Reflective practice into creative arts education
Dr Grant Ellmers
Creative Arts
Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
Dr Grant Ellmers teaches across creative disciplines in the Bachelor of Creative Arts, Bachelor of Communication and Media, and Creative Arts Internship programs with a focus on the representation of critical thinking in creative practice.
In the video below, Grant introduces the importance of reflective practice in the creative process.
Hello, my name is Doctor Grant Ellmers and I teach into the photography program as part of the Bachelor of Creative Arts here at the University of Wollongong and also the Media and Communication Studies and I also look after the Creative Arts internship program.
So the reason I use reflection in my subjects is it helps the students unpack their experience that they are learning or going through as part of their project. So we need to do that in an explicit manner because the research tells us, and I've seen this in class myself, is that the students learning is bound within their project.
So by using reflective practice in a structured and critical manner, we can help them unpack that experience in ways that actually brings the knowledge and the learning to the surface in what we might say in an explicit manner. And that affords all sorts of opportunities then to actually discuss and analyse, unpack and also then lead into discussions about where they might go into the next stage of their project.
Grant: Creative practice programs typically employ learning through doing, aligning with studio-based and project-based learning models. Students undertake projects that drive learning associated with subject outcomes, often culminating in the development of a creative artefact. However, I observed that these approaches can sometimes lack engagement with the creative process and underlying thinking, potentially limiting students' learning from the process itself.
In creative arts studio teaching, students typically learn about their discipline through making creative work. As they progress through their program, the aim is to increase their level of expertise. For this approach to be effective, it is crucial that students transfer learning between projects and across subjects throughout their degree.
Reflective practice has been identified as a strategy that can provide direct support for transfer. By guiding learners to think about their projects and subjects in ways that encourage abstraction of general principles, we can better prepare them for knowledge transfer. This approach not only enhances their learning within individual subjects but also supports their overall development as creative practitioners.
How?
Grant details the ways that he embeds frequent, consistent reflection in projects and classes utilising the Ellmers four step reflection model.
The way that I embed reflection in my projects or the classes that I teach. So bear in mind that this is creative practice.
So this is a photography subject or a media and communication subject where we're creating things, we're creating the well, the students are creating artefacts and also within the internship subject there where they are actually reviewing and analysing their experience that they're getting.
So all of these have a have a similar approach and essentially I'd do it by having them complete a journal or a blog and in that those assessible items, which is quite important. Is this where they go through and they're describing what they're doing.
So certainly for the photography, it's about, you know, they're collecting their research when they're looking at other photographers or or artists that they are collecting their material from their research where they might be researching onto a particular topic, you know, so in a sense a theoretical exploration.Then there's also just the planning how they might go about doing what they want to do.
There is work in progress or draughts of those images, for instance, and, or consultations that they might have with me or their other tutors. You know, all of this.
We, I encourage them to, well, actually I stipulated to get them to put that into the journal. And it just has to be bullet point. You know, it's just a summary. It's not, they're not being assessed on their ability to spell or get their grammar right. It's all about putting this material down, making notes of it because we know that that then is a trigger for the memory that they can come back to later.
So, and that's when they can access all that relevant detail so that recording their process. And then in here is where I embed that four step reflective process. So they've got questions which are written to suit their particular context of of whatever that subject might be. But again, typically it goes back to those stages I described earlier where they're describing identifying significant moments.
How might this help me move forward in this project, and how might this help me think more broadly beyond this project?
Grant: Through my PhD research, I have designed and implemented learning scaffolds and assessment tasks that guide students to explicitly engage with the thinking and making processes implicit in their creative projects. This approach supports students in structured engagement with the rich learning opportunities present in the creative process. I achieve this through a structured and critical approach to reflective practice, employing reflective assessment tasks that link directly to their projects.
The way I embed reflection is through a creative process journal or blog that guides students to respond to a set of learning prompts in the form of questions that they complete in a systematic manner (each weekly class, for instance). These questions are structured following a 4-step reflective practice model I developed through my PhD research (Ellmers, 2014) and is discussed in detail in the L&T Hub article, Model of reflection: The Ellmers Model, which is part of the Teaching reflective practice collection.
When considering assessment tasks to foster the conditions for knowledge transfer, it is important that students are prompted to link the new learning with past learning. That is, the tasks should directly explore learners’ abilities to learn new information and relate that learning to previous experiences. This can occur during the project and/or on completion of the project.
