Seminar Reflections
Here are samples of "Self-Portrait" critical reflection assignments done for the seminar portion of EDUC 408: Professional Development and Lifelong Learning.
Conversations with an Author
Dear Jay Fiset,
Thank you for your dedication to the field of personal development and accountability. Besides my participation in your "Creator's Code: The Gift" seminar, I think your strengths lie in your openness for feedback and creativity to show rather than tell through the design of interactive games and activities which bring our deepest biases and belief system into light and questioning. I feel the most difficult thing in the world to do is to walk your talk, to act on and practice what you know rather than intellectually think/know about it. It is a piece of Zen wisdom: "To know and not to do is not yet to know," or "to know is not enough."
Many people want to know the secret to life, the art of living, living well, full of passion, abundance, joy and gratitude. I agree with you that there is "a secret, although very easy to grasp, can take effort to master." In the hopes of living up to personal accountability, you created a workbook for yourself that you now share with the world. It is about taking our victimization stories and reframing them; it is about finding the life lessons amongst our most bleak, negative and troubling experiences. It is about rewriting those painful memories where we were vulnerable and transforming them into pivotal events of growth and healing.
While I have been able to apply personal accountability to some aspects of my life, I know there are other aspects where my sense of accountability is weaker. Thank you for being clear and concise regarding the payoffs and protections that the victim excuse offers us. Blame is but a reflection of what we do not want to see in our own actions and thoughts. The cost of getting our needs met in unclear and unhealthy ways is too great. I commit to this critical examination and reflection of who I want to be and what I want to create in my life.
As a pre-service teacher, I know that learning is up to the learner. I cannot learn for someone. So what is teaching? It is the other side of the same coin: that which sparked the learning, the lesson. I may do a multitude of different things, from planning, pointing, lecturing, asking, playing, showing, presenting, all in the hopes that these things maximize the probability to spark another being to think, to try, question, examine, reflect and learn. As a coach, you too understand that you cannot make someone else personally accountable, but you can do your best to live up to the example and show the way. And that is enough. Thank you.
Best Regards,
Charlene Wong
Thank you for your dedication to the field of personal development and accountability. Besides my participation in your "Creator's Code: The Gift" seminar, I think your strengths lie in your openness for feedback and creativity to show rather than tell through the design of interactive games and activities which bring our deepest biases and belief system into light and questioning. I feel the most difficult thing in the world to do is to walk your talk, to act on and practice what you know rather than intellectually think/know about it. It is a piece of Zen wisdom: "To know and not to do is not yet to know," or "to know is not enough."
Many people want to know the secret to life, the art of living, living well, full of passion, abundance, joy and gratitude. I agree with you that there is "a secret, although very easy to grasp, can take effort to master." In the hopes of living up to personal accountability, you created a workbook for yourself that you now share with the world. It is about taking our victimization stories and reframing them; it is about finding the life lessons amongst our most bleak, negative and troubling experiences. It is about rewriting those painful memories where we were vulnerable and transforming them into pivotal events of growth and healing.
While I have been able to apply personal accountability to some aspects of my life, I know there are other aspects where my sense of accountability is weaker. Thank you for being clear and concise regarding the payoffs and protections that the victim excuse offers us. Blame is but a reflection of what we do not want to see in our own actions and thoughts. The cost of getting our needs met in unclear and unhealthy ways is too great. I commit to this critical examination and reflection of who I want to be and what I want to create in my life.
As a pre-service teacher, I know that learning is up to the learner. I cannot learn for someone. So what is teaching? It is the other side of the same coin: that which sparked the learning, the lesson. I may do a multitude of different things, from planning, pointing, lecturing, asking, playing, showing, presenting, all in the hopes that these things maximize the probability to spark another being to think, to try, question, examine, reflect and learn. As a coach, you too understand that you cannot make someone else personally accountable, but you can do your best to live up to the example and show the way. And that is enough. Thank you.
