Reflection is Illumination

Final Reflection

Reflectivity is key to that illumination (Taylor & Marienau, 2016, p. 134)

This course was a journey - a guided meditation through current practices, future focuses, and new approaches.

The particular challenge for me is the integration of that learning

.

What approaches can I change tomorrow? What new strategies and innovative teaching practices can I adopt?  Within my learning, reflections and posts, I have focused on considering my teaching context: workplace learning & adult learning.  Thus, with each section of learning, I’ve worked hard to consider how I can adapt this to my professional context.

When considering innovations in teaching and learning there is far more research and consideration for pedagogical approaches and less so for andragogical approaches. To some extent some of the research can be extended, but in so many ways, it’s a completely different teaching environment.

However, there are resources that continue to sit with me and reverberate through my mind. They are:

Facilitating Learning with the Adult Brain in Mind: A Conceptual and Practical Guide by Kathleen Taylor and Catherine Marienau. It was a structural and heavily researched best practise on andragogy.

And

Pedagogy of hope: global learning and the future of education by Douglas Bourn. To consider building hope into training was a profound realization for me. It’s ironic, considering when teaching crisis intervention techniques, we often teach on how to empower and build hope for those in crisis, but I never considered building hope into training itself.

While these resources, along with the course approach, encourages growth as an educator, I’m uncertain how significant my growth in new skills has been. Perhaps, instead, I believe my reflections and posts more accurately showcase the beginning of the dismantling of my approach to workplace training. Instead of skill acquisition, I am reframing. My hope is that this new perspective is the beginning of change. Since learning is change in action, and I have learned about entirely new approaches to teaching and learning, I am confident I am to implement said change into my work.

I am different simply in that I am still learning.

A visualization flying into the nebula Gum 29 and the star cluster Westerlund 2 at its core.

References Bourn, D. (2021). Pedagogy of hope: global learning and the future of education [Article]. International Journal of Development Education & Global Learning, 13(2), 65-78. https://doi.org/10.14324/IJDEGL.13.2.01 

Christou, T. M. (2010). Reflecting from the margins of education faculties: Refiguring the     humanist, and finding a space for story in history. Brock Education, 20(1), 49-63.

Taylor, K., & Marienau, C. (2016). Facilitating learning with the adult brain in mind : a conceptual and practical guide (First ed.). Jossey-Bass.ss.