Scholarship
Grant: An important role of the reflective assessment tasks is to guide the students to engage with the introduced reflective practice. The tasks require students to reflect on their project in a written format. The act of writing serves as an important learning aid as the student needs to cognitively process their experience when writing. This also prompts them to pause from the creative activity in what Schön (1987) refers to as reflection-on-action where they pause to think back over what they have done, exploring the understandings that they have brought to the handling of the project. Students are also prompted to think beyond the project experience and think about the broader context of creative and industry practice. This has parallels with Schön’s concept of reflection-on-practice, discussed further in the L&T Hub Teaching reflective practice resource.
In later research publications, I link these reflective learning outcomes with approaches to industry practice (Ellmers, 2017) and levels of expertise (Ellmers & Foley, 2020).
Impact & Reflections
Grant: What I’ve learned from embedding reflection is:
- Students find it relatively easy to describe their activities and identify significant moments.
- Connecting this thinking with ideas about further development of their project is harder to achieve.
- Students can have further difficulty connecting their thinking from within their projects to thinking about the broader context of their creative practice.
Advice for colleagues
Grant suggests using a consistent, systematic structure for reflection to scaffold students' development of critical reflection skills.
So what I've learned from embedding reflection in my projects and classes; there's a number of things. Firstly, the reflection needs to work with the project. OK, as soon as it becomes an impost, as soon as it's actually becoming the focus on the reflection that that is problematic.
It needs to serve the project and the process that the students are engaging in. Another point is it needs to be written down or recorded in some way because we know that, in fact, through that process of writing, it forces the brain to process that experience. And so students may be, they may find that difficult at the beginning, but that's just a skill. And so, and that's what, and they can learn that skill and which leads into another point, which is: do it often.
That's where it works. Small bits happening on a regular basis in the same way. So I'm I've structured it in each week they do a reflection that's questions are the same. And so they get into the groove, they get into a pattern. And so for the first few times it might be difficult, but then they get into that flow and that's when it works really effectively.
My advice to others wanting to introduce reflection or even refine what you're doing is firstly, it needs to be an accessible item. Another piece of advice is that I would strongly urge you to do it in a structured way so that, firstly students get used to that structure and then they get tuned in. And so then it's consistent and do it in a way that it sort of repeats on a fairly regular basis in a systematic way.
So that then it means that they gather this material and they build it up over time. So even then, where I might have at the end of a large assessment of one of these journals or, or the creative process journals that the students are doing, they've got all these multiple reflections in there.
That also then allows me at the end to actually put in some overarching reflection or, or prompts to actually for them to bring it all together and make sense of it. But then what they're doing is they're not sitting down to a blank page at the end.
They've got all these notes and these details and these moments that they've captured that they can go back and then actually draw on to make these observations. And that's when I think it works really well.
Grant: Reflective practice can also support the development of independent learning skills that students can carry forward into other subjects at university and, importantly, into their future careers.
I feel this is especially important as career pathways, now more than ever, are very fluid, and it is essential graduates have the skills to adjust and engage with multiple shifts in career throughout their working life.
Student feedback
"Grant was instrumental in planting the seed for the way I approach thinking about the design work that I do. Grant was able to help me see that this type of thinking was not a one-size-fits all solution, but rather a methodology that could be used to assist problem solving."
- Graduate
"Dr Ellmers was my lecturer for first year photography. Although I had never studied at university, his method of delivery made all aspects of the course clear and accessible. His approach effectively linked practical, theoretical and conceptual learning. The keeping of a journal and using conceptual templates really helped my learning."
- Graduate
Related resources
- Teaching reflective practice | L&T Hub collection
- Bransford, J. D., & Schwartz, D.L., (1999). Rethinking transfer: A simple proposal with multiple implications. Review of Research in Education, 24, 61–101. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x024001061
- Ellmers, G., (2015). The graphic design project: Employing structured and critical reflection to guide student learning. Communication Design, 3(1), 62-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/20557132.2015.1057376
- Moon, J. A. (2004). A handbook of reflective and experiential learning: Theory and practice. Routledge Falmer. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203416150
References
Ellmers, G. (2014). Graphic design education: Fostering the conditions for transfer in a project-based and studio-based learning environment, through a structured and critical approach to reflective practice. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Wollongong]. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4189
Ellmers, G., Foley, M. (2020) Developing expertise: Benefits of generalising learning from the graphic design project. International Journal of Art & Design Education, 39(2), 461–475. https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12260
Ellmers, G., (2017). Connecting learning from the graphic design project with thinking about approaches to design practice. Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, 16(1), 69–82. https://doi.org/10.1386/adch.16.1.69_1
Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner. Jossey-Bass.
