Writing
Autonomy; or
It's the Content,
Stupid!'Mike Nix

Chuo University
mikenixl@tamacc.chuo-u.ac.jp
This chapter used to be an investigation of approaches for fostering academic literacy andlearner autonomy in group project work, entitled Developing Critical Collaborative Autonomy:
It's the Content, Stupid! Through collaborative discussion with other Anthology writers, it has
been transformed into a reflection on the ways in which I have tried to understand—throughresearch and particularly writing—how my students develop their autonomy and academic
literacy. I have made the process of thinking that accompanied this shift in my concerns thecentral focus of the chapter, and, rather than erase the traces of the previous Content, Stupid!
draft, I have returned to critique them from these new viewpoints. I hope that the rather
emergent, discordant and self-referential way I have written this chapter highlights issues anddilemmas that resonate with other teachers concerned with how we research, theorise and write

about the development of learner autonomy.
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Whereto Begin?

"You'll need more tables than you think"—Elenore Bowen Smith's advice on doing
ethnographicfieldwork. (Quoted in Clifford, 1986, p. 1)
Tuesday June 22nd 2002. It feels like it has been raining non-stop for the last two weeks, andthere's still another five weeks of the rainy season (and classes) to go! Sitting in my office, I'm
hot and sweaty, too tired to concentrate, and in my usual panic over class preparation. Spreadout, in a disorganized heap on the table in front of me, are the self-evaluations, reflections,notebooks, project logs that have been coming in from my third-year Advanced Speaking and
Listening classes—60 students in all. Last week, we finished the first research, discussion andpresentation project of the course. Now I have just 3 hours to make sense of all this material,
decide how to organize the next project cycle, and get ready for class! Where to begin?
I've been doing these group projects in my classes for several years now. Groups of between
3 and 6 students work together for 5 weeks on a political, legal or economic topic that they
have chosen to investigate. For the first 4 weeks of the project cycle, they research their topic forhomework and then work together in class to share, discuss, and organize the information they
have found. In the fifth week, they give a 15-minute presentation of their work to students fromother groups before leading a discussion on their topic.
I see these projects as a way of helping my students develop both their learner autonomy andacademic literacy. They are majoring in International Business and Law, and the projects givethem an opportunity to work, in English, on academic issues they have an interest in; some of
the topics they have chosen in the last project cycle include the death penalty, global warming,
domestic violence, child abuse, and free trade and globalization. I hope that their motivation tounderstand these topics in more depth will encourage them to apply the academic literacy skills
they have studied in their first two years of English courses and reviewed in the first few weeks
of my third year course. This academic literacy includes language skills such as reading for key
ideas, note-taking, and using paraphrases and examples to explain topic-related vocabulary. It
also involves critical thinking skills—such as identifying problems and their causes, comparing
solutions, and evaluating different viewpoints on an issue—that students can use to articulate
their own arguments about the topics.
I also intend these projects to be a space for groups of students to decide amongst themselves
how to organise their exploration of the topics. This involves them thinking, for example,
about which specific issues to focus on, how to explain, connect, and organize their individual
research into a coherent, collective understanding of the topic, and how to present theirresearch clearly and persuasively. This space will, I hope, encourage them to experiment with,and reflect on, how to effectively engage in English with an academic issue. So the idea here isthat the projects will promote a mutually reinforcing development of learner autonomy andacademic literacy. Or something like that, anyway!
Acknowledgements

Iwould like to thank Heidi Evans Nachi.Tim Murphey, and Steve Brown for their comments on
earlier versions of this chapter and everybody involved in this project for the thought-provoking
discussions that also contributed significantly to the development of the chapter Particular
thanks go to Andy Barfield for his generous support and astute feedback, which kept me writing
at times when I thought I might not make it

LD SIG 2003 A n t h o l o g y —199* Writing Autonomy

Effectively developing academic literacy through project work of this kind requiresa version of what Murphey andJacobs (2000) callcritical, collaborative autonomy.
Without this critical, collaborative edge, autonomous group project work may becomea space of negative autonomy. In this space, individual students fall back intofamiliar
but unhelpful learning habits, andgroups largely fail to take collective control of
their learning byexploring and reflecting together on effective ways to organize theiracademic work. Wlxen this happens, group project work may not contribute much to
the development of either students' academic skills or their understanding of academic
issues.

