Campus Session Activities 8th Feb 2011 3835

Mapping the Knowledge of Professional Practice

Work on your own and list the things you need to know in order to be a professional practitioner what do you need to know in your sector?

Join a group and share what you have produced so far and then work together on the graphical representation and present this to the whole group and discuss.

Triggering questions you would like to do an extended inquiry on.

Reflect on these and use them as a stimulus to suggest questions worthy of an inquiry.
Identify any gaps between your competency and capability


Establishing question(s) of inquiry

Find a partner and tell them your big professional question and why it’s important to you. Then listen to their question and why it’s important to them
Move on to new partner and tell them what your previous partner told you and listen to what their previous partner told them.
Repeat
The report back to the group what their last partner told them.
Listen for your own question reported back – have you changed the question in any way? Make a note of this and use for future reference

Insider Inquiry

In groups – identify 3 opportunities and 3 challenges in carrying out an inquiry in the workplace or in an arena of professional practice. How would you deal with these and report back.

The groups agreed to blog their findings – so look out for these among the blogs

Networking and Special Interest Groups (SIG)

In teams work on the following points and report back to the main group where we will receive the thinking

How should SIGs form in BAPP?
How many SIGs should we be a member of?
How can we decide membership of SIG?
Should they limited or open?
How much participation is expected?
What responsibilities should we have to the SIG?
What technologies can we use to support communication?
Any other points?

Digital CV

Follow through this link to a BBC article on new ways of selling yourself and check out the You tube video of an interactive CV. I think it's engaging and it obviously worked as he got a job ...

Critical Reflection Part 2

The purpose of the critical reflection is to demonstrate how practice has been transformed in any way, as a result of learning achieved on the module. This learning may have come from any of the following:

• tasks you have completed
• discussions either real or virtual with peers/classmates/colleagues
• reading published texts
• viewing blog posts
• self reflection
• practice
• learning log/diary/journal

There were three broad themes covered in the module:

• Communications Technologies
• Reflection
• Networking

You might ask yourself about how deeper engagement with these themes have impacted on both your learning and practice. What knowledge have you acquired as a result? One draft I have read mentioned that networking was taken to a more advanced stage with the establishment of a community of practice where knowledge is shared. It could be the case that your learning log shows how your perceptions have changed over time or in response to some new stimuli eg peers, published knowledge, practice.

The act of reflection can result in profound changes such as moving from:

Lacking self awareness ......Self Aware
Accepting ...... Questioning
Descriptive ..... Analytical
Reserved ..... Open
Unassertive ......Assertive
Doing ......Thinking

When presenting your critical reflection it would be good to tell us how you have learned. What do you do differently as a result of the learning and knowledge? For instance, instead of telling us that you have applied Gardner’s theories on multiple intelligences to your practice you should demonstrate how. Illustrate the change with an explanation. If it’s a complicated entity that has changed you might refer us to an appropriate appendix. Appendices are a tool which are useful in providing a back story. They provide the opportunity to enhance the main body of text.

You need to consider your appendices carefully. Position yourself at the centre of a myriad of evidence – e.g. Blog comments, learning diary entries, flickr photos etc, blog posts and sift through this evidence and choose the ones which best tell the story of your critical reflection. Some of the tasks you did may have been incidental. You may have posted a long blog on professional networking but perhaps the learning and transformation to you came about from a comment which someone made. Other academic advisors such as Alan and Adesola have written guidance on this topic which you could consult. After you have drafted up your portfolio for assessment it would be useful to re-read these blogs and self assess and come to a judgement about whether you have addressed the points they have made.

You have worked so hard on the tasks and the readings related to module. It’s now time to hone this mass of evidence into shape.

Some lines on lines of inquiry

I came across a funny greetings card at the weekend. It was a photo of a rather dashing woman and written beside her imposing image was the line, “My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance”. So while I am not dashing in any way, I decided to sweep the blogs with more than a glance in the last few days and was thrilled to see that some fascinating ideas are already emerging, touching on topics worthy of further inquiry. What’s also pleasing to note is that these topics of interest have stimulated much comment in our blogosphere.

From this activity we are beginning to see embryonic professional networks which could in the future form the basis of Subject Interest Groups. Stacey Wilson’s enthusiasm and inspiring curiosity on the topic of how professional practitioners cope with resting periods resonated with others. The use of celebrity, including the reality shows, in the promotion of dance theatre is both timely and relevant as presented by Sandy Moffat. The worthiness of investigating vocal qualities in singing was highlighted effectively by Alana Shirley while Ross Dunning’s blog on the back and spine in dance is clearly of deep personal interest to him. What is of deep personal interest to one professional practitioner would clearly be of interest to other practitioners. Stephanie Montgomery’s suggested topic, which is novel to me personally – the unexpected use of material such as making a dress out of raw meat is certainly pushing the boundaries. What all of these have in common is that they all are of deep personal interest and finding the answers will enhance professional practice. My sweep of the blogs was very rewarding and I look forward to reading more from everyone.

Thinking about Critical Reflection

Looking at Kolb’s learning cycle (see p7 of the Reflective Practices Reader) you can see that all the tasks you have been doing and have yet to complete as part of the module are about having a concrete experience. For instance you may have made a 45sec movie clip about what you expect from BAPP, blogged an inquiry task or identified your five most important sources of information. These tasks, at first glance, may appear random and unconnected but towards the end of the module as you approach the assessment task of writing a critical reflection on your professional practice, you will move on to the next stage of Kolb’s cycle and review and reflect on the experience. What impact did these tasks have on your professional practice? What was learned as a result of completing them?

