REMEMBERING THE CHILDREN: The Art and Science of Reflection

‘Remembering the Children’ is an illustration by Moasenla, a portraitist/illustrator from Mokokchung, Nagaland. Contact her through Instagram: @the_exultant_painter; or e-mail: asenari67@gmail.com

‘Remembering the Children’ is an illustration by Moasenla, a portraitist/illustrator from Mokokchung, Nagaland. Contact her through Instagram: @the_exultant_painter; or e-mail: asenari67@gmail.com

Dr Brainerd Prince

In the last issue we left the story at how we discover our life’s calling and inspiration for our research through a life-transforming experience, which we called the experience of the children under the bridge. But the story only begins with that experience. There is a long way to go before we begin to do something significant with it.

Even after we experience a major life-changing event or a series of events that clearly point us to a particular direction that is worthy of our life’s pursuit or research, it is not an easy task to give a specific name to it. Experiences have many facets to them, evoking a multitude of emotions within us. There are so many aspects to our experience, that it takes careful thinking or reflection to unpack it and to pinpoint precisely to what in the experience that caught our deep attention.

For that to happen, we need to name that which caught our attention. Words are powerful, in that, they give shape and size to our feelings and thoughts. Therefore, discovering the right words to articulate the theme that caught our attention is of utmost importance. Those who have had experience in higher education would know both the excruciating pain and the immense value of finding the right word to express something. The chosen word gives shape to the idea and direction to what we want to do with it. 

There are three easy steps that will help us arrive at an appropriate name for the experience which will give direction to our life’s quest and research. It begins with (a) reflective thinking that results in (b) a narrative writing which would then culminate with a (c) an abstraction of the theme. 

While I am not claiming that this is the only way to arrive at a theme, I have found it to be a useful process, as it offers a structure and a format to present something that otherwise could be purely personal and subjective. In this issue let us look at the first step, reflective thinking.

Reflective thinking helps us to conceptualize the event and look at it from various points of view. Reflective thinking is a part of the critical thinking process that encapsulates the processes of analyzing and making judgements about what has happened, in our case, the defining event(s). For John Dewey, reflection is ‘a kind of thinking that consists in turning a subject over in the mind and giving it serious thought’. He understood it as ‘an active, persistent, and careful consideration of a belief or supposed form of knowledge, of the grounds that support that knowledge, and the further conclusions to which that knowledge leads’ (Dewey, 1993). Applying Dewey to our case, it is an active and persistent turning of the ‘event’ and our knowledge of that event that we received in the experience, over in our mind and giving it serious thought. The goal is to arrive at the ‘conclusions’ that summarize the experience best, which is what I am calling the theme.

Reflective thinking both gives and strengthens our self-awareness. We are aware of who we are only in the act of reflective thinking. We might be busy doing so many things, reacting and responding to the many stimuli that come our way, that in the process we could become ignorant of who we are or who we are becoming. Reflective thinking heightens self-awareness. 

Furthermore, it has an inbuilt mechanism for self-growth. Reflective thinking is able to assess the limits of one’s self understanding while also assessing what one is lacking and then probe how one can bridge that gap resulting in self-growth. Gibbs states it best when he writes, ‘It is not sufficient simply to have an experience in order to learn. Without reflecting upon this experience, it may quickly be forgotten, or its learning potential lost. It is from the feelings and thoughts emerging from this reflection that generalisations or concepts can be generated. And it is generalisations that allow new situations to be tackled effectively’ (Gibbs 1988).

Griffith and Frieden (2000) differentiate between three types of reflective thinking: a) pre-reflective b) quasi reflective c) reflective thinking (the highest level of reflective thinking).In the pre-reflective thinking level, knowledge is either gained by direct observation or from an authority figure and it is taken to be absolutely correct and certain. The persons using pre-reflective thinking see problems in concrete but simplistic ways. 

At the quasi-reflective level, individuals begin to reason and recognized that handling ill-structured problems can be complicated, and knowledge is uncertain. Quasi-reflective thinkers could not rely on themselves dealing with complicated problems.

However, at the highest level of reflective thinking individuals recognize that knowledge is obtained from a variety of sources and is best understood in relationship to a specific context. Although it may be impossible to reach a perfect judgment about a given problem, some judgments might be more accurate than others.

Rodgers (2002) lists the six phases of reflective thinking that she has derived from Dewey’s writings:

1.    an experience;

2.    spontaneous interpretation of the experience;

3.    naming the problem(s) or the question(s) that arises out of the experience;

4.    generating possible explanations for the problem(s) or question(s) posed;

5.    ramifying the explanations into full-blown hypotheses;

6.    experimenting or testing the selected hypothesis.

In the bookLearning by Doing, Gibbs (1988) outlines seven stages for a ‘Structured Debriefing’, which are based on Kolb’s (1984) Experiential Learning Cyclewhich encourages deeper reflection:

1.    Description: What is the stimulant for reflection? (incident, event, theoretical idea) What are you going to reflect on?
2.    Feelings: What were your reactions and feelings?

3.    Evaluation: What was good and bad about the experience? Make value judgements.

4.    Analysis: What sense can you make of the situation? Bring in ideas from outside the experience to help you. What was really going on?

5.    Conclusions (general): What can be concluded, in a general sense, from these experiences and the analyses you have undertaken?

6.    Conclusions (specific): What can be concluded about your own specific, unique, personal situation or ways of working?

7.    Personal Action plans: What are you going to do differently in this type of situation next time? What steps are you going to take on the basis of what you have learnt?

In both Rodgers and Gibbs work, there is a complete cycle that begins with the event which is the stimulant for reflection to testing out personal action plans. Based on the various above models, I propose the following stages for reflective thinking when it is applied to an event with a view to articulate a theme. The steps of reflective thinking that is focused on identifying a theme of an event are:

1.    Description or interpretation of the event;

2.    Identifying the feelings and reactions one had;

3.    Evaluating and analyzing the event to understand the event;

4.    Naming the problem or theme and list the questions that arises out of the experience.

This seamlessly leads us to the next stage of narrative writing which will help to give shape and boundaries to our reflective thinking. Moving from the world of speech or thought to the written world through the act of writing is the first step in making a transition from the lived world to the symbolic world of text. What may appear to be a simple process, if one was literate, entails complex epistemological commitments. While this is not the place to go into them, we must recognize that ‘putting into writing’ is the very first step in becoming an academic researcher. The act of writing down and linguistically re-presenting the world of experiences gives us entry to the world of texts. That is why students however young are often encouraged to keep a diary, or a journal and perhaps in today’s time a blog, that gives them an opportunity to put into word their life experiences. But this we will explore in the next issue.

Dr Brainerd Prince is the Associate Professor of Practice, and Director, Centre for Thinking, Language and Communication, Plaksha University.



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