CCTNetwork7Dec2016
Reflective Practice for Lifelong Learning
Graduate Program in Critical and Creative Thinking, University of Massachusetts Boston
Part of the series of fall 2016 Dialogues on Reflective Practice in a Changing World
On campus and online, Wednesday, December 7th, 7:00-8:30pm EST.
On campus: Wheatley Hall, 4th floor, room W04-170.
Google+ Hangout at:
http://tiny.cc/CCTRP2016 (also, see the
addition help on setting up hangout if you haven't used it previously)
The Hangout will be open around 10 minutes before the start time. When you go to join the online room, you will be able to request access to enter the Hangout, and then wait to be brought in - it may take a minute or two).
Reference:
Five Phase Format
Google+ Hangout tips: 1) Mute your microphone when not currently speaking (you can leave your video on continuously though), 2) use the Chat area in hangout only to take turns speaking: put your initials in, and then unmute and speak when you're next (and then call on the next person when done); 3) if you have audio trouble, it sometimes helps to just leave the hangout and then rejoin
For more information or to RSVP:
cct@umb.edu. Also, see information on previous events in this series for
October and
November.
Join us for one or more of these dialogues, free and open to the public. Reflective Practice is relevant to any field -- education, health care, organizational leadership, arts, and sciences, activism and many others. It refers to ways that people continually develop or change the practices that they use in their workplaces, schools, and lives. Through reflection, we examine our experiences and seek to understand how they can guide us to make those changes. In this series of participatory dialogues, we'll explore together how we might then relate our individual directions to the bigger picture -- the changing world around us. The sessions use a Dialogue Process format, centered around a group discussion where participants hear what others are saying and take a turn to speak when they are ready, and where the discussion emphasizes listening well, sharing thoughts-in-progress, and raising questions to help us get clear in supporting us as developing reflective practitioners. The goal is that learning emerges directly from the discussion among all participants, rather than through presentation or lecture.
Topic for December:
Reflective Practice for Lifelong Learning.
Possible issues: Reflection as a base for both improving our practices; developing practices that allow us to continue learning about ourselves and the world in addition to reaching an intended outcome; challenging situations as a source of learning; building long-term learning out of coming to understand our previous experiences.
Additional session pre-reading:
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From the Tedder and Biesta, authors of Learning from life and learning for life: Exploring the opportunities for biographical learning in the lives of adults, and researchers on the Learning Lives project:
- Over the past three decades the field of adult education has witnessed a strong rise in the use of biographical and life history approaches (see, e.g., Baacke & Schulze 1985; Alheit & Hoerning 1998; Alheit et al., 1995; Erben 1998; Bron & West 2000; Dominicé 2000; Goodson 2001; West et al., in press). The “turn to biographical methods” (Bron et al., 2005, p.12) can partly be understood against the background of rapid changes in modern societies where, as some have argued, “people need, constantly, to work on their biographies and find some authentic rhythms, in the lights of change, and to find the resources of hope ... to compose a biography, and some stability, meaning and authenticity, from the fragments of shifting experience” (ibid.; see also Biesta & Tedder in press). However, the ‘biographical turn’ can also be understood “as a reaction against those traditional forms of research, which marginalized the perspectives of subjects themselves or reduced social processes, including learning, to overly abstract entities or largely socially determined processes in which individuals had little space for creativity” (Bron et al., 2005, p.12). Such research, so Bron et al., claim “gave little or no credence to the idea that participants might shape, however contingently, the social and educational worlds they inhabited and might have important stories to tell in building a better, more nuanced understanding of learning and educational processes” (ibid.). The ‘biographical turn’ is thus not simply connected to the adoption of new research methods and methodologies in the study of adult learning. It is also motivated by an explicit intent to bring different dimensions of the learning of adults into view, and to understand these dimensions in relation to transformations in late- or post-modern societies, without reducing them to such transformations.
- One important advantage of the ‘biographical turn’ is that it allows for a perspective on the meaning and significance of learning through the life course that is distinctly different from the predominant view in contemporary lifelong learning policies. Whereas many such policies only seem to acknowledge the economic function of lifelong learning (see Biesta 2006), biographical and life history approaches have the potential to highlight what learning actually ‘means and does’ in the lives of adults, also, but not exclusively, in relation to questions of employability. As a consequence, the ‘biographical turn’ engages with a much broader conception of learning, one which does not restrict the meaning of learning to institutional definitions, but which includes the cognitive and reflexive dimensions of learning as much as the emotional, embodied, pre-reflexive and non-cognitive aspects of everyday learning processes and practices.
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- Alheit and Dausien define biographical learning as “a self-willed, ‘autopoietic’ accomplishment on the part of active subjects, in which they reflexively ‘organise’ their experience in such a way that they also generate personal coherence, identity, a meaning to their life history and a communicable, socially viable lifeworld perspective for guiding their actions” (Alheit & Dausien 2002, p.17). They argue that lifelong and lifewide learning are “tied at all times to the contexts of a specific biography” (ibid, p.15), which implies that “(w)ithout biography there can be no learning, without learning, no biography”
Source: Tedder, M., & Biesta, G. (2007, March). Learning from life and learning for life: Exploring the opportunities for biographical learning in the lives of adults. In ESREA Conference on Life History and Biography, Roskilde University, Denmark.
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