how such prompts lead students through the reflective
process.
I expected that the reflection format would facilitate not only deeper
analysis but also make this analysis more relevant to students' lives.
Whereas argumentative essays have students complete an assignment to
demonstrate their knowledge to the professor, I thought the reflective
essay would better mobilize students by making the main audience for
their efforts themselves and by making their primary goal coming to a
better view of their own ideas and citizenship. The point was to
discover their real beliefs about American politics rather than to just
have them take a position; coming to this knowledge would better enable
them to integrate course readings into their political beliefs and plans
for active citizenship.
Analysis
I found the resulting essays to be a significant improvement over the
argumentative essays on the same topic that I had been assigning for
seven years. Students did seem to engage in deeper analyses of the
readings. And, more importantly, they in most cases explicitly discussed
how they integrated what they learned with their preconceived beliefs
about politics. Furthermore, this integration was in many cases truly
reflective rather than reflexive. Even students who took positions in
line with the preconceptions outlined in their exploration section
engaged in much more open analyses of writings that conflicted with
those views, and they engaged in more critical analyses of readings that
supported their initial beliefs. Another notable accomplishment of the
reflective format was the way it prompted students to confront the
vacuity of their wholly nominal (Republican or Democratic) political
commitments (the condition of a seeming majority) and caused them to
recognize their need to develop a more critical and informed
citizenship.
The reflective writing assignment, however, was not a complete success.
The notable problem with the reflective writing model, as I formulated
it, was the difficulty students had in fitting their reflection into the
systematic constraints of the format. Students had special difficulty in
formulating a conjecture that could be “tested” in the analysis section.
This problem was less severe in my American government sections, but it
was a big obstacle to students in Personal Development and the Liberal
Arts.
To understand the success of my reflective writing assignment and the
relative failure of the conjecture section, I decided to reflect on my
experience and re-examine my reading of Dewey and other scholars of
reflection to understand the experience more deeply and thus further
refine my pedagogy.
Analyzing the Conjecture
We had included the conjecture and analysis sections, if you recall,
in order to express Dewey's concern that reflection follow the
scientific method. However, my and my students' problems with
mapping the formal scientific method onto the reflective process led
me to reevaluate my commitment to Dewey's scientism. My first take
on the problem was that Dewey was a naïve positivist who had
unrealistic expectations about the intellect of my students.
My consequent rereading of Dewey, however, has caused me to discard
my previous conception of Dewey as a positivist. Dewey's project was
a reaction against the European epistemological tradition with its
portrayal of both thinking and the objective of thinking (objective
apperception of the Real) as different or apart from our everyday
practices and experiences. Instead, Dewey suggested that thinking
was immanent within the everyday experiences that come from pursuing
our goals. Such experiences, in Dewey's view, produce cognitive and
non-cognitive responses in our minds that express the pragmatic
working out of solutions to the problems of existence. Thus
intelligence was always already practical, what Dewey was left to do
was to “intellectualize practice,” to use the tools of philosophy to
better integrate, conceptualize, refine, and broaden the knowledge
inchoate in these experiences (Eldridge
1998, 5). Scientific experiences, in Dewey's estimation,
thus take on the character of any everyday experience. Indeed, for
Dewey, the scientific method as such is made systematic only by
reflective reconstruction, “possible only after the result has first
been reached by unconscious and tentative methods” (Dewey 1998, 149).
But if Dewey conceptualizes the scientific method as a refinement of
everyday practical intelligence, then we have no real need to model
reflective thinking on any inflexible construction of the scientific
method. Instead of a rigorous model of induction or deduction we are
led to Dewey's concern with dealing with distractions from truly
reflective practice. For instance, Dewey emphasizes that the
scientific method represents practices of bracketing issues that
bring on cultural conflicts such that we can focus on the crux of
the matter: openly and honestly judging whether the results of our
actions (empirical data) are congruent with our desired ends
(solutions for problems, support for hypotheses) (Eldridge 1998, 6, 16–20; Dewey
1963, 47–50). The crux of establishing such a practice,
then, is not so much a scientific method as a scientific
posture toward the process of inquiry. If we understand
Dewey's sense of this posture, then we grasp his conception of the
sciences as the quintessential liberal art, reflecting
open-mindedness, a lack of self-absorption, courage, and a sense of
responsibility to think and act with integrity (Rodgers 2002, 858–863). In How We Think, Dewey
puts it this way: “Alertness, flexibility, curiosity are the
essentials; dogmatism, rigidity, prejudice, caprice, arising from
routine, passion and flippancy are fatal” (Dewey
1998, 147).
Thus my initial interpretation of Dewey as requiring a formal
conjecture like a hypothesis was clearly wrong. For Dewey the
scientific method is less about formal hypothesis testing and more
about openness to new information, the seemingly insignificant fact,
insight, or even luck. The conjecture failed, then, I think because
it impinged on the alertness, flexibility, and curiosity that could
come from a less formal method of analysis. If anything, following
Dewey, perhaps the formal conjecture is really the purpose of the
synthesis, a reflective reconstruction of the inchoate conjectures
that flow through the laissez-faire process of analysis.
