Guide to Integrating Reflection into Field-Based Courses

Reflection is a tool to support learning from experience, whether that is the experience of a meeting, a project, a disaster, a success, a relationship, or any other internal or external event, before, during or after it has occurred. In this guide, we will refer to practice as an individual or group's intentional process of doing community-related work. In the section I, we outline a set of three purposes that we see reflection serving in field-based courses, pointing out that instructors may choose to focus on 1-2 of those purposes. In section II, we describe a set of reflection tools and the general utility of each. The third section then matches a subset of the tools with each of the three purposes for reflection. Finally, the fourth section describes the conceptual approach we take to reflection, so that the common rationale underlying any of the tools is explained. (author)