Reflections on Self: Guidelines on Reflective Writing and Decoloniality

Abstract

This article offers basic guidelines on how to engage in reflective writing. The author draws from his experiences with this writing type in North America, India, and Southern Africa to counsel students and their educators-mentors on how to achieve this difficult task from the standpoint of decoloniality. The author argues that reflective writing must rest on decoloniality because doing so presents students and educators with one of the best occasions to think critically about learning and legal education. This is because decoloniality constitutes today one of the most critical forms of critical thinking. Indeed, very few theories challenge as radically as decoloniality the status quo, the premises of ‘modern’ education, its origins in the Humboldtian model in the 19th century, and its Eurocentric slant. Though research on reflective writing abounds, higher-education experts have not probed the nexus between reflective writing and coloniality. Their studies did deploy personal reflections to fulfil decolonial agendas, but they have not elevated and prescribed decoloniality as the ideal shape of reflective writing in higher education. This is the shortcoming that this Article strives to overcome. Although this article addresses and benefits students and teachers in the humanities and the social sciences, it nonetheless focuses on internship reports in legal education, where coloniality takes the form of doctrinalism. Also known as ‘black-letter law’, doctrinalism induces students, their teachers, and practicing lawyers to write by heavily citing authorities. This encourages them to ‘speak with authority’, but at the same time to sound like technicians, who draft reports quite uncritically and unimaginatively. The author therefore proposes what he calls ‘decolonial selfies’, which underscores the role of student’s self-reflection and mentor’s participation in reflective writing. Those selfies translate the humanizing pedagogy that should inform decoloniality in personal reflections.