Moving Forward


Not only could women learn to value and strengthen the reflective process in their lives, but they could learn to encourage and support the value of reflection in the lives of the people they instruct, guide, or counsel. Reflective learning is the key element in learning from experience (Boyd and Fales 1983). According to these authors:

The process of reflection is the core difference between whether a person repeats the same experience several times, becoming highly proficient at one behavior, or learns from experience in such a way that he or she is cognitively or affectively changed. Such a change involves essentially changing his or her meaning structures. (100)

At the present time, there appears to be a conscious search on the part of women to take the concepts of equality, respect, love, and trust out of the realm of abstract ideals and make them more a part of the daily ordinary exchange with each other and those outside their immediate environment. There seems to be a realization on their part that these forms of nurture can serve as powerful, emotionally fulfilling connectors between women whose lives are based on a shared vision. Women moving women is a powerful reality.

Reprinted from WEdf, December 1984, Volume 3, No.2.

Marie Gillen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Adult Education at St. Francis Xavier University, in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

Go forward not backward
Seize time
Seize training opportunities
Teach yourselves
Set your own horizons
Take care
Take hold firmly of tools and
technology

Take part fiercely in the future
Take stock of the changing times
Be all that you can
And all that you want
A decade is over
Our day has begun

Excerpted from a poem written by Elizabeth Cox of Papua New Guinea in celebration of the Tools and Technology Exhibit at the Third United Nations World Conference on Women, NGO Forum, held in Nairobi in 1985. Reprinted from WEdf Summer 1988, Volume 6, No.2.

References
Boyd, E. Reflection as a Mode of Knowing: Case Studies of Counsellors. Diss. University of Toronto, 1980.

Boyd, E., and A. W. Fales. "Reflective Learning: Key to Learning from Experience." Journal of Humanistic Psychology 23.2 (1983): 99-117.

Kolb, D. A., and R. Fry. "Toward an Applied Theory of Experiential Learning." Theories of Group Processes. Ed. C. Cooper. London: John Wiley, 1975.

Mezirow, J. "A Critical Theory of Adult Learning and Education." Adult Education 32.1 (1981): 3-24.



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