Over a cuppa: prompts to reflect on learning and teaching #16 – Tending your reflection garden

This is the 16th post in Over a Cuppa, a series which prompts you to reflect on learning and teaching during the time it takes to make and drink a cuppa.

What a year! As it closes, I hope you have the opportunity for a reflective break in whatever form most nourishes you. I will be spending time with friends and family, visiting the beach, gardening, cooking, reading and ruminating. Thinking of the sensory immersion of the upcoming holidays – especially the beach – I can already feel my shoulders loosening.

While relaxing, I will be idly considering questions such as: What have been the most memorable experiences of 2021? What have I learnt? How have I spent my time and energy this year? Is this how I want to continue using these finite and precious resources? What am I grateful for this year? What am I proud of accomplishing? What would I like to do differently in the new year?

This is a different type of reflection from the learning and teaching prompts I have written about in previous posts. The aim of these posts has been to ask questions (what are your teaching intentions? What are your memories of learning? What makes your teaching shine?), build a reflection toolkit of readings and resources (lenses for reflection, go to resources,  circular reflection), and share ideas that develop reflective practice: put on your teaching cloak, make your learning visible to students, and use your senses.

I believe reflection during the holidays still fits within what Harvey, Coulson and McMaugh (2016) call the “ecology of reflection” which they describe as the “situational, contextual and complex … setting … for reflective practice.” They write: “Ecology is used in its broadest sense of an holistic, interconnected system such as those used in human ecology, social ecology and systems theory … which examine the bidirectional interrelationship between humans and environments.”

Hence the prompt for this post: tend your reflection garden. By this, I mean focus your reflective skills towards yourself. If you are fortunate enough to have a break, what activities will allow you to renew your energy? How can you recharge in order to continue the work of caring and connecting with students and guiding their learning? What keeps you in balance?

This will be the final post in Over a Cuppa, at least for now. In the process of writing these posts, I have read (or reread) several books, including Schön’s (1983) The Reflective Practitioner; hook’s (1994) Teaching to Transgress; Brookfield’s (2017) Becoming a critically reflective teacher; Carter’s (2020) Academic Identity and the Place of Stories, and, most recently, Ashwin et al’s (2020) Reflective Teaching in Higher Education. For each post, my colleague Fidel Fernando created an original digital artwork. Sadly (for us), he is leaving Macquarie University for an exciting opportunity at the University of Technology, Sydney.

There is still more reading and thinking to do about reflection, but this will take different forms. Over a cuppa will be replaced with a new series on the ABCs of pedagogy, designed to give teachers the language to describe their practice. This may be for the purposes of reflection, but can also encompass scholarship, career progression and recognition.

Harvey, M., Coulson, D., & McMaugh, A. (2016). Towards a theory of the Ecology of Reflection: Reflective practice for experiential learning in higher education. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.14453/jutlp.v13i2.2

Catch up on previous posts in this series:

Image created by Fidel Fernando