Who am I??? And who am I as a Reflective Practicioner?

Who am I as a reflective practicioner? Wow, what a loaded question and one I am probably not fully prepared to answer at this chaotic moment in my life. That is like asking me who I am as a person. I know who I am as a reflective practicioner at the moment but I have nowhere near reached my full potential. This class has opened my eyes to a whole new world, where everything builds upon itself and we are in control. What do I mean by this you may be asking? Ok let me break it down into simpler chunks! First off, we are a product of all of our past experiences. Dewey informed us that directed, insightful thought allows us to approach our problems and we are able to come to a solution. Before this class, as a motivated student and persistent human being I was already doing this. I wasn’t going to let fatigue keep me from winning the district wrestling tournament in middle school, I wasn’t going to let the trifecta of music, sports and academics limit me in any one of those area and I sure as hell am not going to let senioritis prevent me from graduating college this year. Anyways, my point is I am a motivated person and often problem-solve on the fly. But that’s it… that’s where I’d stop. I wouldn’t look back on how I tackled the problems and apply success to future situations. I was always caught up in the moment, busy with the task at hand. I felt that since we can’t change the past it wasn’t worth focusing on. I found a quote on pinterest that states “Don’t bring up the past of a person that is trying to improve their future.” Now I believe this quote couldn’t be further from the truth. We learn a great deal from our past! We learn effective strategies for handling situations. We can add to our database of metacognition (or procedural understanding) and we never know to which new scenarios we may be able to transfer this knowledge to.

Learning through trial and error sucks. We’ve all gone through it and to some degree it is essential to forming our conceptions about the world. Remember back when we were very young, and any new thing intrigued us and piqued our interest. Well we would often manipulate these objects and see what happened under these altered conditions. This is similar to our in-class social experiment where we isolated variables and noticed the outcome… except the stakes were lower than in real life. If you test what not sleeping for a week, what skipping work for 3 consecutive days will do, there are severe consequences and potential health concerns! Thus it is better, when possible, to draw upon our personal experiences and learn from others. Talking about others, communication and collaboration play and integral role on reflection. We learned that communication doesn’t necessitate verbal interchange between two individuals. A lot can be picked up while in complete silence. Looking into a stranger’s eyes for an extended amount of time can be disquieting but if you get over yourself and look deep into their soul, or more literally their pupils, you can gather a lot of information. The problem is we are often not that observant to notice the cues of the people around us and that nature is continuously giving off. Also, interdisciplinary studies often reveal more interesting findings than a work concerning a single discipline as there is a more wholesome approach and more varied free-flowing ideas. We learned how hard it is to be a master in one field, so more than likely you are going to have to team up with others in order to solve Earth’s great mysteries.

I am not advocating that you play the game of life safe though. Some of the greatest advancements in the history of mankind have been when great innovative thinkers have questioned the status quo and thought outside of the box. I think creative thinking should be encouraged more than it is, because it would be super lame if everyone was the same. Think about how things would be if we all excelled in and were passionate about the same things. There would be no specialization in society and thus there would be little progress. We would be stuck in time. Thus we all need to take chances, live life on the edge and truly be ourselves. I don’t know why anyone would want to be anyone else. Yes, you might be famous, rich and powerful but then the joy of determining our own fate would be taken away. I find that is one of the most rewarding aspects of life, devoting yourself to improvement and seeing where this takes you in life. I may be young, I may be naïve, but this is where I stand at this moment in time. I see myself as a continually adapting, well-informed risk-taker who is a part of a very large team of individuals (my generation) who is trying to make the world a better place, trying to solve the problems that confront me as I try to pave my own future as a meaningful contributor to society. I will always be open to change and scrutiny. I will always do my best to not repeat mistakes done by others. I will always try to build upon the past. I will allows be keenly observant of external stimuli and allow them to lead me in my quest for answers. I will allows be resourceful, creative and adventurous in how I tackle life and will not let anything stop me. Although that won’t lead to the “All I Do is Win” scenario of DJ Khaled, as there will undoubtedly be ups and downs, it will lead to a very well-lived life and I will be satisfied with the outcome no matter what.

At the moment, I am investing my time in trying to become a master marine biologist. I have learned foundational knowledge and have been able to form connections to generate core concepts. I have also learned procedural basics of studying, test-taking, lab report writing which hopefully will be applicable in different situations down the road. Admittedly, these future situations will not call for an exact replication of what I’ve done so far in college but having a foundational base will allow me to more easily grow and build up to these levels of professional expertise. I’d like to think that if I continue to fully dedicate myself and energetically and passionately approach the field of Marine Biology I will be able to do something great (which I haven’t defined quite yet). And then when looking upon how I reached excellence, I will look back and see reflection as a major tool that paved my way and continue to use it in efforts to further excel (as we are all accomplished novices and there is more learning to be done). As an African Proverb put it “a wise man never knows all; only a fool knows everything”.

Lastly I will leave you with a video that has some awesome points about reflection I found after writing my reflection: