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3. Thinking It Through
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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chapter three Thinking It Through “I would say just ‘confusion.’ It was a state of confusion,” Stephanie Badavis recalls of her return to campus after a trip to Guatemala building a house with Habitat for Humanity. Stephanie, who had traveled frequently with her family growing up, did not expect the Habitat experience to be life changing. “I was excited about doing the Habitat house, but I think my expectations were really low compared with what I got out of it. I realized that this was absolutely different from anything I had ever seen.” The disorientation created by immersion in such a different culture, however, by itself was not enough to create lasting change in Stephanie’s life. Transformation emerged as she continued to reflect on the experience afterward. “I couldn’t stop talking about it for a month. And it was difficult because people didn’t understand. I would describe to them what I saw and to them it was just another poor area and another city. To me it was something completely different.” Stephanie’s intense need to talk out her experience illustrates a vital element of transformative learning—the pivotal role of critical reflection. Long ago, John Dewey (1997) noted that experience alone isn’t educative; only when experience is paired with reflection is learning likely to occur and to last. It’s no surprise that institutions of higher education seek to foster critical thinking and reflective practices in their students. We want to encourage our students not simply to think different thoughts but also to think those thoughts differently. The intention is not to eradicate particular conclusions , although this is sometimes a concern for both students and parents. Instead, the goal is learning and embracing the process of thinking carefully , analytically, and empathically, which may result in taking up new perspectives or recommitting to prior conclusions and beliefs. 42 Transforming Students With students engaging in daily classroom discussions and writing countless papers, reflection might seem so common in higher education that it barely merits discussion. However studies like Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift (2011) suggest that students are not learning as much, or as consistently, in college as we might want or assume. Recent research from the Wabash National Study demonstrates that “reflective learning was found to have a unique positive association with first-year growth in both critical-thinking skills and the need for cognition [e.g., inclination to inquiry and pursue life-long learning] . . . [and also] a significant positive link with four-year growth in critical thinking skills” (Pascarella and Blaich 2013). Research also reveals that critical examination of the assumptions underlying our current ways of seeing and being in the world is at the core of the transformative process (Taylor 1998). In fact, in her examination of undergraduate students, Sabra Brock (2011) found reflection to be the most consistent predictor of self-reported transformative learning. As Paulo Freire (1970) asserted long ago, “An act of learning can be called transformative only if it involves a fundamental questioning and reordering of how one thinks or acts” (139). Sharan Merriam (2004) concurs: “Having an experience is not enough to effect a transformation. . . . What is valuable is not the experience itself but the intellectual growth that follows the process of reflecting on experience. Effective learning follows not from a positive experience but from effective reflection” (62). Some students may be practiced at reflection when they arrive at college , although even the most skilled will benefit from continued guidance (King and Kitchener 1994). To other students, reflection may feel like a foreign process. It is certainly not intuitive for everyone, especially at this developmental stage, and students may not even recognize it as a valuable component of the learning process. The good news is that this fundamental skill can be learned. With instruction and encouragement, all students can develop their abilities to critically examine their underlying beliefs and assumptions when they find them challenged. Like any learned skill, however , critical reflection must be practiced. This chapter is about recognizing and fostering this process when it is happening and facilitating it when it is not. [44.223.37.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:33 GMT) Thinking It Through 43 The Nature of Critical Reflection Critical reflection involves dismantling previously held thought and belief constructions, examining them from different...