From the previous draft of this paper, 'Developing critical collaborative autonomy:
It's the content, stupid!' (June 2003)
But recently I've been thinking it doesn't quite work that easily. Students seem to get boundup in the content of their projects, because that's what they're interested in, and lose sight ofwhether they are using their language skills effectively or not. They may, for example, readand make notes in Japanese, because that seems like an easier or better way of understanding
the topic, and then translate their research laboriously and awkwardly into English when
they explain it to their group. Noticing this has made me think that I need to find a way offocusing the students back on the language skills themselves. Perhaps some more explicitly
metacognitive framework for planning and reflecting on the use of those language skills isnecessary if these projects are really going to help the students develop their academic literacy
autonomously.
So, for the first time, in the project cycle just finished, I have asked groups to discuss, atthe beginning of every class, how to organize their work and then record their decisions on
a project log. (See the Autonomy You Ask! website for example project logs.) I've suggested
that they set goals for their use of English in class (explaining key vocabulary in English, forexample), allocate roles to group members (such as discussion co-ordinator or note-taker), andplan stages for their work (such as sharing research, organizing information with mind maps,
doing vocabulary development work, and deciding what to research next). I've also asked themto take time at the end of the class to reflect together on how their work went and set goals fornext week's class. Recently, I've read an article by Tim Murphey and George Jacobs (2000), andI'm excited because there seem to be connections between their idea of'critical, collaborativeautonomy' and what I think I'm trying to develop in my classes with the group planningand reflection. I'm wondering if I'm also trying to develop a version of'critical, collaborativeautonomy' but I need a bit more time to think about that one.

This paper discusses action research I conducted in theacademic year2002 to encouragea more critical, collaborative approach toproject work. Thisaction research had twoparallelelements. To promote collaboration, groups used a project log to make collective
decisions about theirproject work. Alongside this, students wrote weekly reflections
on their individual andgroup work to help them become more critically aware of theeffectiveness of their ways of working.
From the previous draft of this paper, 'Developing critical collaborative autonomy:
It's the content, stupid!' (June 2003)—

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Anyway, this group project logging and reflection thing is my big, new 'autonomy' idea forthis year. It seems like it might be a wayfor students to develop their academic literacy moreautonomously as well as help me develop my understanding as a teacher of what learnerautonomy in group project work involves (and also perhaps to write an academic paper or
two on that). I want to have plenty of feedback from the students to help me see what kinds ofdecisions they are making and how their awareness is developing (and also to quote in thosepapers maybe). So, in the last class, I asked them to hand in their notebooks, the group projectlogs and reflections, and an individual end-of-project self-evaluation and reflection.
And now, I've got all this paper in front of me and just 3 hours before the next class! I
flick quickly through some of the feedback about the project logs to get a sense of the main
issues it raises. Most of the comments seem to be very interesting and useful insights aboutautonomous, group project work. Some of them are unexpected; all seem to be saying
something different. I feel like I need more space—more tables—to spread them all out, makethe connections, recognize the patterns, see the big picture. I need more time and energy tomake sense of it all. Where to begin?
False Starts"The problem of beginnings is one of those problems that, if allowed to, will confront one
with equal intensity on a practical and a theoretical level"—Edward Said (1975, p. 3).

Actually, it's not Tuesday22nd June 2002 at all. In reality, I'm writing this on Monday 4th August,
2003, and I've just made up that story about that hot, sweaty, panicked Tuesday morning in
June 2002. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I've imagined or dramatized thesituation, and state of mind, I would have been in sometime in June 2002, as I tried to makesense of all the feedback that I really did receive from my third-year Speaking and Listeningclasses at the end of their first project cycle. Indeed, the sense of excitement that I imaginedfor that day, turning into frustration and confusion as time and space close in, were real on
many occasions last year when I tried to understand what the comments from students in thoseclasseswere telling me about the development of learner autonomy and academic literacy.

And those feelings are all too real now, already 4 days past the deadline for my near final
draft for Autonomy You Ask! Today my office is strewn with reflections, notebooks, and projectlogs from students, and now also the different earlier drafts of this paper and comments onthem from Andy, Cathy, Jodie, Miki, and Tim. And it does all seem too much to make sense of.
I'm still wondering where to begin.
The way I now want to write this chapter has changed radically, dramatically, since I
discussed a previous draft of it with other members of the Anthology team at the Anthology
Retreat two months ago. I have tried starting this new draft with a story because we hadtalked a lot at the Retreat about the lack of time to reflect on our teaching, to listen to what
our learners are telling us, and to learn from it ourselves.We also discussed the importance of
foregrounding teachers' and learners' voices in our research and writing, as well as the benefit
of using narratives to highlight the conflicts and dilemmas in our attempts to understand ourstudents. So the start of this chapter is a fiction. But it's a fiction that expresses what I haverealized are some of the real conditions in which I try to develop my thinking as a teacher—thelack of time, energy, and space to reflect.
Indeed, the question of how I represented the process of reflecting on and developing
my understanding of learner autonomy and academic literacy in the previous version of

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this chapter has now become a key issue for me as I write this current draft. I look again
at the previous draft, the one I shared at the Anthology Retreat called 'Developing critical,
collaborative autonomy: It's the content, stupid!' It tells the story of me gradually, carefully,
learning how to develop 'critical, collaborative autonomy' in my classes as I move through threestages of reflection, following each of the three project cycles in the course.
In that draft, I describe each of these moments of reflection as if I had been able to makesense of the all the feedback from the previous project and then incorporate those insights into
a new, improved framework for 'critical collaborative autonomy' in the next project. At the endof the whole process, I realize I've been wrong about trying to focus students' metacognitionon their use of language skills as the starting point for developing their academic literacy
autonomously. I see again that it is the students' interest in learning about the topics themselvesthat motivates them and provides the springboard for the development of autonomy. And I
recognize that all the planning and reflection that I ask the students to do should start from thestudents' engagement with the topics—with the content, stupid! It's a narrative that reads as if
I had all the time and space in the world to reflect on the feedback from my students and coolly
develop my understanding of'critical, collaborative autonomy'!
I'm struck now that the rational, contemplative tone of that previous draft misrepresents
the rushed, incomplete understanding that I actually brought to my teaching in those classes
last year. It is that dissonance that I have tried to express by interspersing the uncertain
introspection of the fictional opening and early sections of this current draft with segmentsfrom the previous draft. The objective, authoritative voice of the teacher-researcher at the startof that earlier draft—elaborating the issues, describing the research project, laying out thetheoretical framework for the research—now seems more of a fiction than the hot, flustered

