"Without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, there’s really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness doesn’t come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious, and often furious."
-Maxine Greene
Ontario College of Teachers (OCT) – A Self Reflective Professional Learning Tool
The core values that underpin my role as an educator are…accessibility, diversity, inclusion and acceptance.
Others would say that as an educator I believe in and stand firmly for…cultivating opportunities for joy, inspiring a passion for learning, and encouraging students to find their own self-empowerment.
Unique dimensions and actions associated with my professional practice include…music making as not merely a “curricular subject” in my classroom but as a means to engage in all learning.
Reflection is in-depth review of events, either alone – say, in a journal – or with critical support with a supervisor or group. The reflector attempts to work out what happened, what they thought or felt about it, who was involved, when and where, what these others might have experienced and thought and felt about it from their own perspective. Most significantly, the reflector considers WHY?, and studies significant theory and texts from the wider sphere. It is to bring experiences into focus from as many angles as possible: people, place, relationships, timing, chronology, causality, connections, the social and political context, and so on. Seemingly innocent details might prove to be key; seemingly vital details may be irrelevant. Reflection might prove something thought to be vital to be insignificant, or lead to insight about something unnoticed at the time, pinpointing perhaps when the seemingly innocent detail was missed.
Reflexivity is finding strategies to question our own attitudes, theories- in-use, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions; to understand our complex roles in relation to others. It develops responsible and ethical action, such as becoming aware of how much our ways of being are culturally determined; other peoples have very different expectations and norms (Bager-Charleson, 2010). To be reflexive is to examine, for example, the limits of our knowledge, of how our own behaviour plays into organisational structures counter to our own personal and professional values, and why such practices might marginalise groups or exclude individuals. It is questioning how congruent our actions are with our espoused values and theories (e.g. about religion or gender).
Delderfield, R., & Bolton, G. (2018). Reflective Practice: An Introduction. In G. Bolton & R. Delderfield (Authors), Reflective Practice (5th ed., pp. 9-10). London, UK: Sage.
Course Work
Article Reflections - Annotated Bibliographies Intro to Music Ed 1800A Western University