Best Regards,
Charlene Wong
My Vantage Point
My Vantage point in space and time (the place and time of greatest awareness past or present) was walking along the shoreline from UBC to Stanley Park to watch how the path twisted and winded, observe the changing composition of sediments, rocks and kelp, notice the shifting populations of humans, birds and other organic matter, feel the fluctuations in temperature and air currents, to push my own ability to hike and to explore unknown places as the scenery changed and unexpected sights and sounds greeted me along the way. The winding shore has since become my personal metaphor for diversity, complexity, interconnectivity and intersectionality, demonstrated visually in one of my two-page comic spreads. Read Asian-style: right to left
My Archetype
My Archetype (character or personality) is a writer, a novelist: many in one, a singular plurality of many characters occupying one physical mind-body. In fact, sometimes I feel I am too many people to maintain any coherence myself!
I use the metaphor of being a film director at a production studio in my head. My characters are actors that visit only when on the job, or if they choose to hang out for tea. I used to think of myself as a landlord, but renting out headspace got to be too much of a hassle. Thinking of myself as a god of my own universe was a woefully inadequate metaphor, because I can control nothing, only direct. An independent life is an independent life, real or fantasy.
If nerves that fire together wire together (Edelman 2006), then I am a strange loop (Hofstadter 2007) of all the associations and connections between every sensory experience I have ever come across in my lifetime. Each of my characters are a loop of their own experiences and interactions with one another, thus allowing me to be a loop of many other loops.
I use the metaphor of being a film director at a production studio in my head. My characters are actors that visit only when on the job, or if they choose to hang out for tea. I used to think of myself as a landlord, but renting out headspace got to be too much of a hassle. Thinking of myself as a god of my own universe was a woefully inadequate metaphor, because I can control nothing, only direct. An independent life is an independent life, real or fantasy.
If nerves that fire together wire together (Edelman 2006), then I am a strange loop (Hofstadter 2007) of all the associations and connections between every sensory experience I have ever come across in my lifetime. Each of my characters are a loop of their own experiences and interactions with one another, thus allowing me to be a loop of many other loops.
Words to live by: My Story and my Quest...
I must thank Anne-Marie LaMonde for providing such a great introduction in class prior to my talk. I wasn't expecting her to elaborate on the significance of stories that same day.
I did my (first ever) Prezi presentation on lessons I learned from writing fiction. Thanks to Oatley's (2011) work, I understand why I love fiction: it's mental exercise in empathy. It's stepping into and walking miles in the shoes (or moccasins) of someone else. The power of dramatic narrative, of storytelling, is why oral cultures and early written accounts of history (epics, myths and legends) were composed in this format. We are changed, psychologically, after reading a piece of fiction. For me, I detailed my journey, thinking writing fiction would be easy. I didn't think imagining fantasy and making up stuff would be particularly hard. But coherence theory stepped in, and my task of writing became complex as I had to navigate all the association of the protagonist's past, his history, his friends and family, the past of each of those characters, his lineage, the world history, the culture, religion, politics, economics, geography, linguistics, and so on. Initially I used the metaphor of God to explain my relationship with my alternate universe, but it became increasingly obvious that this metaphor was woefully inadequate. This process has taken me nine years now, and it is still ongoing.
I learned that the rule of drama is the rule of life: utopia is boring, living is adapting to ever-changing circumstances, just as a steady heartbeat is a dead heartbeat. There is no show without conflict, adaptation is growth, growth is transformation, and transformation is meaning and purpose. It's what we like in a great story. I learned that ignorance really is the root of all evil (getting to know the antagonist was particularly difficult, as well as coming to grips with my own shortcomings and biases). I learned that characters really do "come to life" over time and develop a self in the same way we do: through the process of autopoiesis and the accumulation of experiences and interactions with others. I had thought of myself as a landlord, renting out headspace to a hundred or so other people. But it got too crowded, so I had to close down. Now my metaphor is a movie director of a production studio. My favourite characters are the ones who come to visit most often, but they have lives of their own outside of the casting, rehearsing, shooting, editing, etc. I had to learn to work collaboratively with different personalities and the drama that arises naturally from those interactions. I learned to love and accept all kinds of people from all walks of life, including all the cast extras. I learned to love learning about anything and everything, because it's all potential story material.