figure scrambling through the papers littering the table that I imagined at the start of thischapter. No sign of my dilemmas, panics, and rushed decisions at the start of the previous
draft! No sense there that the idea of'critical collaborative autonomy' was something I
stumbled on as the course progressed rather than the conceptual starting point for the whole'research project,' as I had made it seem. I realize now that all the coherence is retrospective, thewriter making sense of practice after the fact.
Andy Barfield points out, in a comment on the 'Content stupid!' draft, that I describe what
I am doing as an 'action research' project, as if I had isolated a particular problem to addressin my teaching. The figure of the ethnographer struggling to make sense, from inside, of acomplex network of multiple meanings and viewpoints seems more appropriate now. I notice
how the way that draft starts conflicts,not just with my lack of conceptual clarity at the time,
but also with the more 'ethnographic' attempt to make sense of all that disparate feedback in
the later sections of the draft. It's as if the researcher and the ethnographer in me are fighting
for control of the text.

However, I also recognize there a cyclical narrative that recurs in my write-ups of my'action research', and which seeks to reconcile this conflict. I start out as the teacher-researcher laying out the theoretical rationale for 'critical, collaborative autonomy' andidentifying the research questions at the beginning of the paper. I then switch into teacherethnographer mode, making sense of my students' responses to the framework for planningand critical reflection I have given them. In this phase, I represent myself as learning fromand with my students. I'm happy to have my ideas modified and complicated, in an on-goingprocess of developing understanding in which I assimilate all these new insights from mylearners into fuller, more complex models of what 'critical, collaborative autonomy' involves.
But these new insights are never allowed to challenge my basic starting assumptions as—

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teacher-researcher that the development of'critical, collaborative autonomy' itself is a Goodand Necessary Thing.

Autonomous group project work needs to becollaborative notjust because groupmembers must co-operate to complete theproject successfully. More than this, I
understand effective collaboration as theprocess through which thegroup members'
different perspectives, knowledge, and ways of learning and usingEnglish become apositiveassetfor theirproject work. In terms of content, this means the integration of
their individual knowledge and research intoa more complete understanding of the
topic. Forthe organization of theirwork, it entails considering different waysof setting
goals, sharing tasks, andplanningtime in order to make the best collective decisions.
Andfor thedevelopment of English academic literacy skills and awareness, it means
recognizing and learningfrom the group members' different ways of learning and using
English. In short, successful collaboration is what makes thewhole group project greaterthan thesum of itsparts.
This kind of autonomy (perhaps all kinds ofautonomy) mustalso becritical because
learners need to beable to recognize alternative, andpotentially more effective, ways oflearning and using English to those they are familiar andcomfortable with. To carryoutproject work successfully, learners have to reflect on, evaluate, and adjust notjust
their learning, butalso theway the group is working together and the development of
the project itself. Reflecting critically ongroup work isperhaps more challenging than
individual self-reflection because it implies evaluating others as wellas yourself. But
the potential range of individual understandings within a group also opens up the
possibilities for seeing other, better ways oj working. Critical reflection is, therefore, thekey for making autonomous group work collaborative.

From the previous draft of this paper, 'Developing critical collaborative autonomy:
It's the content, stupid!' (June 2003)
Textualisinc Autonomy

All this talk of drafts, narratives, fictions makes me realize that I have made the problem ofunderstanding how to develop learner autonomy into a question of understanding throughwriting, both for me and my students. Understandingfrom writing—from all those reflections
and project logs and self-evaluations I get students to write; and understanding by writing—mytrying (and usuallyfailing) to make senseof all that feedback by writing coherent narratives
for academicpapers. It's as if my students' experiences and interpretations as learners are only
significant for me when they become textualised.
This recognition raises questions for me about what an 'ethnographic' understanding ofclassroom practice involves. I am reminded that ethnography has itself been described as aform of textual practice, as "writing culture" (Clifford 8c Marcus, 1986).The ethnographic text
tries to assimilate the multiple and dissonant subjectivities that make up a culture, and which
the ethnographer has sought to collect and record in the field, into one all-embracing objective
written account. This seems very similar to the way that I collect feedback from my students
in the classroom and then take it back to my officewhere I try to incorporate all the different
responses into one coherent understanding that willinform the development of my teaching
and that I can write up in comprehensible academic papers.When Marcus and Fisher (1986, p.
68) point out that"... ethnography's neat textualization of the immediateexperiential data of— LD SIG 2003 A n t h o l o g y —203* Writing Autonomy

fieldwork conceals... the fieldworker's imperfect, shaky control of material about which he later
writes with authority," I recognize the conceit in my own writing about my classes—except thatmy writing doesn't seem that neat anymore.
Making Sense of Diversity