Indeed, Dewey's views seem to argue somewhat against the overly
restrictive character of the model in general. What I wish to be
teaching, after all, is ultimately judgment, wisdom, and the posture
of liberal inquiry rather than process and academic vocabulary.
Dewey was especially concerned with this issue in Democracy and
Education, for he feared that efforts to indoctrinate
students in academic disciplines (what he called the “logical”
method) would alienate students' learning. Instead, he focused on
fostering capacity for judgment (what he called the “psychological”
method) by coordinating reflection on the subject matter with the
unique goals and abilities of each student (Garrison 1998, 69; Dewey 1931,
256–261).
Analyzing the General Success of Reflective Writing
Dewey's focus on cultivating judgment rather than the accumulation of
knowledge may be key for understanding the character and pedagogical
power of reflective writing. In How We Think, reflection is
precisely about moving students from the possession of knowledge
about a subject (an academic concern) to judgment about how to solve
problems (the province of wisdom). For to Dewey,
If one is not able to estimate wisely what is relevant to the
interpretation of a given perplexing and doubtful issue, it
avails little that arduous learning has built up a large
stock of concepts. For learning is not wisdom; information
does not guarantee good judgment. Memory may provide a
refrigerator in which to store a stock of meanings for
future use, but judgment selects and adapts the one to be
used in an emergency—and without an emergency (some crisis,
slight or great) there is no call for judgment. (Dewey 1998, 148)
This way of conceptualizing education places a premium on creating
such an emergency, by structuring assignments and course content in
such a way to put students into a crisis (“slight or great”) in
which an easy application of their prejudices and common sense
knowledge is impossible. Such a crisis forces students to go beyond
the kind of learning associated with memorizing cold, hard facts
and, instead, engage in deeper learning. Indeed, Dewey's contrast
between reflection and memorization suggests that the pedagogical
practices we usually promote are demonstrably inferior to
reflection.
Research into the cognitive character of reflection compared with
other forms of pedagogy support Dewey's contention. For instance,
John Biggs' taxonomy of learning levels places the pedagogical
practices most frequently used in political science courses at lower
levels and reflection at the top. “Unistructural” learning,
constructing paraphrases of texts or lectures that demonstrate basic
comprehension and memorization, represents the lowest or surface
level of learning according to the model. This is the kind of
learning tested by most multiple-choice exams. The next level,
“multistructural,” involves the learning associated with sifting
through a text and being able to pull out central ideas or arguments
from a variety of information. Such learning is frequently tested by
short answer questions like, “What is federalism?” The next level,
“relational,” involves applying concepts in some way: explaining in
depth, evaluating lines of reasoning, or using concepts to address
an immediate problem. Most argumentative essays, I would contend,
leave students stuck at this stage, emphasizing an ability to
demonstrate knowledge of the arguments a student has encountered in
a course and cite reasons for favoring some set of positions. The
highest level of learning, however, emphasizes reflection. Biggs
calls this level “extended abstract” or “deep” learning, where
students apply concepts to “far problems,” the development of new
hypotheses and theories, and the reevaluation of actions, goals, and
values (King 2003).
Jennifer Moon provides a more complete understanding of why
reflective learning is deeper learning, relying heavily on the work
of Mezirow (1991). She describes the
network of knowledge, pre-understandings, and prejudices within the
mind of the learner as a “cognitive structure” that is both used to
understand new material and which must be integrated with new
material if learning is to take place. At basic levels of learning,
such as Biggs' unistructural understanding or Moon's “noticing” or
“making sense,” the material learned is only laid upon this
cognitive structure without being integrated with its deeper
elements; hence terming it surface learning (Moon
1999, 136–142). At Moon's next level, however, new
knowledge is linked with existing elements of the cognitive
structure, such that a concept is related to some existing element
of the structure. This kind of learning Moon calls “making meaning,”
because new meanings for both the preexisting cognitive components
and the material learned must be formed in order for this
integration to take place. This is, however, only an intermediate
level of learning, since such learning does not necessitate a very
deep reorganization of the cognitive structure (143). For instance,
while the student might understand that Madison's concern with
ameliorating the problem of factions connects with her hoary civics
lessons about checks and balances, she hasn't significantly modified
more central understandings about American democracy and citizenship
that Madison could bring to mind. This would require the deeper
levels of learning associated with reflection.
Moon conceptualizes such basic reflection as “working with meaning,”
work associated with reflecting on the tensions that arise between
newly integrated knowledge and deeper understandings, values, or
goals. This means generating significantly novel meanings within the
cognitive structure as Deweyean hypotheses, tentative essays toward
resolving the difficulty that is the occasion of reflection. In our
example, this might mean reflecting on the contrasts between naive
conceptions of popular democracy and Madison's concern for refining
and enlarging public opinion away from its leveling impulse
(143–145).
