Dialogues on Reflective Practice in a Changing World series, hosted by the Graduate Program in Critical and Creative Thinking, UMass Boston
Monday, December 9, 2024
7:00-8:00pm ET (RSVP here)
Overview:
These dialogues are free and open to the public. Reflective Practice is relevant to any field — education, health care, organizational leadership, arts, and sciences, activism and many others. It refers to ways that we continually develop or change the practices that we use in their workplaces, schools, and lives. Through reflection, we examine our experiences and seek to understand how they can guide us to make those changes. In this series of participatory dialogues, we’ll explore together how we might then relate our individual practices to the bigger picture — the changing world around us. The sessions use a structured Dialogue Process format, a type of group discussion that emphasizes listening well, sharing thoughts-in-progress, and raising questions. The goal is that learning emerges directly from shared contributions of diverse participants, rather than through presentation or lecture, and that participants leave with new ideas around how their own practices can evolve.
Theme: Reflective Practice for Resistance, Refusal, Rejection
One of the tenets of reflective practice is to continually review our progress and our conditions, reflect on experiences, and make choices about new actions or commitments in how we practice our work and our lives. One of the possibilities, though, is we might also mindfully decide not to act. In what situations do we, as reflective practitioners, express resistance to change, and what motivates us in those situations? Are there times when we might refuse to accept the conventional views of what the “best practices” are in professional and personal settings, or when we need to “hold steady” in our approaches to ongoing challenges? When or how does saying “no” support us to engage more deeply? How does reflection help us to meet that “third space” where we neither bend completely to the will of authority nor entirely reject it? Where do we find a sense a community in refusal of the status quo? What practices might we take on or avoid when holding a mindset of nonconformity?