A key concern for me, then, in both this version and the previous draft of this chapter, is how
to make sense of the diversity of ways in which my students carry out their academic projectwork. This diversity is both the reward and the challenge for me in trying to frame theseprojects to encourage learner autonomy It emerges when students start to experiment with,and reflect on, different ways of doing these projects—of organising their work as a group,of using English for academic purposes, and of articulating their own perspectives on the
topics. But that variety of approaches also presents me as a teacher with a dilemma. Should I
require, model or encourage students to conduct their project work in ways that I think will
be most useful for them in engaging academically with their topics? And, if so, in which ways?
Or should I accept that the diversity of approaches they adopt is an integral feature of theirdeveloping academic literacy and learner autonomy?
In the 'It's the content, stupid!' version of this chapter, I posed this question in pedagogicalterms. I was concerned with how to develop the framework for students to plan and reflect
on their work for each new project cycle,on the basis of their feedback on the previous cycle.
How could I encourage all the students to utilize ways of, for example, delegating research tasks
that some students had found useful in the previous project cycle,whilst still creating space forthem to explore their own ways of sharing the research?
Now, re-writing this chapter, a new set of rhetorical and temporal concerns have also comeinto focus. How did I try to understand the different approaches students were adopting
through making them record and reflect on them in writing? How did time pressure limit myunderstanding of this feedback? And how did I try to create coherent, holistic models out of thediversity, both as the course was progressing and as I wrote it up in the earlier draft?
I'd now like to consider both sets of questions together by briefly re-interpreting, in light ofthese new concerns, my discussion in the previous draft of the three stages of reflection that
followed each of the three project cycles.
Making Sense of (Too Much) Diversity

Let's go back to that Active morning in June 2002, when I am hurriedly trying to take in all
the feedback from students at the end of the first project cycle. Here are some of their (real)comments, about using the project logs—to set goals for their use of English, to plan theirresearch and in-class discussions, and to allocate roles for group members—that I might haveread then:•The project log was useful for our group work. I think the most useful section was thetime-keeping. ForI now have thought, whenever I worked withgroup, that it was very
difficult to discuss, to shareinformation and to exchange opinion in class. I think the
project log is a very good idea to use time effectively.

•

The project logmakes us easy to decide the object of ourproject and our individual work
(I'm a chairman, I'm a note-taker. ..and whatI have to dofor next class.) It made me
have a clear consciousness of my own goalfor each class and whatI should improve.

• Actually we don'tneedit every week. We fixed our roles in class one.

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•

I noticed that toshare role is effective, and toset questioner position is important because
theperson can improve our discussion.

•

The project log is very useful as a whole, because we are easy to decide what we mustdo, or what wedo nexttime. But it is difficult toset the role of each person for example,
planner, questioner... etc. Actually weplayed all roles together.

•

Especially, I think that it is useful toforesee thewholeproject. Project Logenables us
doing it. I think having wholeproject plan is need.

•

Project log was useful to chairgroup discussion... We can avoid the aimless discussion.
But there was too manyitems we mustwrite. For the logkeeper, it must bea greatburden.

•We madeplansfor ourgroup work, and we triedtogo according toplan. But it wasdifficultfor us to do that. However, we learned from it. We madeourgroup's work
efficient. So it was useful.

Scanning through these and many other comments, and connecting them with myobservations during the project, I am initially excited that there are so many ideas here about
different ways of organizing the project work. But faced with the task of rationalizing this into
a new framework for the next project cycle, I feel overwhelmed by the diversity and volume of
information. I notice that some groups are using the project logs as I imagined, to allocate timein class for information-sharing and discussion tasks, or to rotate roles such as discussion-coordinator or note-taker each week, for example. Others have been extending the project log
beyond my original framework. They are using it to plan their work, not just for the current
class, but also for the next class or to give them an overview of the whole project. Or they areallocating roles for research out of class as well as for in-class discussion. Other groups seem tobe subverting the log by ignoring the weekly planning of class work, by fixing roles at the startof the project or by all playing a part in these roles together.

As well as this variety of specific ways of organizing project work, I notice two bigger issues
in the feedback. Firstly, most students seem to be saying that the new focus on metacognitiveplanning is helping them to organize their project work more consciously and effectively
However, there also seems to be an undercurrent of dissatisfaction about having to use theproject log project itself to record decisions as this takes up valuable class time for working on
the topics. Secondly, I notice that students are givingless attention to planning and reflecting
on their use of language skills than I had intended. They are focusing more on organizing
their work in terms of the critical literacy component (identifying the causes of a problem, forexample) and content-engagement aspects (comparing the situation for their issue in Japanand another country, for example) of academic literacy.

