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Reflective Jouurnal

INTRODUCTION
Reflective learning, according to Boud & Fales (1983:99) “is the process of internally examining and exploring an issue of concern, triggered by an experience, which creates and clarifies meaning in terms of self and which results in a changed conceptual perspective”. Boud, Keough & Walker (1985:19) state that “reflection in the context of learning is a generic term for those intellectual and affective activities in which individuals engage to explore their experiences in order to lead to new understandings and appreciations. (McDury & Alterio, 2003:21).
Daudelin (1996, 39) provides a definition of reflection that explicitly captures its relation to learning, "Reflection is the process of stepping back from an experience to ponder, carefully and persistently, its meaning to the self through the development of inferences; learning is the creation of meaning from past or current events that serves as a guide for future behaviour." This definition suggests that reflection is integral to learning, when learning is defined as making sense of past experience in order to affect and understand future experience. (www.compact.org).
The key issues in reflection based on the above definitions, is the ability to use one’s past experiences to learn thereby shaping the future. According to Boud et al (1985:7) experience alone is not sufficient for learning rather, there must be an awareness of how the experience can be turned into learning and learners being able to gain maximum benefit from their situation as well as how experience can be applied in new contexts.
These experiences and perceptions can be analysed in a learning journal. “A learning journal is an analytical record of a person’s learning which may be tied to an individual subject in a course, a particular topic within a subject or the experience of learning in general”. (www.binaryblue.com.au). The learning journal provides a growing understanding of a subject or experience,...