Writing studies scholarship lauds reflection’s capacity for building metacognitive understanding and facilitating transfer. Meanwhile, feminist and antiracist pedagogy scholarship highlights reflection’s ability to create spiritual and societal change. By contextualizing reflection within institutional and programmatic contexts, we argue that writing scholars can revise assignments to account for reflection’s contributions to civic and spiritual identity development. This cross-institutional case study analyzes patterns in first-year students’ reflective writing across three writing programs. Drawing on five codes for reflective identities—scholarly, writerly, professional, civic, and spiritual—we found that scholarly and writerly identities were emphasized regardless of context. However, students often had an “excess” in reflection, writing about civic and spiritual growth when prompts did not invite it. In conversation with university and program mission statements, we argue that instructors and WPAs can leverage reflection to expand beyond a single classroom context, ultimately tapping into its potential to create individual and social change.

Abstract This article recounts the partnership between university and high school colleagues to advocate for what the authors call mindful collaboration. Mindful collaboration is a term they use to describe a two-pronged approach in which high school and college partners (1) prioritize learning and understanding their collaborators’ lived realities, and (2) work toward equitable power dynamics between collaborators. The authors support their argument for mindful collaboration based on data from site visits to four high schools; focus groups and interviews with students, teachers, and other stakeholders at those schools; and surveys of students in ELA classes at those schools.