Ruby.H

A critical reflection on reflective practice

Part 2

After going through my experience and Dewey’s theory of reflective thought, I then went on to study and consider Kolb’s learning cycle, to see the importance of being able to identify you have had an ‘experience’ and the importance of having tools to be able to reflect on that experience. This learning cycle seems like a hard process to tell because all of the stages link together and is an on-going process or activity which leads to the next. Though, it seems more straightforward to just understand all the stages of the cycle, the difficulty is to know or find the stage at which I start to learn new thing or enter into the learning process and distinguish the difference between stages. It seems that everyone has individual way to the learning cycle and at first I found it was confusing as there were situations that happen all in one time and I felt difficult to figure out which stage was my entry point into the learning cycle. After thinking, studying a long time and experimenting with applying it to different experiences, I’ve realized that I am a multi learner which means I always seem to start in a different place/stage depending on the nature of the experience and this is my learning style. As a make-up artist and a styling student, the nature of my working environment is diverse as I always work with different people (photographers, models and art directors). For example, when I engage working in a photo-shoot or a styling project I start to learn at concrete experience as I always need to contact the people first to confirm things of the shoot and use Facebook to keep this contact and track progress. When I do someone’s make-up or create a styling I prefer to start learning with active experimentation, I actually find it comfortable to test it out on a friend or my sister before I can do it properly; when I am offered a work placement or asked to do a styling design for a group, I can only learn by abstract conceptualization as I always need to work out in my head first so I draw, collage and photograph my ideas first for myself rather than doing on the person’s face and body. For blogging, I created it by writing journals while I see reflection from my day-to-day activities and reading other people’s blogs to get ideas so active experimentation or reflective observation is the entry point into to the cycle. Having talked so far, from this I can conclude that I am a capable learner who can adapt the style of learning to any situations and I think my work and my study need this capability. From my professional to what I have been doing (writing journals), I can see I am a versatile learner and if one learning technique doesn’t seem working to me or not helping me at first I know I can always alter myself and try another one, I think this is an advantage to reflect on my on-going experience and learn from it.

Journal writing and critical reflection

As I mentioned in the beginning, writing is always the part that I am afraid of and have never had this habit, even in my first language! Before I began the journal writing activity I started to think and write some random words in my mother tongue language and mixed them with some other English words which I felt confident. Once having all the words I wanted to write in my journal I started to organise and translate them into a full sentence. After doing a couple time of thinking and writing by this way, I felt writing journal was not as boring as I thought before and it seemed fun! Until I practiced a little, I began to do some research in to thinkers who had written about journal writing and critical reflection. While doing the research I firstly came across to Jenifer Moon’s theory of journal writing and I found many similarities between us, as well as that many people have got a lot from journaling. Moon wrote that “A journal is a friend that is always there and is always a comfort. In bad moments I write, and usually end up feeling better. It reflects back to me things that I can learn about my world and myself. It represents a private space in my life, a beautiful solitude…” (Moon 1999:14-5) Well, I think it is true, when I write journal, it is all about my personal life and activities I do every day. It is a private world to record my experiences, thoughts and things that make me feel less stressed as there nobody will look at it and only myself have the key to enter it. At first, I found difficult to express my experience into words and flow them properly. Until then, I went on to looking at Gibbs model which I found helpful as it was clear and I could relate to it from looking at the frameworks of Reid and Moon. All these categories in the model seemed to give me some sort of structure or some guidelines to start and come back.

After studying Gibb’s reflective cycle, I thought it would be helpful if creating a ‘reflective learning log’ to approach the reflection from my experiences, several questions included and I put them in a particular order which suits me. Below is the log:

1. What was the event/the experience/activity?

2. What was I expecting to learn?

3. What have I learned?

4. What is significant about this learning for me?

5. How will this learning change my practice?

6. What were my feelings about what happened?

7. What went well?

8. What didn’t go so well?

9. What were the feelings of others involved?

The idea of creating a reflective learning log was to help me to identify the process of experience, from this, I can explore my feelings, make sense of what I know or what I don’t and combination of other purposes. I realized this approach of leaning also relates to the model by Peter Honey and Alan Mumford, the four stages they created which happens every time when I am involved in an experience. While looking at Gibbs reflective cycle and reviewing Honey and Mumford’s model I found that learning is not just a one go thing, it is an ongoing process and writing journal is seen as a form of reflective practice, on a whole, I think it is a tool to clear my minds to concentrate on the details or importance of the experience, it is also a safe and private space for emotions and a training ground for improving my writing skills.

Mary Louise Holly (1989: 20) makes this point well:

It is a reconstruction of experience and, like the diary, has both objective and subjective dimensions, but unlike diaries, the writer is (or becomes) aware of the difference. The journal as a 'service book' is implicitly a book that someone returns to. It serves purposes beyond recording events and pouring out thoughts and feelings... Like the diary, the journal is a place to 'let it all out'. But the journal is also a place for making sense of what is out... The journal is a working document.

Participating in blogging has been the most evidence to show me that this has given me a relationship with reflection which I have never considered before. As said earlier, it is a space which only belongs to me and for me to make reflection on things I experience every day. Writing blogs for this course, for me, has seemed the most useful way to know what I am heading to and who I am. It is a mirror to reflect how I cope and progress through parts and parts. Another important aspect I have found helpful by using this tool is reading other people reflections, they are not only helpful in my own reflection, also lead me to consider new things/ideas. As I put in my You tube video earlier, I hoped I could change my way of thinking by using these tools (blog, journal, diary), after having a short period of these experiences and researching into reflective practice thinkers and theories has made me realized that reflection plays a key role in learning and is an important part of progressing in professional practice. So therefore, I could say that so far, the reflection through my blogs has changed my way of thinking and given my reflection much more depth.

Finally, I am glad I pushed myself, like Adesola said at the beginning: “I won’t be able to see the depth of the pool until I jump into it”. Yes, it is true, though it made me feel really sick and scared at times but comparing the beginning to now, I’ve learnt so much from this experience and I really value this short period of time in my life!