Everything I have learned, whether from professional experience
and activities or more personal turning points and important events in my life,
tells me that, beyond everything else, all learning, in projection and
consequence, is intensely personal. And
even more importantly, the events that change your life trajectory happen, more
often than not, away from the classroom and away from the academic endeavor. It
is the sense we make of these events, either when they occur or later on in our
lives, the value that reflection gives them, which actually drives the change
in our lives.
So I began to question myself. Can I, along with the
other topics, also write about my own personal learning? How did I develop the
convictions, knowledge, and attitudes that I carry today? Why did I make the
decisions that I made? What were the influences and events that formed me and
affected the course of my life? Could I blog in a way that combined the strands
of experiential DNA in my life, the personal learning, the professional
development and trajectory, and the vision and hope for the post-traditional
ecology that is informed by both? Well, I am going to try.
I have recently been inspired by a book, LifeReimagined: Discovering Your New Life Possibilities, by Richard Leider
and Alan Webber. In it they lay out a path for working through life changing
activities. The book also informs the LifeReimagined Institute at AARP, a forum dedicated to the same
proposition. Their approach includes what
I call conscious reflection, developing the ability to assign value to and more
deeply understand experiences you have had and dreams that you want to explore.
When did I come to understand that experience changes you
every day and reflection is the way to extract meaning from that experience? It
was a day in the late 1980’s when I was sorting old photographs, one of those
lazy Sunday afternoon jobs for a winter weekend. I came across a picture of me
cradling one of my sons, taken a dozen years earlier during my final days at
the Community College of Vermont. As I looked at my smiling face in the
photograph, I realized with a physical shock that I was looking at a stranger,
a person who no longer existed. This wasn’t the person I saw in the mirror as I
shaved every morning. This was someone young, insulated by his own naïveté,
mostly unscarred and unseasoned. I wasn’t that person any longer.
The intervening 12 years had rushed by: elections won and
lost, an unsuccessful business venture, my father’s death, and more. It was
dizzying. There was a chasm of unreflected experience between the man in the
picture and the person I had become. A river of unreflected learning and
experience had flowed by and over me, making me a new and different person. On
that Sunday afternoon, I began developing my understanding of active,
disciplined reflection as a pedagogical and a personal learning tool that helps
us extract meaning from experience.
When we reflect on what we know and the impact of what we
have experienced, we gain control over our lives. When we do not reflect in
this way, we are flying blind without any personal radar, risking our lives as
victims of circumstance and prisoners of our own experience and learning.
So, every now and then, I am going to climb down from the
podium of higher education and share a personal story about turning points and
important events in my life. Let me know what you think.
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