The reflections should focus on your awareness, insights or learning about any issue that is relevant to your personal or professional practice or values, regarding the contribution business approaches can make to addressing social problems. In preparing your reflections, you can draw attention to a wide range of issues, ideas or matters that bear on your own attitudes, performance or experiences. There should be some relevance to the matters covered in this unit or to students' activities in this unit. The reflections can be prompted by anything that triggers your imagination or captures your attention from any of the classes, the class discussions, the readings, your research activities or any associations you can make with any of these.
With connections to the past, the present and the future, each reflection should take the following format:
1. Description of a situation, event or occurrence: This is a very brief description of something that happened and triggered your reflection. (This has a focus on past events).
2. Critical explanation or analysis: This is your explanation or analysis of the past event or occurrence in the context of your awareness about social issues from your personal or professional experience. Some useful questions to consider might be: Why did that event/occurrence happen? How is it connected with the issues of the world? How is it connected with your professional practice?
3. Reflection: This is your reflection about how your explanation or analysis of the past event or occurrence can contribute to your future social behaviour or professional practice. Here are some questions that might assist you to develop your reflection: What have you learnt about yourself and your attitudes to or capacity for contributing to social issues? Will you need to change in any way? How? How will you implement the change? Are there any obstacles or pitfalls? How can you use your new knowledge or ideas to address social problems in your future professional practice? How might your new knowledge or ideas about yourself impact you or your professional practice? What do you need to do differently? Is that likely or possible? In what ways can you apply the things you have learned from the past situation, to your future professional practice?
Students must keep a reflective journal by posting weekly entries, of 300 words each, to their confidential vUWS site. Separate entries must be posted before the start of the classes in Week 2-7. Each student's confidential reflective journal is located in vUWS - no student has access to or can view any other student's reflective journal.