Guidelines for Final Reflection Paper
Due December 7th by email to Campus/Community Professor
Purpose of Paper: to reflect on the ways in which your learning in this course has influenced your own educational narrative, or story.
At the beginning of the semester, you wrote your educational ethnography, describing and reflecting on significant aspects of your educational experiences up to that point in your life. Here at the end of our course, we’d like for you to consider the ways in which our readings, guest speakers, films, museum tour, small and large group discussions, community projects, and other activities, have influenced your understanding of your own education narrative, or story*.
A scholar has paraphrased Shakespeare, “beware of the stories you tell yourself–for you will surely be lived by them” (Howard, 1991, p 196). How did your learning in the course influence the story you tell yourself about your education, and how will it influence your actions with regard to your education, and the story you live in the future?
In the first part of your reflections, think back to your educational ethnography. How has your learning in the course led you to think differently about your story of your education? Knowing what you know now, in what ways, if any, would you have wished your education to be different, and why?
In the second part of your reflections, write about how your learning in the course will influence you to think or act differently with regard to your education in the future. What ways of thinking, being, and/or acting will you change to “live” your education differently in light of insights you’ve gained in our course this semester?
Each part of your paper should be 1½ – 2 double-spaced typewritten pages, for a total of 3-4 double-spaced typewritten pages in length. We would like for you to meaningfully integrate 3 course references into your reflections. Use proper citation and reference list form—APA, MLA, or University of Chicago style.
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Howard, G. S. (1991) Culture tales: A narrative approach to thinking, cross-cultural
psychology, and psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 46, 187-197.
*These aspects of the course are meant as examples of sources of learning from which you might draw for your reflections; you do not have to draw from all of them!