Research Week: Reflection and Transformation

Next week sees Research Week at CQUniversity and no doubt many members of LTERC (and I hope the Cultural Studies and Education Special Interest Group) are taking part in seminars and workshops. While the bulk of the activity takes place on the Rockhampton campus, here in Bundaberg our event is being held on Monday evening April 4 at 6pm. Last year was the inaugural event and a rag bag collection of researchers gave short talks on their research areas. For instance, I talked about television which is my primary area of research and the disicpline in which I gained my PhD.

This year there is more of a collective focus on community engagement. As a lecturer with CQUniversity's preparatory program, the STEPS Program, I decided that this was probably more appropriate to talk about. Last year, another STEPS colleague, Dr Jenny McDougall and I wrote a paper together on the transformative learning aspects of teaching in the STEPS Program. Integral to the STEPS Program is a focus on self-reflection as a practice which helps our students engage with their own thoughts about themselves, education and the learning journey they have embarked upon. Following some informal discussion at a STEPS retreat, Jenny, past colleague Anne Monsour and myself decided that it might be interesting to see just how we, as educators in the STEPS Program, would go if we also engaged in a semi-structured process of self-reflection. The result was an article which has been sent for review. Without repeating the contents of the article in great detail here, what we identified was a number a key assumptions or themes that underscored our work in the program. On Monday evening I decided I will talk about just two of these. The most interesting one for me is the idea that STEPS has a "mandate for transformation". As authors, and educators i the program it is relatively safe to say, that each of us had varying degrees of skepticism about this. In other words, it is expected that students will transform in some way as part of their STEPS experience, and following on from this - if they don't visibly do so, then we, as educators have failed somehow. Clearly, this is not the case. It is simply that for some students the whole notion of transformative learning is extraneous to what they wish to gain from the program. Increasingly students enrol in STEPS for very pragmatic reasons, without the expectation that they will have to go on a soul-searching journey of self discovery. On the other hand, many students do take to the notion of transformation as it is presented in the program and we see the results of this at the program's conclusion. Overall, though whether we want to explicitly label change education can bring to the life of an individual as a "transformation" with its particular connotations is a question on which we were undecided. We did agree however, that we are privileged to work within the STEPS Program. It offers both amazing and challenging opportunities for our own personal and professional growth. And in engaging in our own process of self-reflection we have modelled the practice that we are so insistent will be beneficial for our students.

Welcome to the Cultural Studies and Education SIG

Welcome!
You have made your way to the Cultural Studies and Education Special Interest Group Blog. Cultural Studies and Education is a loosely connected group of researchers who are aligned to CQUniversity's Learning and Teaching Education Research Centre. Formed for little over a year now the idea behind Cultural Studies and Education is to explore both disciplines, as well as the "interdisciplinary connections" which could form between them. Many of our members choose to work on their own research but we also would welcome making connections with other like minded researchers through this forum, or our twitter feed which is @LTERCCSE

Please feel free to follow the CSE on twitter and visit our blog. As we post this will be updated on twitter also.