I’ve been asked to reflect on my trajectory through higher education and to be honest, I’ve been having trouble with the overabundance of definitions for reflection. Words tend to use their power when they are overused, and I had come to believe that the word was used in the sense of a passive contemplation. I wasn’t happy that reflection, in that sense, had any power to describe what I do in practice. Until yesterday.

While attempting to track down the recommended text for my coursework (ED5300) I stumbled across an excerpt from Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher by Stephen Brookfield. He starts with the declaration “we teach to change the world”. I was so encouraged by this that I almost blurted it out to a fellow cyclist on my ride into work today, when he bemoaned the fact that he would rather be riding but had to find a way to pay the bills. That, my friend, is not all there is to work and play.

I believe in the transformative power of education. Education has the power to change lives, starting with my own. When I hear declarations like Brookfield’s I am inspired to continue developing academically so that I bring that power to others. But there was something more that appealed to me in his idea that reflection was about hunting assumptions.

Hunting assumptions for me becomes the primal intellectual urge. It is not just something I can do, but something that I must.

Education as an industry has been built upon assumptions that no longer apply. We see the crushing weight of student loans in the United States in an economic environment which makes it nearly impossible to earn enough to pay them back. We see student activists in South America demanding education be returned to the people, free for all and guaranteed by the government. We see similar student uprisings against fee-hikes in the UK and other global unrest that some are calling a metamovement.

So as I begin to reflect on my academic trajectory, I do so with a warrior stance.

Highly recommend reading below. How do you approach reflection in practice? Is it something you bring actively, powerfully?

Brookfield, S. (1995). The getting of wisdom: What critically reflective teaching is and why it’s important. Retrieved from http://www.ronmilon.com/Documents/The%20Getting%20of%20Wisdom.doc