Friday, October 31, 2008

10.6 Why Ethical Reflections Matter

Box 14.2, Ethical Reflection and Pedagogy, G. Cheney
After reading Mr. Cheney’s experience about reflections and the need for more ethical reflections in corporate America, I found myself reflecting back on my recent semesters. The Instructional Design classes offered a great deal of challenges in learning new concepts and applying them to the development of projects. What I always found useful near the end of the course was the time for reflection on the “process”.

There was no need to adhere to the APA style, nor comment in so many words. It was pure and honest reflection on what you experienced and what you wanted to say to the entire class. Most of the time it was a debriefing about the project. And then every once in awhile there was an “aha” moment. And that’s when I knew I was learning. Taking the time to reflect with your peers, (even in this electronic medium) without the constraints of words counts and time intervals, is worth every thought.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with you because ethical reflection is a way to learn from your past experiences. I believe that ethical reflection should be a priority for corporate executives because this is one of the reasons that they hold a position of power (or at least it should be); however, the truth is that most executives are in their position because they are ultimately trying to “maximize shareholder wealth.” I would like to think that they also reflect and look back on the decisions that they have made, whether good or bad, in an effort to learn from their experiences.I’m sure that most do.

charlemagne said...

On the subject of ethics, in relation to communicaiton studies clsees, brings up an experience I had while trying to graduate. As the program was structured at that point, Comm 199 was a capstone course were students engaged in the process of reflection and tried to put some perspective on their experiences in the program. And one particular area of communication studies seemed lite: ethics. Students had not been taught the ethical considerations regarding communication studies as a discipline. As a result, we were reflecting on something that we had never learned about.