Reviewing all the tasks involves sitting back and making mental or actual notes on each of them. In Dewey’s view reflective thought involves “active, persistent and careful consideration” (see p6 of Reflective Practices Reader for full quote). You may see that there are patterns. For instance, certain tasks engaged you with technologies, while others were designed to actively engage you with peers. But the question to ask is what effect have they had on your professional practice? From all the tasks, certain themes may emerge and you need to identify these through another point on Kolb’s cycle – concluding from the experience (task). This process should provide you with the material you need for your critical reflection.

Another point on Kolb’s cycle is trying out what you have learned as a result of the reflection and identifying what was actually learned. You should be looking for deeper learning in constructing your critical reflection. While you might have learned how to embed a link to a flickr site from your blog, the question to ask is whether this actual activity had any impact on your actual professional practice and if so how? You may find, perhaps, that the process of learning was more about the content of the images of you posted on flickr. You may have noticed through engaging with other blogs that some of your colleagues were more selective in images they provided links to and thus used the opportunity to demonstrate their different skills / aptitudes, while on reflection you posted images which were all slightly different shots of the same event / show. Therefore in constructing a visual CV, on reflection, you may choose to revise what you include on a flickr link in the future.

Key issues to cover in your critical reflection on professional practice are to consider how your professional practice has been changed and this will be the subject of my next blog.

Catching up with Module

It’s early days yet on the programme and some are further on with the tasks than others. There are a lot of good reasons for that but it’s important right now to try and catch up, if you are behind, before you feel overwhelmed. It’s worth recalling that there are 3 strands/themes to the module. The first is Professional Communication Technologies, the next is Reflective Practitioner (which is where we are right now) and finally there is the Networked Professional. Each one of these has the following elements:

Reader
Campus Session
Tasks to do

All the readers are located under the module tab on libguides. The campus sessions have been reported upon on many of the blogs and indeed the blogs also contain many of the tasks. The tasks to do for Part 1 – on Page 8 of the Module Handbook. Tasks for Part 2 – are on Page 14 of the Handbook. It’s good to remember that each theme is underpinned with a reader which introduces the topic to you at greater depth and contains suggestions for further readings for you.

The campus sessions have been reported upon on many of the blogs and indeed the blogs also contain many of the tasks.The First Campus session is well described by Mark & Anthony. Paula has posted the student work produced in that session as well as my blog. Joanna's account of Professional Communications Technologies drew in a range of comments from colleagues and is well worth a look as are the comments. The tasks, in particular, the video clip produced some real creative and entertaining gems. In the realm of photos, Melissa provided a professional overview of her professional practice as did Ross. The videos gave opportunity to fulfil those cinematic urges. Stacey’s video clip is a mixture of the scarily imaginative at the outset transferring to a straight to camera piece. Other clips which cleverly conveyed the message were Joanna’s (who also provides technical advice, Hayley’s & Alana’s .

My earlier post provides an overview of the exercises we did with short video clips for those who were not there. Natalieprovides a good account of Campus Session 2 (Reflective Practice) while Mark’s follow up piece in Reflection in and Reflection on Action is well worth reading.

The sources of learning are becoming evident and they are building up into resources. There are examples of all stages in Kolb’s Learning Cycle (see Reader) contained within these blogs.

Refelction - theme of Campus Session 2

This was meticulously planned by Adesola – and the theme of the session was Reflection which is in the reader for this section of the module. It was a pity that at the last moment, Adesola had urgent family business and so it fell to Paula and I to run the session on her behalf. One of the exercises we did was to imagine another professional practice as follows:

Professional Partners

Partner with someone who does not do what you do - think of ‘what you do’ choose one thing! And put it as a title on your notebook (i.e. choreographer), then swap with partner and list all the things they experience / do. Swap back and read what is said. In the discussion afterwards there was more reporting on the content of what people thought their partner did rather than on the process.

Scary story

The next exercise involved telling a scary story as follows: Scary story – with a partner, tell story then do it with different partner…talk about the experience
In the feedback this time which was more about the process than the content of the story points were made that you had to react quite quickly with little time to think.

Moving with sticks

Using Sticks, in threes (or four) the class had to move from one side of the room to the other and turn inside out. The feedback on this was that teamwork, communication and co-ordination were necessary. The groups merged naturally to try another level of difficulty unprompted.

We then asked participants to jot down one thing from this morning’s activity they could identify with in Kolb’s Learning Cycle which is the Reflection Reader which is part of the module.

Silent Tour

Everyone was asked to plan their own, including three things using three pieces of card. They could include sound, smell etc…. In groups of four everyone to both lead a tour and go on one. In the feedback afterwards, everyone said how much they enjoyed this and the main difference was that they had time to plan this.

The discussion turned to journal writing which is the nature of the next set of tasks – as on Page 14 of the Module Handbook. We asked people to revisit the points they had identified as having experienced in Kolb’s Learning Cycle and after a few days to revisit this and see if anything new could be recorded as a way of stimulating reflective practice.

During the campus session, everyone was asked to make a contribution to the graffiti wall as thoughts occurred to them