Archives: December 2013

Postdocs – some home truths

The changing face of the academic world, the major cuts in funding, the new pressures faced by academics are also reflected in the changing role of the postdoc. While in the past newly qualified doctoral students or those in the writing up stage would spend a great deal of time writing up grant applications for

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A common student query…What should I reflect on?

This is probably the most common question my students ask… Reflective analyses form an part of their course work and they may be quite disillusioned with ‘reflecting’ when all they want to, from their perspective, is to ‘do’/ ‘to create’/ ‘to make’. They may just resist reflection and this can be a difficult concept for

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Critical Reflection and Teaching

Some of my reading for this week included extracts from Stephen D. Brookfield (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass) One passage quite early on in the book drew my attention: ‘What critical reflection means for our teaching’ (38-48) Here Brookfield discusses the ‘emotive’ aspect not just of teaching, but also of being reflective

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On reflection (my third teaching principle)

Further to a previous post (http://wp.me/p2kETw-59) over the past few weeks I have been thinking more deeply about the concept of reflection. Reading through current literature on the subject, I realised that there was a network of words that kept cropping up. Often these are isolated and discussed as free-standing concepts, sometimes they are not.

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