Moon's deepest level, “transformative learning,” is accomplished when
working with meaning has produced significant reordering of the
cognitive structure. Moon, following Mezirow (1991), associates this kind of learning with the
critical theory of Jurgen Habermas, in which knowledge is critically
evaluated for the purpose of achieving human emancipation rather
than any instrumental values. Truly reflective thinking, in this
reading, involves not only reevaluating preconceived values and
conceptions but also the systematic distortions (such as dynamics of
power) that may prevent the emergence of liberating
self-understandings and actions. The learner at this stage is truly
active, taking control of her own learning and responsibility for
transforming her own actions and prejudgments in the light of the
learning process (146, 13–15).
This critical dimension of reflective learning recommends the
pedagogy to any discipline, but is especially appropriate to courses
in political science. I have always taken political science (and
especially the teaching of political science) to be primarily
concerned with fostering democracy.3
A
notable example of connecting democracy and reflection in
political science is the “Public Achievement” program
described by Hildreth (2000).
Dewey is rather persuasive that the
cultivation of a democratic society is essentially an exercise in
reflective education. Democracy, in Dewey's view, is “more than a
form of government; it is a mode of associated living, of conjoint
communicated experience” in which the community reflectively
searches for solutions to the problems of living together (
1931, 101). Thus, just as the point of
reflection, for Dewey, is to make sense of experience for the
purpose of pragmatic action, the point of democracy is to make sense
of the communal experience of American life such that its inchoate
goods (the “liberation of a greater diversity of personal
capacities”) can be deliberately sustained and extended. A society
of individuals trained to be reflective, then, is indispensable if
democracy is to adequately express this reflective character, the
“flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of
the different forms of associated life” (115).
This discussion of deep learning and the connection between
reflection and the transformative learning of democratic citizenship
suggest why my reflective writing assignment was so much more
successful than my old argumentative essays. Argumentative essays
allow students to merely layer new information onto their existing
cognitive structure, using what they have learned to support their
preconceptions without significantly reordering them. Reflective
essays, on the other hand, succeed because they are explicitly
structured to promote the integration of old preconceptions with new
material. The catalyst to such integration is getting students to
highlight their preconceptions (the exploration stage) and then to
deftly put those preconceptions into crisis (with challenging course
content in the explanation stage) so that students must struggle to
“make meaning” with the ideas involved. I had thought that students
would spontaneously mobilize their energies to feats of civic
education, but now I see that, while the core of Deweyean
citizenship may rest in everyday knowing, it must, nevertheless, be
deliberately sustained and extended through teaching reflection.
Synthesis
In Dewey's model of reflection, the synthesis is the moment when the
thinker reconstructs from his or her experience principles that can be
used for dealing with the future. My reflections on reflective writing
have led me to derive several important principles. When I began my
inquiry into reflective writing I was torn between two contradictory
understandings. On the one hand, I saw it as concerned primarily with
coming to grips with core personal values and beliefs. But on the other
hand, following a naïve interpretation of Dewey, I saw reflective
writing as a kind of formalized method of hypothesis testing to derive
such ethical principles. The fist idea narrowed the application of
reflective writing to expressive topics, while the second constrained
the reflection to an almost scientistic formula. Now that I understand
reflection better, however, I think that reflective writing has much
broader and more flexible applications. Because it involves deeper
cognitive processing and, thereby, deeper learning, structured
reflective assignments can be appropriate for most topics. And
reflection on these topics can be structured relatively formally or
loosely as the occasion or the student's needs require. Students do not
need to be directed toward approximations of hypothesis testing (the
goal of formal conjectures). Indeed, my students failure to write good
conjecture sections shouldn't be surprising given Dewey's view that
scientists also rarely operate with formal hypotheses. Therefore, a more
basic and fluid model of reflective practice that requires exploration,
explanation, analysis, and synthesis, but leaves the organization of
reflection up to the student, may be more effective. The organization of
these four elements is less essential than their clear presence and the
creativity, honesty, and openness in which the reflection is
pursued.
I've tried to synthesize these reflections into the changes I've made to
my prompt for the introduction to American government reflective essay
(available online as Appendix C,
www.apsanet.org/ps/oct05/josefsononline.pdf). Note how I have eliminated
the conjecture stage, allowed students to organize the essay any way
they wish, and emphasized that the assignment is more about reflecting
on arguments and preconceptions than making them. I worry that the lack
of an explicit required organization will lead to poorly organized
essays, but I'll have to reflect on that experience after next
semester.
Author Bio
Jim Josefson is assistant professor of political science at Bridgewater
College. He can be reached at jjosefso@bridgewater.edu. He is currently
working on a manuscript, The Politics of Identity: Assimilation,
Recognition, Coalition.
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