All this presents me with a number of dilemmas about how to re-conceive the planning andreflection work to help students further developtheir 'critical, collaborative autonomy' in thenext project cycle.At the time, I see two sets of choices:
1. Whether to let go of my (already shaky) control over the metacognitive processesby allowing each group to find their own ways of planning and reflecting, or to reimpose some sort of framework on groups for directing these processes?
2. Whether to accept the students' focus on critical-literacy and content-engagement, or
to re-direct attention back to their use of language skills?

— LD SIG 2003 A n t h o l o g y —205* Writing Autonomy

Now, in retrospect, I also notice that, at the time, I ignored another choice posed by the
feedback: whether to continue using the actual project logs or not.

So what did I do to resolve these dilemmas and develop the framework for 'critical,
collaborative autonomy' over the next two project cycles? And—the questions that interest me
more now—how did the constraints of time shape my response to this diversity, and how did
I rationalize these decisions when I explained them in the 'It's the content, stupid!' draft of thispaper?
Making (Too Much) Sense of Diversity
Rethinking Project Cycle Two

For the second project cycle, I revised the framework for planning and reflection in thefollowing ways:

I gave the students an action log of their comments that referred to all the various
approaches to organizing project work they had used in the first project cycle, andasked groups to adopt those they felt might be useful for the second cycle.
I expanded the project log into a framework that I hoped would cover all of theapproaches described in the action log.

I required each group to make an overall plan in the first week for their workthroughout the project, as well as to make a weekly plan of their project work at thestart of each class.

In the 'Content, stupid!' draft of this paper, I explained that these decisions were based on
an attempt to re-theorize my understanding of'critical, collaborative autonomy' I described
this as an attempt to identify and map "the range of strategies that students had found usefulin the first project [and] could draw on to collaborate more effectively in their group work." Isaid that the feedback "suggested a much fuller and more complicated understanding of criticalautonomy than I had started with," and tried to represent this as a typology of strategies forcollaborative group project work (see Table 1 overleaf). Explained like this, my approach in thesecond project cycle was to raise students' awareness of all the options for collaboration but
give them choices over which they used.

Looking back at this earlier draft, I now recognize that most of this 're-theorization'
happened after I decided how to develop the metacognitive framework for the second project.
When I made those decisions, I didn't allow myself enough time to adequately reflect on the
feedback from the first project cycle, or to theorize that in a new understanding of how to
conduct academic group work autonomously Instead, I took the short cut of simply recycling
back to the students all the various approaches that different groups had used in the firstproject. In effect, I passed my dilemmas back to the students for them to solve and left them todo the theorizing. I also see now that pressure of time limited me to revising the ways in which
the project log was used rather than considering whether the project log itself was actually
useful or not.

Re-visiting my previous draft, I now understand that this retrospective rationalization was
structured by the assumptions about 'critical collaborative autonomy' that I had started thedraft with. My claim that a fuller, more complete understanding of collaborative autonomy
is emerging from the feedback looks like a way of reconciling my students' focus on critical
literacy and content-engagement with my belief that they should reflect on their use ofAutonomy You

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—

information on causes of problem.

• Content-engagement e.g., Get more

further research.

• Language skills e.g., Share information;
make a mind map; identify questions for• Language skills e.g., Discussion coordinator, note-taker, questioner.

connections between ideas clear.

causes in Week 3, and solutions in Week 4.

• Critical-literacy/Content-engagement e.g., Discuss the whole
topic in Week 1; focus more specifically on problems in Week 2,• Critical literacy e.g., Discover and choose specific problems fromgeneral information shared today.
• Content-engagement e.g., Compare the situation with the US.

• Critical literacy e.g., Each member think about the solutions.
• Content-engagement e.g., Each member research each kind ofchild abuse: Hiro - physical; Haru - sexual; Masa - emotional.

clear, understand about harm of dioxins.

• Critical literacy e.g., Find main argument; list up for and against
positions; identify key points.
• Content-engagement e.g., Make problems of education reform• Language skills e.g., Identify key ideas
in note-taking; paraphrase specialist
vocabulary and explain in English; make(adapted from, 'Developing critical collaborative autonomy: It's the content, stupid!')project/ wholeLong-term

week

5'

CM

P

Mediumterm / next2

13

/ this week

Short-term

Allocating roles

Setting goals

Strategies introduced by the students

Strategies suggested by the teacher

Table 1 Strategies for Collaborative Group Project Work

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language skills.I also recognize an 'ethnographic' attempt to represent my understanding of'critical, collaborative autonomy' as a complete, though complex, system of strategies: I need todemonstrate that I can incorporate all the students' different, subjective interpretations of how
to organise autonomous academic project work into one objective, holistic model in the text.
For the second project cycle, I also revised the process of reflection. I asked students to write
individual reflections after each class rather than the group reflections they had done in the firstproject. I also gave them a set of questions to respond to that I hoped would direct them awayfrom summarizing their understanding of the topic (critical-literacy and content-engagement
focused reflection) and towards their use of academic language skills. In the previous draft, I
explained this as a way of helping the students to become more critically aware of which of themany metacognitive strategies would be most useful for their particular project. I think thisrationalization does partly express my thinking at the time I made this decision. I was trying,
perhaps, to find a way of helping students to make up for my own lack of theoretical guidance.
But I sense now that it was also a way for me to gather even more 'data' about how the students
were organising and understanding the progress of their work.
Rethinking Project Cycle Three

For the third and final project cycle of the course, I again revised the organization of theplanning and reflection framework. This time, I allowed each group to design its own project
log and to decide whether to reflect on their work individually, as a group, or not at all. Looking
back now at my discussion of this decision in the 'Content, stupid!' draft, I notice that two stark
contradictions in my understanding of'critical, collaborative autonomy' have become almost
impossible to reconcile by this point in the account.

