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Reflection Resources

The key to powerful community-engaged learning experiences is thoughtful reflection. In fact, reflection is essential with any high-impact practice. There are a variety of ways to incorporate reflection in your course, from prompts and journaling to poetry, monologues, or oral presentations. Community-engaged learning faculty should also incorporate ePortfolio into their classes, which is another vital reflection tool. Below are some tools you can use to design meaningful and in-depth learning for your students to help them leave your course with new ideas, perspectives, and curiosities.

We do not learn from experience… we learn from reflection on experience.

John Dewey

The central question for Dewey in developing what he called a philosophy of experience is "how is it that experiences are educative?" In posing this inquiry, Dewey noted: The belief that all genuine education comes about through experience does not mean that all experiences are genuinely or equally educative. Experience and education cannot be directly equated to each other. For some experiences are mis-educative. Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. An experience may be such as to engender callousness; it may produce lack of sensitivity and responsiveness. Then the possibilities of having richer experience in the future are restricted. ( 1938, p. 25)

ePortfolio Reflection Tools