A Culture of Reflection: How my living-educational-theory enabled me to transform the teaching-learning attitude in my school.

Abstract

This paper is a narrative of my journey; my faith in my values and the way I live those values in my professional environment. I believe primary school teachers and students are the key people who can transform society. Additionally, as a teacher, I believe that a democratic and negotiated learning environment fosters accountability in a human being. Keeping this in mind, I had initiated a few educational projects with teachers and students in Lavad Primary School during the years 2015 to 2019. This paper describes how reflective practices enabled me to address the contradictions in my values and allowed me to put together creative solutions to avoid acts of autocracy. To influence my teachers and students towards transformation I tried to establish a 'culture of reflection' in the school environment. Those educational projects were designed in a manner in which teachers and students had to negotiate first and then absorb the values if they wished to. The purpose was to initiate democratic teaching and learning processes to empower teachers and students to be able to generate knowledge independently. While writing this paper, I wondered what drove me to persist on this reflective journey, which has resulted in this paper.

Keywords

• reflective practices
• critical friend
• democratic learning
• living educational theory