![]() ![]() ![]() My liberal arts college required students to write a reflection at the end of each course as well as a summative reflection throughout our college career, a document they required us to submit before graduating. When you engage in sustained and purposeful reflection about your learning, you simultaneously take on the role of student and teacher and compose proofs of what you know and how you know it.Īs fate would have it, my fraught childhood relationship with journaling came full circle when I went to college. In the same way, reflection allows you to think about and become aware of your own thinking, also known as “ metacognition.” As you reflect on your learning, you are giving yourself an exam of your own making: you are testing your ability to both teach yourself and internalize the ways of thinking, knowing, and doing that you are taught in a given course. This agency that reflection affords is precisely what makes it such an important learning tool and why it is an integral part of your General Education at UA: reflecting on your learning enables you to explain to yourself what you learned and how you learned it. Reflecting with purpose gives me agency: it transforms me into an active analyzer of my life - rather than a mere passive participant. The act of journaling allows me to move past the anxiety cycle about the interaction because it provides me with a tool to describe exactly what happened, how it made me feel, and what the conflict means within the larger context of my relationship to that person. For example, when I journal about a conflict with a family member, I begin by reflecting on what occurred and then naturally transition into analyzing why the conflict happened and why it matters to my understanding of myself and my family member. Reflective writing begins as a recounting of what has occurred and quickly turns into your own rich and insightful analysis of what the event means within its larger context. What I’ve come to find about the benefits of journaling, which is an inherently reflective genre of writing, is that it forces you to pause and consider what you’ve recently done, learned, and experienced and what it means to you - why it matters to who you are. I always wanted to be the person who kept meticulous records of my life and thoughts, but it was never something I managed to habituate until my therapist prescribed it as a tool to work out my anxieties, as a way to be honest with myself about what I am fretting over and why. All told, I can find only a handful of diary entries from my entire life up until January 2021, at which point I finally made a commitment to myself - at age 30 - to try to journal each morning as a method of managing anxiety. Unfortunately, I didn’t like to journal - it didn’t come naturally to me and it wasn’t something I felt compelled to do, even though I loved the idea of doing so. The thought of having a record of my life was so romantic and quaint to me, probably because I was an enthusiastic reader of historical fiction novels in which the heroine wrote daily diary entries telling the story of her riveting life. ![]() When I was a kid I had several diaries tucked between the many books on my shelf, diaries in which I aspired to write each day. ![]()
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