Choose an image (photograph/cartoon) from one of the articles/books/chapters you have read on this course that has been meaningful to you. Write about it, with reference to your reading of one or more articles, explaining its particular relevance to you and what you are learning.

Learning Journal Prompts

Choose an image (photograph/cartoon) from one of the articles/books/chapters you have read on this course that has been meaningful to you. Write about it, with reference to your reading of one or more articles, explaining its particular relevance to you and what you are learning.

It is the main space in which you reflect critically on the readings, workshops and discussions you are undertaking as part of your learning. While it is not a formal essay, it is still important that you use it to engage with the course materials and themes; it should not be a ‘personal diary’ or a reflection of your life experiences with only a tenuous connection to the course readings.

The journal entries should be based on:

Essential readings you are carrying out for weekly workshops;

Additional reading you choose to follow up (e.g. from Recommended or Extended Readings suggested in the Resource List, or in anthropology journals listed on the LEARN page;

Activities and group work you undertake in the workshops;

Discussions you have with other people (e.g. via the Discussion Boards) on the course about what you are learning/readings you enjoyed etc.

As many of you are new to anthropology, we would recommend that you try and read exclusively within this discipline for your work on this course. This will ensure that you do not get confused with other approaches to the same topics.

For example, a developmental psychologist might be writing about literacy but in a completely different way from an anthropologist.

The LJ is an individual space and there is flexibility for it to take different forms depending on your preferences as a learner, or how you think whatever it is that you have learned can be best expressed.

The main aims of this course are to help you to:

Think anthropologically about education and learning.

Reflect critically on ethnographic writing about education.

To deepen your understanding by making you aware of what you are, and are not, learning.

It is important therefore that you do not fall into the trap of either:

a) Confusing the LJ with a diary in which you discuss your biography and personal feelings about things;

b) Simply describe what you have read/learned without showing how it has changed the way you think, approach issues in education, or see the world.

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