Over a cuppa: prompts to reflect on learning and teaching #11 – Questioning

This is the 11th post in Over a cuppa, a series which offers prompts to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa.

If I had to sum up reflection in one word I would say: questioning. Reflection treats teaching as an experimental learning process.

After (too much) thinking for one word, I discovered Reflective Teaching in Higher Education (2020) has questions as its table of contents. It opens: Who are we as teachers and who are our students? How can we develop the quality of our teaching? Then questions on spaces, curriculum, communication, inclusion… It ends: How do we develop a career-long fascination with teaching? How does reflective teaching contribute to society? I’ll let you know when my copy arrives! In the meantime, the website includes useful individual and group activities.

I am currently reading Sarah Krasnostein’s (2021) The Believer: Encounters with Love, Death & Faith, a work of narrative non-fiction that resists description. Krasnostein writes:

It is thinking—in the specific sense of an honest interior conversation that tries to distinguish between right and wrong, both factually and morally—that anchors the human world. Arendt speaks of the willingness to hold these inward interrogations as the disposition to live with oneself (p 45).

Bell hooks’ (1994) in Teaching to Transgress offers the inward interrogations of reflection as a process of imagination:

Excitement in higher education was viewed as potentially disruptive of the atmosphere of seriousness assumed to be essential to the learning process … Critical reflection on my experience as a student in unexciting classrooms enabled me not only to imagine that the classroom could be exciting but that this excitement could co-exist with and even stimulate serious intellectual and/or academic engagement (p 7).

Initially I thought this post would ask ‘why reflect?’ but the process of writing it, and the books I am reading, made this seem like asking ‘why think?’ or ‘why imagine?’ How could we do otherwise?

Catch up on previous posts in this series:

Access previous ‘Reflection’ posts at this link.