The Green Cup

(A note on my title…)

Reflection has become a leading buzz word in education. How much do you reflect on your practice of education? Reflective practice is important, isn’t it? You certainly can’t make it through a graduate course in education today without a little reflection along the way.

So just what is reflection?

I mentioned elsewhere recently that one of my favorite websites was Philosophy Bites. The website makes podcasts available – podcasts of interviews with leading academics in the field today. They discuss, well, philosophy. And occasionally an issue comes up that touches on something I write about.

I came across this interview at Philosophy Bites from back in August with Professor MM Mabe. The topic is Socrates and the Socratic Method. I downloaded it to my iPod and listened to it on a warm day recently while I was outside working on a flower bed.

Socrates held the position that the unexamined life is not worth living. What does that mean? From Mabe:

Think of it as a life… What he’s asking us to consider is a whole life, not a collection of goods that we might gather together one day or the next…

Nigel Warburton:

This ancient injunction, “know thyself:” and you might think that the implication is that you have to introspect, go away to the wilderness and think about your life apart from other people. But for Socrates, it’s an essentially social activity.

Mabe:

I think that’s right. Supposing you try to work out what it is to be reflective… I think what Socrates thinks being reflective is, is having a perspective on what you think that is detached, so that you can look at, so that you can reflect on the things that you think, as it were, from outside. One of the ways that you can do that best is actually in conversation. What conversations do is provide you with these different perspectives.

Mabe at one point in the 12-minute explains that the purpose of this reflective process is to ensure that your own principles and processes of reasoning are honest and consistent.

I think we tend to see reflection as introspective, and we tend to think its purpose is to help us see some deeper truth about a particular pedagogy or curriculum. The truth is more Socratic, I think. We need to reflect in groups – cooperative reflection, if you will. And we need to do it to learn things about ourselves as educators.

You can listen to the podcast here…

For some time now I’ve followed higher education issues and written about them at the Universities Weblog for Creative Weblogging. I’ve worked in higher education in the past – taught credited classes as an adjunct, worked in a financial aid office, been a counselor for a TRIO program (Veterans Upward Bound), worked as a grant writer in a private college’s advancement office, and help manage an adult degree program for night class students. But at the moment my only connection with higher ed is the occasional grad course I take. And Creative Weblogging sold the Universities Weblog domain name last month, so I’m no longer blogging there.

Perhaps something will come up. It will be hard for me to stop paying attention to higher ed issues altogether. But for now, I guess I’m out of higher ed…

I managed to get registered for the West Virginia Reading Research Symposium that’s comign up in March. Last year’s symposium was exciting. So far I haven’t seen an agenda or any kinds to tell me who will be atthis one…