Thinking about Reflection
After our conversation on Monday the issue of how reflection is used and how it is conceived became salient to me. Is that we pretend to engage in reflective practices and do so only nominally, that is through "naming" it but without considering if these reflective practices are indeed critical?
Have we done this in class on Monday since not everyone was really willing to engage with the issue? Or through my "monopolizing" of the discourse for what?? 4 hours?!?!
Thoughts????
posted by Patrick K. Schmidt @ 3:30 PM
1 Comments:
It is easy for one to interpret reflection as a passive process; it would be foolish of us to say that a great portion of reflection is not. Think about a time you have seen a group of students reflecting. When you have walked into a classroom of “typical” (passive) reflectors, there would be little intellectual engagement on the part of the students and teacher.
There is more to reflection than thinking about the past. Jennifer Haines point attention to the vast number of references to reflection around the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy. She further states that “the President said over and over again on Monday that we need to reflect on the events of 9/11, but he should have said, remember. “
Patrick K. Schmidt urges us to “{consider] if these reflective practices are indeed critical.” So, we must figure out what critical reflection is. As a matter of fact, Joan Wink (yes, the famous Wink) uses the words of Paulo Freire to call teachers “to name, to reflect critically, to act,” (Wink, Critical Pedagogy: Notes From the Real World, p. 3). So, now we REALLY need to define this thing.
Well, since this is just a little ol’ blog, I’ll hurry things up and let you know what I think critical reflection is. It’s recalling an event and replaying it in our minds in different ways: it’s changing the scenerio. Add variables, remove variables. Common reflection questions are “What would have happened if I had done this,” and “What would the outcome have been if this had been changed.” This reflection period is a time of deconstruction. We have to destroy our preconceived notions of “meaning” before we can make meaning, and reflection helps to make meaning. And, from making meaning, we can change ourselves and, in turn. the world.
I guess reflection can be a powerful thing, huh?
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