Module 1 reflective practice - a few notes on the campus session

The Part 2 session was mainly on reflective practice and referred to Reader 2.
Lisa, Irini and Tom attended so you may want to check out their blogs.

We talked about 2 related words:

reflexivity - which is about an awareness of the role of self in the making of knowledge "positionality"

and

• reflectivity - which involves the ability to deconstruct (own) assumptions (Schon) and learn from the experience (Dewey)
• Therefore being reflective aids awakens of self and ability be reflexive
• the 'critical element' - recognition of the power dimensions of knowledge making and seeking to destabilise these for social practice.

(definitions from Fook's 'Reflexivity in research what it means in theory and practice' - powerpoint presentation)

We talked about keeping a journal and developing a sense of what is happening in terms of your 1. position and 2. reflecting upon people, places, things events (Paula's 'the nouns)



2 group exercises - the idea of reflection is about doing and thinking about the doing - in this exercise doing was interpreted as 'observation' looking at how others did things within a particular place (space)

1. people went to the Quad in the main building and 'observed' movement for around 5 minutes - and took notes - some photos (not of individuals) - an then fed back to the group about what the observed

the idea was to look and reflect on the experience and record some of what was observed

in this exercise the main point was to focus on movement - interesting how people interpreted movement - as groups of people - as the flow around the rom - as individual movement




2. people then went to the Quad and this time observed about the various types of 'learning' or communication taking place - so how people were connecting with learning in this space - around 70% of language in non-verbal - no other instructions were given

feedback form those who did the observations - people were alone and in groups - interacting and behaving in different ways - even the idea of looking for 'learning' might have been an interpretation -  reflecting on something brings meaning to the activity

this might also relate to social learning - also in Part 3
http://infed.org/mobi/the-socialsituational-orientation-to-learning/