I connected with someone new on LinkedIn this week, Roxanne Houshmand-Howell, founder of The Right Project, CSM alumni and the woman behind Fashion Happiness, an ‘initiative designed to empower individuals and businesses to build more resilient, positive workplaces’ and to ‘redefine success beyond just profit’.
It struck me that these are qualities that we want our students to aspire to in the businesses that they go on to work for, and as individuals in their everyday lives. A role in an ever more competitive fashion industry is certainly not for the faint hearted, and I firmly believe that part of my own personal and professional development as an educator is to help my students build the knowledge and resilience to realise their ambitions.
Having previously led a unit entitled ‘People Management’, as part of the BSc/Msc Fashion Management, Gibbs reflective cycle (Gibbs, 1988) was a core element of the topic, encouraging students to reflect on their own work, prior to summative submission. In terms of a tool to build resilience and positivity, and having used reflective practice throughout this first unit of my PGCert, I am now considering again how I can build this in more effectively into the other units I am leading.
I already reflect informally, and I am sure, sometimes subconsciously on events and learning opportunities. However, as asked by Daudelin, 1996, in her paper ‘Learning from Experience through Reflection’,
“If the process of reflection is so natural and familiar, what keeps organisations from embracing formal reflective practices as a way to encourage learning?”
In terms of my own development, and ability to critically evaluate my approach to planning, teaching and assessment, I am realising that instigating more formal reflective practice into my own timetable has the potential to become a useful documentation of what happened during a lecture or seminar, what I did well, and what was less effective, how did it affect the experiences of my students, and what would I repeat for future classes and what do I need to change or evolve to improve the experience.
References
Daudelin, Marilyn Wood (1996), Learning from Experience Through Reflection, Available at: https://www.scribd.com/document/656114477/Learning-From-Experience-Through-Reflection-1996Daudelin868 (Accessed 18.03.2025)
Gibbs, Graham (1988), Learning by Doing, A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods Available at: https://thoughtsmostlyaboutlearning.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/learning-by-doing-graham-gibbs.pdf (Accessed 18.03.2025)
Roxanne Houshmand-Howell, The Right Project & Fashion Happiness Available at: https://www.therightproject.org/c (Accessed 17.03.2025)