Beyond Reflection Through an Academic Lens: Refraction and International Experiential Education
Monica Pagano, Loyola Marymount University, Laura Roselle Elon University [ERIC]
We introduce “refraction” as the transformative learning process that helps students understand and identify the intermediate processes of learning that aid the development of critical thinking skills. Refraction centers learning by integrating and elaborating the experience, the academic subject matter, and the context by examining assumptions and biases.
comment:
Another avenue is to be more rigorous about reflecting about reflecting. A conception of Second Order Reflection is not in general circulation in theory-making in experiential learning. Because I would be able to deploy my own complementary structural analytic means–the Reduced Bateson Set–it is possible to go further and amplify refraction as being related to a Third Order Reflection. In that regard, the analytic aim would be to organize and logically type the conceptions underlying the cognitive instrumentality of reflection; to propose reasons for starting at one point and not another in beginning to reflect on reflection; and, to suppose the reflecting subject brings identifiable particularities into, and expresses a phenomenology about, their specific reflecting on reflection. Those particularities would include assumptions and biases.
