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Assessing Reflective Learning: precepts, percepts and practices

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Salmon, Richard (2006) Assessing Reflective Learning: precepts, percepts and practices. Investigations in university teaching and learning, 4 (1). pp. 97-104. ISSN 1740-5106

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Abstract

R.D. Laing, the distinguished psychiatrist, said that we are ‘acting parts in a play we have never read and never seen’, (Laing 1971). This allusion to the influence that the unconscious has in shaping our thought and action, provides those in higher education with a reminder that, until we learn to reflect and liberate our minds, we shall be destined to repeat past mistakes. Subscribing to such a post-Freudian interpretation, it follows that by deepening our understanding of unconscious and conscious processes, insight and genuine change become possible.

Within higher education, reflective learning methodologies are becoming an increasingly essential tool for the review and evaluation of past experience since reflective learning is a practice that can be delivered both within a subject-specific or a discrete context. Indeed, reflective learning is one of the key mechanisms by which both pedagogic development in the academy and the skills of lifelong learning can be attained.

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