Reflection - an essential component of story practice

Most university students these days are asked to engage in a form of reflective practice as an assessable component of their work. In days gone by, this was the domain of the Social Work and Psychology Departments, but now, everyone from Engineers to Business Management students are being asked to reflect on their study and work activities.

Some adults actually engage in reflective activities quite comfortably: these activities include writing journals, movement and dance, drawing and painting 'without rules'.

Students are often asked to reflect on the work-based activities that form part of the course in which they are enrolled. These include internships, placements, and Industry Based Learning (IBL). While there are slight differences between all these activities, essentially they each involve a form of on-the-job training that compliments the theoretical, classroom-based studies.

Over the years I have taught students in wide-ranging settings, from Secondary Education, TAFE and Uni to adult education. As I teach mainly career and work-related subjects, invariably lessons include one or more on 'how to engage in reflective practice'. I have market hundreds of assignments over the years, and I can say that most people do not do this part very well at all. I have some grounds for blaming our education system for avoiding this less-scientific-rational activity that is output rather than outcome or results based. Apart from the 'airy-fairy' label, it is something many other teachers avoid wherever possible, because they find it so hard to assess. Some questions I have been asked include, 'Do you assess a student for honesty, higher level self-awareness or grammatical accuracy?' 'Does a student who digs deeper into his psyche and uncovers the muck and mire obtain bonus points over a student whose life appears to have been one everlasting bed of roses?' I have even been handed the genderist comment, 'Boys are disadvantaged in this kind of activity. Males just don't DO reflection very well!'

Reflection essentially means looking inside yourself and expressing what you find, to yourself and maybe to others. There is some anxiety around this. A lot of the problem stems from constraints placed on us by our own societies. Most of us love to read or hear stories about relationship breakdowns, financial failures, mental fragility, monumental mistakes and the like, but this has to be in a particular context. In the weekend papers or a Nicholas Sparks box-of-tissues novel, we expect to have our emotions torn asunder as we grapple with the things that make us human. But, when it comes to expressing these same emotions from a personal perspective, we are completely clueless!

Of course, there is also the issue that there are right places and wrong places to be reflective: imagine a job interview where the applicant discusses a mistake she made that cost the company a small fortune - no matter how much she has learned from this episode, you can pretty well guarantee she won't be on the list of finalists. In so many ways, we are taught to bury our failings, our weaknesses, and along with these a large chunk of ourselves. So it is no wonder that teachers and students alike baulk at the idea of reflection. And it is no wonder that as people we walk around as ghosts of ourselves - after all, it is only through reflection that we can feel truly alive?

So, what is reflection, how does it make us feel alive, and why is it an essential part of story practice? (stay tuned, more coming soon ...)