Month: March 2023

For this activity we split in groups of 4 people and each of us read and summed up one article.

The reading list was the following:

• Moon, J. (1999). Reflection in Learning and Professional Development : Theory and Practice. Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.

• Hyland, K. (1999) Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge. Applied Linguistics 20 (3), pp.341-367 

• Dall’Alba, G. (2005) Improving teaching: Enhancing ways of being university teachers. Higher Education Research & Development 24 (4), pp. 361–372 

• Macfarlane, B., & Gourlay, L. (2009) The Reflection Game: enacting the penitent self, Teaching in Higher Education, 14 (4), pp. 455-459 – The reflection of this article by me is summed up on the previous blog post.

Summary and table discussion:

— Improving teaching Dall’Alba 2005 – Dan

Theorising the way they teach. Learning as an experience and not just giving information. 

Is teaching more difficult than learning? The care you need to have when trying to create new experiences taking in consideration Dif backgrounds. Teaching in a collaborative way and questioning the authority of the teacher. 

The most important thing is the literature being presented to produce reflexivity.

Being able to think on your feet and work the room.  

— Hyland K 1999 – Sade

Citation is really important for stabilising credible writing ethos. Construction of academic facts.

Locating within a body of knowledge where the gaps are and the reflections that can me made. Giving reference to those who came before and locate your body of knowledge within. Building blocks of knowledge. 

State the difference between citations in social sciences and place engineering and physics below the average. 

Table discussion: citation being important to build on knowledge but also a way to keep the status quo of knowledge as may voices are not published.

— Moon, reflection in learning – Don

Is reflection conscious?

Reflection as seeing the same, mirror image. Confirmation bias? Reflection taken a crude meaning of the word. 

1st March, a summary of ‘The reflection game: enacting the penitent self (MacFarlane & Gourlay 2009)’

The article draws a parallel between reality shows and reflective assignment. The idea being that in refl assignment students are constantly asked to reflect on their journeys and show willingness to change, to give examples of misbehaviour and evidence change after the pain, much like some reality shows that attempt to change people’s lives.

The authors present with some advice to “win” the game, it covers the need to “eat the humble pie” and through reflection admit its mistakes and faults, using the workplace as example of errors. It follows by the second advice which is “revelation brings conversion” in which they highlight the conversion pathway where through reflection and after admitting to the errors you can give examples of how you’ve improved and applied the new way of doing things.  Finally it gives the advice of “toe the line – or else” which I understand as keeping the new learned way of doing things as a dogma without questioning any aspect of it or how it even applies to your reality. 

By following those steps the learner who is a teacher themselves can game the system and use reflective assignment in a way of conforming to the norm in vogue. It doesn’t dismiss this practice as a valid way of teaching but instead question its application without criticism and validity within different course and cohort scenarios. 

It suggests that reflection can be driven by a real critical evaluation of theory and in a way use reflection to loop back into the practice in place at the time.