Firstly, I explained in that draft that I changed the framework for the third project in
response to a now unmistakable level of feedback from students saying that the project
logging and reflection were taking up too much of the time they needed for their research anddiscussion. I noted that creating their own planning and reflection processes would enableeach group to spend time on just those areas they felt were important. However, what seems
significant to me now is that I still required groups to record their decisions in a project log(even if one of their own design), which is the very part of the process they felt wasted mosttime. And, ironically, most of the groups took the whole of the first class of the third project
cycle to make their new project logs. I observe now that I couldn't let go of my need to havestudents textualise the metacognitive processes of planning they went through, even though I
had recognized that this was actually interfering with their investigation of the topics.
The second contradiction in this part of the 'Content, stupid!' draft concerns the diversityof approaches the groups were using to organize their work. I acknowledged in that draftthat I could no longer reduce all these different collaborative approaches into one coherent
account: "I.. .abandoned the search for one overall collaborative framework and accepted that
there would be many different routes to critical, collaborative autonomy in my classes." Andyet, at the same time, I was still trying to find a way of conceptualizing all this diversity within
one objective, systematic model. I attempted to do this by mapping "as a set of dichotomies,
the tensions that seemed to be inherent in the way I had tried to encourage more criticalcollaborative autonomy in the project work."

One of these tensions, I observed, was between metacognitive work and content-based work. I
suggested here that the tension between planning/reflecting on how to engage more effectively
with the topics and actually researching and discussing them seems to be "the central problem
in developing more critical, collaborative autonomy in the project work." One student put this—Autonomy

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succinctly: "Ifwe do so much reflection that we don't havetime to discuss much, then we don't
haveanythingto reflect on!"One of the other tensions I identified was between learning English and usingEnglish. Here,I recalled that the original purpose of the projects was to enable students to use their language
skills to do academic work in English. "I now feel that requiring students to go through explicit
cycles of reflection and planning can be very powerful for the development of their academic
literacy, but also runs the risk of positioning them as learners who have to practice certain
teacher-imposed skills for the sake of practice not because they are useful to them." Onestudent observed, for example, that "I understand what we shoulddo in class. So I thinkI do notneed writeProject Logevery week, onlyfirst time activity, we use this to decide whole project plan."Re-writing this chapter, it seems that those tensions are much more of an issue for me thanfor the students. They exist because I demand so much weekly project logging and reflection;
the students seem to have a much clearer sense of how a useful amount of metacognitive work
can be balanced with their exploration of the content of the topics. And the tensions are also
produced by my need to construct holistic models of'critical collaborative autonomy' thatincorporate every metacognitive strategy that every student in the class is using; individual
students and groups seem to have found their own specificways of working that don't create
these conflicts.

A Break in the Narrative

The third stage of reflection in the 'Content, stupid!' narrative takes place after the end of thecourse and is triggered by an interview with three of the students who took it. This earlier
draft represented my thinking at this stage as breaking with my starting assumptions about
how to develop 'critical, collaborative autonomy.' The interview suggested that "I had got therelationship between reflecting on the use of academic [language] skills and the understandingof the content wrong. I had been asking students to reflect on their use of the [language]
skills in order to grasp the topic better. The students seemed to be saying that reflecting on
their grasp of the topic was the way into making more effective use of the [language] skills." I
attributed this shift in my thinking to new insights coming out of the interview:

One student commented that it was very difficultfor them set goals and evaluate theirwork in terms of the academic skillsbecause they were too abstract, and the students did
not reallyknow, for example,what good note-taking was.It was much easier for them toevaluate themselves in terms of goals focused on their understanding of the topic: "Like if
weare doing Iraq war, ourproject goal in this class is to make clear the situation in Iraq. So
notskills goal...It's going to be easier toset...because the topic is concrete."
Thinking again about the interview now, I see this break as the result, not just of more
feedback on the project work, but also of a different kind of feedback. In the interview, thereflective discourse has shifted from writing to speaking, and from a monologic process ofreflection to a dialogic one. This seems to have allowed the students to challenge the agenda
I had set for reflection much more than they were able to do when responding to the focusedquestions I gave them for their written evaluations of the projects. I had intended to use
the interview to get the students' views on the typology of collaborative strategies and theframework of tensions models. In other words, I had hoped to organise the discussion aroundmy own understandings of'critical, collaborative autonomy' However,the interview soonveered away from those models, and the students were much more able to raise their own
concerns and to challenge my framing of the issues.
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The 'Willto Know'

