Reflective learning is a hallmark of higher education, turning new knowledge and experiences into sparks that light curiosity in students. Encounters with unfamiliar ideas become opportunities to question outdated beliefs and biases.
However, in the climate of neoliberal academia, where the strapline of university education is slowly becoming “value for money, at all costs”, reflective learning is losing its radical edge. Reflection is increasingly framed as a tool that aids students’ employability, developing their insights into skill sets and encounters with professional practice, above all else. As pioneering critical educator bell hooks remarked: “The engaged voice must never be fixed and absolute but always changing, always evolving in dialogue with a world beyond itself.”
When reflection is approached as a tick-box process, it loses its potential for inviting students to question their personal beliefs and surrounding worlds.
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Here are four practical strategies, informed by my research on reflection as a transformative tool in disability studies curricula, to help you overcome common barriers to reflection that enables transgressive learning.
1. Integrate reflection with course values and content
Generic guidance surrounding reflective learning sets students up to fail. Reflection is an “ambiguous notion”, with many people uncertain of what it entails, as Marc Clarà from the University of Lleida suggests in the Journal of Teacher Education.
Use what you already teach on your course as the starting point. Many educators rely on traditional frameworks – such as John Dewey’s model of reflection (1910) or Graham Gibbs’ reflective cycle (1988) – as an introduction. However, are decades-old theories the most compelling routes into reflective learning for the students of today?
Make connections between the process of reflection (for example, considering how new ideas and experiences complicate previously held beliefs) and values, topics and debates relevant to your course. Ask yourself: what do students already do on the course that is a form of reflection? How can you teach them about reflection in a way that extends these processes, making them more critical and rigorous?
2. Be explicit about what tokenistic approaches to reflection look like
Since reflection is a buzzword in academia and beyond, you should be explicit from the start about the dangers of tokenistic approaches.
As educators David Carless and Kennedy Kam Ho Chan from the University of Hong Kong argue, “discussing exemplars of student work” is a time-tested method to support learning. However, you can also reverse this technique by prompting students to highlight flaws in shallow approaches to reflection.
For example, ask students to consider an instance when a public figure spoke in a disingenuous way about learning from their mistakes. Ask why they think the person brushed over uncomfortable truths they should acknowledge? How did they fail to explore different ways of understanding their beliefs and behaviour?
Explain how these tactics enable people to avoid reflecting on their deep-seated beliefs.
3. Facilitate collaborative approaches to reflection
Reflection can resemble little more than navel-gazing when approached as an individual pursuit. In White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, academic Robin DiAngelo suggests that, when left to their own devices, white people typically fail to reflect on their “complicity” with “systems of inequity and domination”. Students embrace new ways of thinking through dialogue with other people.
To facilitate collaborative reflection on the disability studies course I lead, I organise students into small groups (encouraging them to work outside their usual friendships) and provide them with prompts to share recent moments when they questioned their assumptions surrounding disability.
As one student who also participated in my research explained, collaborative approaches encourage class groups to mix with each other instead of only sharing perspectives with their friends, who probably “think in the same sort of way”. By reflecting with individuals from different backgrounds, students are more likely to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions.
4. Challenge unequal power dynamics
Collaborative approaches to reflection are aligned with social justice values, encouraging students to learn from one another’s experiences of the world. However, group-based reflection is not necessarily a tool that promotes equality in and of itself.
Unequal power relations are rife in group discussions. Sociologists Jennifer Lee (Indiana University Bloomington) and Janice McCabe (Dartmouth College) highlight that, in contrast to women, men are more likely to “speak out without raising hands, interrupt, and engage in prolonged conversations” in university classes.
When those in positions of privilege dominate group dynamics, their worldviews shape – and distort – reflections, rather than these being developed through a multitude of perspectives. Providing flip-chart paper and pens – or digital versions of these tools, such as Padlet or Mentimeter – gives students opportunities to share their thoughts in written, as well as verbal, formats. These can make communication more accessible for some individuals. Students can also take turns facilitating group discussions, inviting different members to contribute perspectives, so conversations are not monopolised by one or two individuals.
You already have the tools to engage students with reflective learning in more meaningful ways. Steer clear of generic approaches and instead contextualise reflection by connecting it to values and topics relevant to your course and the students you teach.
Ella Houston is a senior lecturer and core member of the Centre for Culture and Disability Studies at Liverpool Hope University.
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