Writing Praxis: promoting critical reflection among media practice students through blogging in Project-led Problem-based Learning (Conference Proceedings)

Writing Praxis: promoting critical reflection among media practice students through blogging in Project-led Problem-based Learning.

Introduction

The adoption of blogging as a pedagogic tool in Higher Education is widely explored in the learning and teaching literature (cf. Sim and Hew 2010) and is commonly thought to provide a range of benefits such as promoting the attainment of skills in research for creative practice, academic writing, critical reflection and professional identity formation. Notwithstanding some of the difficulties faced by educators wishing to employ blogging in an educational context (cf. Robertson 2011), there is a clear sense of an opportunity for learners to engage with acts of personal and critical reflection, identity building and community membership through the use of Web 2.0 technologies such as course blogs. The paper that follows explores some of these ideas through research undertaken into the implementation of course blogs on Project-led Problem-based Learning (PjPBL) modules on an undergraduate media practice programme at an English university.

The Problem

The initial aim of the study was to investigate whether or not blogging might address a number of previously identified issues with the use of critical reflection as an assessment of practice on the programme. The first issue concerned the need to integrate theory and practice into course activities so that the student’s creative media practice would be informed by theory, thereby deepening the critical dimension of problem solving for creative practice. Secondly, there was a need to promote an engagement with critical concerns that circulate around ideas of practice so that the student’s critical reflections are located within an appropriate theoretical framework. Finally, there is the need to promote an early engagement with contextual material so that there could be a formative component to the act of looking back upon practice. The problem being, in the experience of the course team, students will tend to leave work on their written assessment until the last few weeks of a practice unit. Thus, the theory doesn’t inform practice, engagement is purely strategic and importantly there is no draft presented for formative feedback.

Reflective writing is commonly used as an assessment tool in media practice education as, in and of itself, the output of a project doesn’t necessarily evidence learning and/or critical thinking (Hanney 2013). By its very nature the output of project is a complex intertangling of actions, intentions, problem encounters, risk strategies and group dynamics. That is to say, while a project output may be of a high quality the reason for this can often be as much down to luck and good timing as it can be down to high quality critical thinking. The value of reflective writing for assessment is then very clear, it adds an individual component to the assessment of group projects, a clearly useful academic imperative is at play here since group-working can also serve to mask effort, contribution and participation by individual students working as part of a project team.

If, following Dewey (et al) it is the case that reflection and in particular reflective writing is a manifestation of critical thinking. Then the promotion of this skillset through the writing of course blogs would seem an appropriate strategy. It is argued here that if expertise is the capability for ‘thinking through problem encounters based on acquired knowledge and experience’ (Chi, Feltovich and Glaser 1981), then the challenge for educators is to encourage novice practioners to take hold of knowledge as it pertains to their domain of practice and use it to inform their practical work. Critical reflection is key to the process of integrating theory and practice and the use of course blogs aims to ensure critical reflection is located within an appropriate theoretical framework. It also provides for a formative opportunity to rehearse the act of looking back upon practice.

The Solution

After an initial pilot project which was well received by staff and students the use of course blogs was rolled out across all modules where critical reflection was an assessment component. At the conclusion of each semester further reviews were undertaken and changes made to the way in which the use of course blogs as embedded within practice modules. This has led to the development of a clear methodology for the use of course blogs on the programme.

For all modules where critical reflection was an element of assessment students would be asked to write a minimum of three blog posts during the life cycle of the module. We employ a simple model for explaining how students should approach this writing task suggesting that there should be a balance between their reflection on their personal experience, their theoretical research and their creative practice. Each blog post is triggered by a writing task that is directly related to the set reading for the module and reflecting the particular form of practice for that unit (e.g. documentary filmmaking, drama filmmaking, photography, podcasting etc…). Classroom time is given over to the initiating of each writing task in the form of class discussion, exploratory research or even the drafting of the post. As blogs are posted tutors are expected to comment on the post and provide quick feedback on the students writing, relevance of content, structure of arguments and so on. High quality posts by students can be used in class to illustrate good practice and students are encouraged to read their tutors own blogs in order to model the practice of blog writing and to promote the development of a community of practice around this activity.

At a mid-point in the module students are asked to read each other’s blog posts and provide their own comments. Encouraging students to comment on each other’s posts has a number of additional benefits since it requires the students to learn how to give and receive feedback, plus it has the potential to further promote the development of a learning community. At the end of the semester students are instructed to copy and paste their blog posts into a new document and to use this as the basis for their final critical reflection. The re-reading and subsequent editing of their initial blog posts is construed as a form of meta-cognition, while the synthesis of the original posts into a newly edited and narrativised critical reflection is recognised as evidence of the application of high-level critical thinking skills. It also mirrors a commonly recognised framework for the writing process that will be familiar to anyone who has undertaken academic and other professional writing: research, draft, write, re-write.

Findings

The roll out of course blogging as a means of effecting a change in students’ engagement with critical reflection; ‘for-action, in-action as well as on-action’ (Schon 2016), has been ongoing now for close to three years at the writing of this paper. The method above has emerged out of an ongoing process of reflection by the staff team on the programme out of which a number of findings emerge.

1. Early on in the roll out of course blogging we found that staff buy in to the use of course blogs was patchy, in part due to the need to better communicate the purpose. But also, it was discovered that the level of digital literacy among staff was extremely uneven. We dealt with this by running a staff blogging group which provided technical support for staff, developed a model for students along the lines of a community of practice and importantly aimed to get all academic staff to think of themselves as academic writers.
2. Through focus groups with students we learned that they were reluctant to undertake the blogging tasks as they were not assessed. Consequently, we re-wrote the assessment brief so that while the blogs were still only formatively assessed, the writing of three blog posts that would be later synthesised into one final document for submission, became an assessment requirement. 
3. Initially the choice of topic for assessed critical reflections was left to students however this resulted in a number of issues with the students writing. There was a tendency to go for safe options such as reflecting on group working. The selection of sources to reflect on was largely a result of last-minute googling. Plus, there was a potential for plagiarism as students realised, they could recycle the previous year’s reflections. More focused writing tasks rooted in set readings or research specific to their role as a creative practioner has worked to resolve the above issues.

Conclusion

Further reflection by the course team has also identified a number of additional issues that we are now trying to tackle which include the need for:

• Provision of more support for the development of reading skills among a generation that has pretty much abandoned the reading of books and eschews the reading of academic texts.
• Modelling of the writing process more clearly through increased writing activities in class and in particular the development of skills in synthesis and strategies for narrativising the content of the assessed critical reflection.

References

Chi, M. T. H., Feltovich, P. J., & Glaser, R. 1981. Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices. Cognitive Science 5(2), 121.

Hanney, R. 2013. Towards a situated media practice: Reflections on the implementation of project-led problem-based learning. Journal of Media Practice 14(1), 43-59. 

Robertson, J. 2011. The educational affordances of blogs for self-directed learning. Computers & Education 57: 1628-44.

Schon, D., 2016. The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. London: Routledge

Sim, J.W.S. and K.F. Hew. 2010. Review: The use of weblogs in higher education settings: A review of empirical research. Educational Research Review 5: 151-63.

Cite this article

Hanney, R. (2021). Writing Praxis: promoting critical reflection among media practice students through blogging in project-led problem-based learning. International Research Symposium on PBL. Denmark: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, pp.228-232.