Engaging Community: Notes on the Necessity of Reflection

As we are constantly reminded of the contested spaces in education, reflection on our practice becomes critical to the improvement of learning spaces. Where the following example does not speak to an instance in the traditional classroom, it is equally important due to its attempt to address the educational needs of young people. Utilizing Dewey's (1) five phases of reflective thought, the remainder of this account documents the struggles of a university professor, two college administrators and a group of college students to authentically engage community concerns (issues external to the campus, but centered in the concerns of neighborhood residents) through a process centered in the educational needs of young people. Couched in a narrative, the remainder of the document reflects on the author's role as participant observer in a student designed community initiative. Providing a tangible example of how reflection operates in community spaces, our experiences in a community program shed light on the utility of reflection in the attempt to maintain a program despite escalating conflict. Overview of Deweyan Reflection Popularized in his volume How We Think, Dewey maintains reflection occurs when teachers experience difficult situations in practice and are charged with thinking through them. (2) Taking his suggestion further, the work of Christensen et al, speak to the difficulties in such work. Referring to reflective practice as a conceptual orientation, they feel that it involves: A way to think about dissonance and to examine observations, problems, conflicts, philosophies, belief systems, and ideologies. As an active means of thoughtful consideration, reflection is a persistent search for explanations and alternatives in an attempt to resolve perplexity within an experience. (3) In observing our philosophies, belief systems and ideologies, we come to grips with the motivations, struggles and confirmations that foster engaged learning. For the purposes of this account, the reflection by the group discussed throughout the document speaks to Dewey's assertion that will always be the two sides: the conditions to be accounted for, dealt with, and the ideas that are plans for dealing with them or are suppositions for interpreting and explaining the phenomena. (4) For our experience, the process of engaging young people in an urban community enabled us to come to grips with the difficulties of our outsider status. Despite the fact that many of the facilitators of the project were from the community where the initiative took place, we still occupied an outsider status due to the fact that we now were connected to an institution (university) with a history of hostility toward community residents. The experience called for us to look deeper within ourselves, while engaging young people and the community at large. As conflict was not always visibly present, the narrative reveals how the inability to recognize such tensions can lead to unexpected results. Where the following example for this document is couched in a narrative, our goal was not to engage in a critical reflection of our work. Instead, our reflection came about as part of an attempt to wrestle with conflicting ideologies. As there were no sessions with the college students that actually reviewed Dewey's five aspects of reflective thought, our collective reflections speak to suggestion (where the mind leaps first to a solution), intellectualization (asking a question that demands an answer), hypothesis (to initiate and guide observation), reasoning (the elaboration of an idea) and testing the hypothesis (practice). (5) Our process would be considered idiosyncratic in that we did not follow Dewey's suggested chronology, but each aspect was realized throughout our experience as facilitators in a community program. Engaging Deweyan Phases Currently I am employed as an assistant professor at an urban research institution in a metropolitan area. …

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