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Conference theme: Strategies and Innovations in Teaching and Learning
Title: Thinking about thinking: integrating self-reflection into an academic literacy course
Stella Granville and Laura Dison
Applied English Language Studies and Faculty of Humanities, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Abstract
This paper describes work done with first year students in an academic literacy foundation course at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It is concerned with encouraging students to develop meta-cognitive reflective skills as a means to enhancing learning and developing higher order thinking. The work emphasizes the value of promoting reflection in relation to particular and situated learning tasks. By using their own voices in their reflections, students remain grounded in their existing identities and thus more easily make the transition from their everyday language use to the academic languages required at the University. The research also shows that reflectivity is a developable ability and as students acquire more practice, their reflections become more articulated and elaborated - the ability to self-reflect is not separate from the process of coming to know and understand.
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Optimal learning occurs once the phenomenon of learning itself has become an
object of reflection … something that can be explicitly talked about and
discussed and can be the object of conscious planning and analysis’ (Saljo,
1979: 446 in Candy, 1991)
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