CLIC Webinar: "Staging and Evaluating Structured Reflection for Transformative Learning"

‘Structured reflection’ refers to a set of diverse practices used to help learners make sense of their learning as they critically link content/theoretical knowledge, personal experience, and previous assumptions. For foreign language instruction in particular, guided reflection can be a powerful instructional tool for helping learners to decenter themselves from their existing assumptions and values as they try on, engage with, and respond to cultural perspectives that may be very different from their own. Drawing on students’ written reflections across a collegiate language curriculum, this webinar shows how structured reflection can provide space for language learners to shift their initial frame(s) of reference and approach moments of real transformative learning (Mezirow et al., 2009). In this webinar, participants will learn how transformative learning theory and the concept of structured reflection can be used to conceptualize, develop, and stage meaningful reflective opportunities for foreign language learners across a collegiate curriculum. Specifically, participants will: (1) develop familiarity with discussion strategies and reflective prompts that can be used to elicit critical reflection from students within a language program; (2) learn how one can evaluate and provide feedback on structured reflection (esp. reflective writing); and (3) begin to develop prompts for their own specific instructional context.