One crucial question for me now is: Who benefited from all that writing down ofmetacognitive planning and reflection that I asked for during the project cycles? To what extent
did it help the students to develop awareness and take more control of the development of theiracademic literacy? And how much was it driven by my need to textualise understandings ofautonomy, and even to provide the quotes that become the voices of learners in texts like this?
Clearly, my students do feel it has helped them to write weekly reflections on their learningand use of English. Most of their feedback on this part of 'critical, collaborative autonomy' wasvery positive (although some students did complain about the time it took):•

It helped me toplan for thefuture. With writingreflection, I could think about what
would begoodfor me to do next week. Writing reflection is importantbecause I havemotivation to do projects.

•

By writing reflections, things which arevague and unclear become so clear.

•

Weekly reflections were useful for making thegroup aims of each class.

•/ think the reflections is veryuseful, because I can review what is good point or what is
badpoint clearly. Forexample, I canfind today's discussion is bad because our discussion
is not to thepoint.

The benefit to students of recording decisions on a project log each week, rather thanjust discussing how to plan their project work, is much more doubtful, especially after the
first project cycle when they have already been able to experiment with a range of ways oforganizing their work.

I'm struck now by how stubbornly I demanded even more project logging when many
students were telling me that this was getting in the way of the research and discussion it
was supposed to facilitate. I notice also the ambivalence in my previous draft about whether
the project log was designed to provide a record for the students of their work to help themreflect better, or to help me understand more what they are doing. As David Little has implied,
students may have the metacognitive skills to organise their learning autonomously, even if
they can't describe those skills (Dam, Little,Smith, 8c Katsura, 1999).Tim Murphey was making
a similar point in a different way, I think, when he commented on my'Content, Stupid!' draftthat "studying the process of reflection might have become the 'new grammar'."Perhaps myfocus on metacognitive skills is actually getting in the way of my students' ability to develop
their autonomous engagement with academic topics in the same way that a concern forgrammatical accuracy may inhibit students' ability to communicate.

I also wonder if my concern to textualise metacognitive awareness is actually preventing mystudents from taking more control of their own use of English. Michel Foucault (1980, 1981)
has identified the 'will to know' as a characteristic strategy for exercising power in modern
societies. He describes 'incitement to discourse' as an element of this strategy, and I recognize
the 'incitement to record and reflect'in my approach to developingand understanding
autonomy He also sees power operating not through repression—thou shalt not—but throughprocesses of surveillance and regulation (including self-surveillance and self-regulation)—apower that operates productively by saying 'you must.' For all the value that self-evaluation
and reflection definitely have for my students, I also now see an element of (self-)surveillanceand (self-)regulation at work when I tell my students that they must write a reflection on theirlearning every week, hand it in to me to look at, and share it with their peers. Perhaps requiring
my students to do all this recording and reflecting, just at the point when I'm finding it hard to

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keep track of their different ways of developing the project work, is a way of maintaining someof my waning control as teacher over students who are becoming autonomous.
Concluding Thoughts

In this chapter, I have discussed how I have refocused my thinking about the paralleldevelopment of learner autonomy and academic literacy in group project work in the processof re-writing the chapter. This shift was prompted by collaborative discussions at the Anthology
Writers' Retreat, which explored the possibilities for writing about learner and teacher
autonomy in ways which break with the genre of the standard research paper authored by adisembodied researcher. These possibilities, we thought, might include the foregrounding ofteachers' and learners' voices in the text and the use of narratives and fiction to locate ourselves

within the contexts, processes, and dilemmas in which we develop our understanding of ourlearners and our own teaching. Those new perspectives helped me see how my thinking about'critical collaborative autonomy' had actually been constrained by the structure and voice of theprevious draft of this chapter, as well as by my predilection for textualising the students' every
metacognitive thought (without having time to make sense of all that information) and myefforts to construct universalizing models of how learner autonomy develops.
I have been rather critical of my own demands for written reflection from my students
and of my attempts to theorize on the basis of those reflections. However, that self-critique
has led me to re-consider, rather than devalue, the role that reflection and theorizing can playin developing better frameworks for promoting learner autonomy. It has sensitized me tothe question of whether the processes of reflection are helping the students to develop theirawareness of how they do their project work or enabling me to collect data that will validate myrole as action researcher or ethnographer. And I have realized the value to me of insights andchallenges that come from exploratory, dialogic processes of reflection with individual students(such as an interview). These may be far more pertinent and penetrating than my attempts tounderstand what every student in the class is thinking from their monologic, written feedback
to questions I have decided, the answers to which I can interpret within my own frames ofreference without negotiation with the students.
I think I have also learnt a little about how the theorizing of practice can best contributeto a clearer understanding of the development of learner autonomy, both for myself and mylearners. My theories should to be able to take into account the diversity of practice that is anecessaryand important consequence of the development of autonomy. And I need to develop
those theories in a process of negotiation with the students, framing issues for dialogue withand amongst them, rather than either imposing my models upon them or expecting them to
do all the conceptualizing for themselves. That means developing a common discourse withmy students about key issues in the development of learner autonomy and academic literacy—
not us all reaching an identical interpretation of those issues—so that each student canconceptualise for themselves what they need to do to use English more effectively for academic
work. So, at the end of this process of re-writing and re-thinking, I now think that the key
question to ask about reflective processes and conceptual frameworks for developing autonomy
is: Do they help both meand mystudents make sense of our practice in the classroom?