I learned not to belittle the experiences of others, though I may not agree with their values. They too, want to feel dignified. We are all vulnerable. I learned this too: it's weakness that makes characters (and people) feel human to us; perfect characters are not relatable, they feel false, distant and unreal. We either avoid or worship those on pedestals. Either way, realistic characters are human, mortal. The God metaphor couldn't hold because once my "creations" had independent life, they wouldn't take any crap from me, they had their own feelings and opinions, and if they chose to do things they would regret later, it had nothing to do with me. They would criticize me for my mistakes, for my mortality. We were not so different. We have to each take responsibility for our own roles and actions. Life is just one drama after another, one story after another, one birth after another. So as Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage." You are all directors of your own movie, your own classroom, in collaboration with the many actors around you. You are all co-creators of your own character, your own existence, your own destiny. Those are my lessons from writing fiction and they will undoubtedly inform my research and teaching.
There was a long pause, a moment of awe, before the comments rolled in. Everyone felt embarrassed now, saying I set the bar really high, being the first presenter. Their embarrassment made me feel embarrassed/awkward, since I have high standards but I never want those expectations to take away the light of others. We should not be comparing ourselves with each other, but with our past accomplishments to see our own growth. Mine is bound to be different from yours; my context is different, despite our brief time as fellow classmates in this course, at this University. Angelica liked how I linked my lessons to concepts from EDUC 401 and 406. I couldn't help it, they really helped to explain what I have experienced. I know now that fiction is real, that characters do "exist" and can/do effect reality, even if they do not possess "real" bodies in "our" world, that the process of autopoiesis is the same for them as it is for any piece of artwork—its the context and the process which gives it additional value beyond its completion and mere existence. Pete was nice enough to write me the following comment:
"I found your connections between writing/illustrating and practice to be very interesting. What really stood out for me was the attention to scale, in particular the storyline mapping that you showed us which seemed mind-boggling at first but stunningly could be shown as coming from the interactions of just a handful of characters. Further, the ways in which characters and stories seemed to evolve naturally as though your own input was ancillary to the process was fascinating. I'm sure that in the future this will be particularly relevant to teaching as being able to subtly orchestrate this apparent chaos that comes from those around you (students rather than characters) is certainly a skill that will create a style of classroom that could foster a lot of creativity from your students. Thanks for letting us look into the world you've created and the process you've used in growing it."
I did my (first ever) Prezi presentation on lessons I learned from writing fiction. Thanks to Oatley's (2011) work, I understand why I love fiction: it's mental exercise in empathy. It's stepping into and walking miles in the shoes (or moccasins) of someone else. The power of dramatic narrative, of storytelling, is why oral cultures and early written accounts of history (epics, myths and legends) were composed in this format. We are changed, psychologically, after reading a piece of fiction. For me, I detailed my journey, thinking writing fiction would be easy. I didn't think imagining fantasy and making up stuff would be particularly hard. But coherence theory stepped in, and my task of writing became complex as I had to navigate all the association of the protagonist's past, his history, his friends and family, the past of each of those characters, his lineage, the world history, the culture, religion, politics, economics, geography, linguistics, and so on. Initially I used the metaphor of God to explain my relationship with my alternate universe, but it became increasingly obvious that this metaphor was woefully inadequate. This process has taken me nine years now, and it is still ongoing.
I learned that the rule of drama is the rule of life: utopia is boring, living is adapting to ever-changing circumstances, just as a steady heartbeat is a dead heartbeat. There is no show without conflict, adaptation is growth, growth is transformation, and transformation is meaning and purpose. It's what we like in a great story. I learned that ignorance really is the root of all evil (getting to know the antagonist was particularly difficult, as well as coming to grips with my own shortcomings and biases). I learned that characters really do "come to life" over time and develop a self in the same way we do: through the process of autopoiesis and the accumulation of experiences and interactions with others. I had thought of myself as a landlord, renting out headspace to a hundred or so other people. But it got too crowded, so I had to close down. Now my metaphor is a movie director of a production studio. My favourite characters are the ones who come to visit most often, but they have lives of their own outside of the casting, rehearsing, shooting, editing, etc. I had to learn to work collaboratively with different personalities and the drama that arises naturally from those interactions. I learned to love and accept all kinds of people from all walks of life, including all the cast extras. I learned to love learning about anything and everything, because it's all potential story material.
