Resumen de Developing the professional ‘toolkit’ - making learning meaningful in applied youthand community work education
Reflective practice is a signature pedagogy (Schulman) which is central to the education of professionalyouth and community work practitioners. Good reflective practice is based on the ability to connectthe self to learning and experience. This requires learning frameworks that enable students to deconstructlearning and create meaning; we cannot learn from experience unless we have the tools to doso. As teachers in professional education contexts we need to assess how well we facilitate the conversionof knowledge into applied practice.Providing the learner with tools that can heighten awareness of themselves as learners and providethem with a valid way to legitimise older and existing knowledge as well as the assimilation ofnew knowledge is the key task. The challenge is to create an environment that can enable the participantlearner to ‘join the dots’ that exist between their experiences, concepts that construct meaningand the skills required to reapply the knowledge from these experiences to new and unique situations.While critical reflection can provide a learning lens to either allowing students to look back at asituation and understand it in a particular way or deconstruct a situation as it unfolds before us whileengaging with it, the capacity to articulate that journey is central to the development route the studentwill take towards full capacity to integrate the personal, professional and theoretical in a practice environment.Informed by key frameworks for facilitating the deconstruction of professional learning, this paperpresents a reflective template designed to enhance the student’s awareness of learning and to progressthe knowledge from ‘reflection on action’ to ‘reflection in action’ (Schon). Using this tool, we argue thatthe internal conversation framework that we propose can create internal dissonance through engagingwith critical analysis that provokes the learner to discuss, debate, validate and challenge their understandingof experiences and the meaning they have constructed around them. We consider this issue inthe specific context of working with mature students undertaking a professional youth and communitywork undergraduate course in Ireland. However, we argue that our experience has broader value forprofessional education.