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Autonomy

Critical Reader Response i

Jodie Stephenson and Miki Kohyama
Mike's chapter reads almost like a diary, and we enjoyed the privilege of being let into hisworld. As teachers, we could imagine ourselves being in his shoes, in front of a desk with heapsof reports and reflections to scan through right before class starts. We could also relate to hisbusy schedule—trying to juggle teaching, research, writing, and other commitments all at thesame time. We found his honesty throughout everything both refreshing and challenging.

We began to think about our own classesand the motives behind the decisions we make. Do
we do things because we honestly believe that they will benefit students, or are we just settlingfor the easiest and quickest option? Or is there a more ambiguous, self-serving motive? Do
we really listen to our students? Do we use modes of reflection that encourage dialogue andnegotiation? Are we really encouraging students to be autonomous? How much are we willingto let go of our preconceptions and our control?
These are questions that we want to continue to ask ourselves as we teach. We want to keepquestioning our motives and checking that we are doing the right things for the right reasons.
We know that there will be times when we do wrong things for right reasons, or even rightthings for wrong reasons, and, like Mike, we hope to be able to realize this and respond humblyand honestly.
Mike's chapter also made us think about ourselves as writers. His frankness about theprocesses involved in his research and his writing challenges us to be real and honest in
our own writing. We often feel pressured to write as if we had all of the answers: We havea problem, we look at the literature, we theorize, we collect data, we suggest reasons andsolutions. In reality, things are usually not so simple, yet we usually don't reveal that in ourwriting. Mike shows us that writing about teaching doesn't have to be that way, and we realizethat we can in fact learn more when the writer is honest about their struggles as well as theirsuccesses.

After everything, though, perhaps the biggestthing for us is the issue of time. It is not easy
to find the time to plan and reflect when our days already seem crammed. But, since reading
Mike's chapter, and thinking about it in order to write this reader response, we have become
more aware of the importance of reflection, and somehow find ourselves doing it more duringclasses recently. This may just be a coincidence, but perhaps not. Perhaps it reminds us again of
the importance of being in contact with other teachers and letting them, either in person or inwriting, challenge our own theories and practice.

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Critical Reader Response 2

Sultan Erdogan

As a teacher and researcher, Mike's reflective article made me look at aspects of the daily
routines of my profession more critically. 1 think he very nicely elaborates the feeling of
uncertainty which I'm sure all teachers have when trying to put anything new into practice.
I'm amazed personally at how much time I spend worrying whether my students have got any
benefit from the activities we do together. However, I think this anxiety is part of the processof teacher-learning, and one way of coping with and seeing beyond the 'veil' that this anxiety
draws in front of us might be to share it with others, exactly as Mike does here.
It strikes me that, by practising what he preaches (critical reflection), Mike has been able toidentify alternative paths towards establishing the interaction and negotiation between students
and the teacher necessary for the development of critical collaborative autonomy. Since
reflection has become a 'buzz word,' we direct our students to plan, monitor, and evaluate,
and of course we encourage them to provide records of the underlying thought processes
that they go through mostly in written form (diaries, journals, logs, etc.). Mike's experience
led me to give a second thought to this matter. Could it be that my students sometimes get
into a routine so that they start reflecting just for the sake of reflection? Could it also be thecase that my image in the classroom as an authority figure poses difficulties for them when
they are by themselves holding their pens indecisively above the paper? Most important, am
I able to respond genuinely to the reflections that they put on paper within the busy schedule
I have, so that my students will have the chance to negotiate? Mike reflects that his students
could challenge him during the interviews as opposed to via the regular entries in their logs.
I think this kind of a dialogue, where immediate response and negotiation can be enhanced,
might have advantages over the conventional written form of reflection. Such written reflection
cannot usually be exploited fully due to constraints such as lack of time and power relations, as
is demonstrated through Mike's observations.

Also worth highlighting is the insightful experience Mike has had as a teacher-learner. It wasvery interesting for me to read how he started out with particular assumptions only to abandon
them later on. The more his students showed diversity in their ways of thinking, the more Mikehas had to make an effort to be able to see the issues through their eyes, an experience whichchallenges one's own beliefs and values about teachingand learning (and this can be painful
sometimes?!). I want to congratulate Mike for his honesty about his feelings as a teacherlearner.

Finally, it has been thought-provoking to be reminded of the fact that we have a
responsibility towards ourselvesand our students to help the processes of teaching and learning
be meaningful and beneficial. Considering current world affairs, isn't critical collaborativeautonomy something that we all should self-critically think about offering to our students?

LD SIG 2003 A n t h o l o g y