I learned not to belittle the experiences of others, though I may not agree with their values. They too, want to feel dignified. We are all vulnerable. I learned this too: it's weakness that makes characters (and people) feel human to us; perfect characters are not relatable, they feel false, distant and unreal. We either avoid or worship those on pedestals. Either way, realistic characters are human, mortal. The God metaphor couldn't hold because once my "creations" had independent life, they wouldn't take any crap from me, they had their own feelings and opinions, and if they chose to do things they would regret later, it had nothing to do with me. They would criticize me for my mistakes, for my mortality. We were not so different. We have to each take responsibility for our own roles and actions. Life is just one drama after another, one story after another, one birth after another. So as Shakespeare said, "All the world's a stage." You are all directors of your own movie, your own classroom, in collaboration with the many actors around you. You are all co-creators of your own character, your own existence, your own destiny. Those are my lessons from writing fiction and they will undoubtedly inform my research and teaching.
There was a long pause, a moment of awe, before the comments rolled in. Everyone felt embarrassed now, saying I set the bar really high, being the first presenter. Their embarrassment made me feel embarrassed/awkward, since I have high standards but I never want those expectations to take away the light of others. We should not be comparing ourselves with each other, but with our past accomplishments to see our own growth. Mine is bound to be different from yours; my context is different, despite our brief time as fellow classmates in this course, at this University. Angelica liked how I linked my lessons to concepts from EDUC 401 and 406. I couldn't help it, they really helped to explain what I have experienced. I know now that fiction is real, that characters do "exist" and can/do effect reality, even if they do not possess "real" bodies in "our" world, that the process of autopoiesis is the same for them as it is for any piece of artwork—its the context and the process which gives it additional value beyond its completion and mere existence. Pete was nice enough to write me the following comment:
"I found your connections between writing/illustrating and practice to be very interesting. What really stood out for me was the attention to scale, in particular the storyline mapping that you showed us which seemed mind-boggling at first but stunningly could be shown as coming from the interactions of just a handful of characters. Further, the ways in which characters and stories seemed to evolve naturally as though your own input was ancillary to the process was fascinating. I'm sure that in the future this will be particularly relevant to teaching as being able to subtly orchestrate this apparent chaos that comes from those around you (students rather than characters) is certainly a skill that will create a style of classroom that could foster a lot of creativity from your students. Thanks for letting us look into the world you've created and the process you've used in growing it."
All that you will see in my classroom-studio is my students' work. I am the director whose presence is noted in the roll of credits only when the production is done.
References:
Berlow, Eric. (2010). How Complexity leads to simplicity. TEDGlobal 2010. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/eric_berlow_how_complexity_leads_to_simplicity.html
Davis, B. (2012). Plenary 5: Teaching is Enacting Beliefs about Knowing and Learning. EDUC 401: Issues in Learning and Teaching. PowerPoint.
Oatley, K. (2011). In the minds of others. Scientific American Mind, 22(6): 62-67.
Oatley, K. (2011). “Empathy and Fiction” in The Psychology of Fiction (blog). Psychology Today. Retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-psychology-fiction/201111/empathy-and-fiction
Oatley, K. (2011). “Narrative Empathy” in The Psychology of Fiction (blog). Psychology Today. Retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-psychology-fiction/201109/narrative-empathy
Additional Resources:
Johnson, D. (2012). Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(2): 150-155.
Mar, R. and Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, (3): 173-192.
Berlow, Eric. (2010). How Complexity leads to simplicity. TEDGlobal 2010. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/eric_berlow_how_complexity_leads_to_simplicity.html
Davis, B. (2012). Plenary 5: Teaching is Enacting Beliefs about Knowing and Learning. EDUC 401: Issues in Learning and Teaching. PowerPoint.
Oatley, K. (2011). In the minds of others. Scientific American Mind, 22(6): 62-67.
Oatley, K. (2011). “Empathy and Fiction” in The Psychology of Fiction (blog). Psychology Today. Retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-psychology-fiction/201111/empathy-and-fiction
Oatley, K. (2011). “Narrative Empathy” in The Psychology of Fiction (blog). Psychology Today. Retrieved from: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-psychology-fiction/201109/narrative-empathy
Additional Resources:
Johnson, D. (2012). Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(2): 150-155.
Mar, R. and Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, (3): 173-192.