Reflection for Integrative Learning: USR

Dr Yew Kong Leong:

The old USP curriculum was very targeted at students up to their third year. When students reached their fourth year, they would normally go back to their major, do their honours theses, and graduate. It would’ve been remiss of us not to offer a capstone module that would allow students to think, in an intellectually rigorous way, how the skills in USP benefited them, or changed the way they thought about themselves, their disciplines, and the world. A lot of students who were graduating also had a tremendous amount of attachment to USP in the first few years, but did not have the opportunity to come back. This was how USR came to be the compulsory final module.

Dr Yew Kong Leong:

I haven’t been involved with USR since its beginning; I started five years ago but it has been around longer than that. The ringleaders who started USR are Mark Brantner, Jeremy Arnold, and Mabel Wong, but they aren’t around any more. By training, Dr Brantner is very much a rhetoric person who’s into the fundamental skills of thinking and writing and he spearheaded the design of the curriculum. He saw the value of not just reflection, but critical reflection, and particularly the use of e-portfolios. 

One good reason why we advocate the use of end-of-semester e-portfolios as a form of assessment is that it allows students to revisit or redo earlier assignments, having the benefit of all the skills and content they have covered. For example, in Writing and Critical Thinking, all the essential skills are delivered towards the end of the semester. But they need to do their first assignment by the end of Week 3 or 4. How do you do your assignment even before you’ve been introduced to the whole lot of skills in WCT?

An e-portfolio system then allows students to submit drafts early in the semester, but the grading is not final. When they reach the end of the semester, they get to revisit the things that they have submitted, review the comments they receive, and rewrite and put everything together. This system allows students to submit work at the end of the semester again, to be given the chance to revisit their earlier work. This also allows a reflective component, for students to think about what they have learned and how these learning points translate into their assignments. This assessment method has become quite a popular method in many universities. To Dr Brantner, the e-portfolio was the tool to perform reflective thinking, and Year 4 is a good time for students to write about their university experiences.

The other justification for USR is what we call integrative learning. A lot of pedagogy experts are worried that the American university educational system which we’ve adopted, has became quite pigeonhole-ish. You take a module in one semester, and after the semester it no longer affects what you’re going to do. Some knowledge you learn there may go on to influence the way you think, but essentially the modules are all very compartmentalized. The hope in USR is that students can think about other modules they’ve taken in the past that may affect something they’ve learned in another module. The reflection module was meant to be something that formalises this process of integration: form connections within and outside the classroom, form connections within your major and USP, and other connections like within your major or within USP itself.

Dr Yew Kong Leong:

Dr Brantner implemented an e-portfolio system for his writing modules, and Prof Geertsema tried this for awhile, I think. I also tried to incorporate e-portfolios in my own inquiry module – Asianism and Singapore, a level-3000 module some years back. Reflection can be done in different scales: on a semesterly basis like in a specific module. It can be on a yearly basis, like reflection on Year 1 or Year 2, or on the scale of your whole undergraduate education, like in USR.

One thing I wanted to do as USR coordinator was to show more faculty members that the pedagogy and the sorts of things we do in USR could be adopted in other USP modules. The directors were interested in this and we did talk about conducting workshops for USP faculty. Then COVID hit, and the plan unfortunately didn’t go very far.

Dr Yew Kong Leong:

If you’ve been to the USR website, under resources there is a link to e-magazines. From 2014 to 2017, every cohort was put into groups and they would each produce their own e-magazine based on collective reflection. The name of the module at that time was called Intellectual Responsibility in a Complex World. There were particular themes like “food” or “multiculturalism” that students worked with, and all the e-magazines had a sub-theme.

Eventually, we felt that the e-magazine wasn’t working out. Students felt that it was very intense on top of their Year 4 workload, so we decided to change it into a system of making response posts and original author replies. We tried to get students to take responsibility in interacting with each other and offering each other formal feedback on their writing. USR was supposed to encourage reflection as a group activity. This boils down to the belief that reflection is not something that you do by yourself, but in groups. That’s why the e-magazine was introduced, but eventually it was replaced by the response post assignment.

Then, USR evolved further. Previously, USR was taught as one singular module like USS. There were separate instructors to handle smaller tutorial groups and teach slightly different things, but all students were assessed and administered as one big cohort instead of separate official sections. There were a few problems, particularly around timing. That format required all USR classes to be held at the same time, Monday and Wednesday 6-8pm was the chosen slot, since there would be fewer scheduling conflicts and most of the students could attend the class. However, teaching in the evenings was not feasible when many professors have families or were unwilling to teach those timings. So I thought, let’s sectionalise USR and make it more like WCT, where it fulfills the same requirement but we have different session timings. This gave students more flexibility as well to shop around for the time that suits them.

Starting in AY22/23, we completely sectionalised USR so that each section is separately graded. It gave instructors a lot more flexibility, who could teach things that weren’t common across the course, while at the same time maintaining a set of common requirements across the modules. We leverage on different instructors’ ability to bring out different aspects of the curriculum, but we still need to have some amount of standardisation.

However, there were things that remained largely unchanged. And the e-portfolio structure was the most enduring. Mark Brantner introduced us to some pedagogical works, one of which was Leveraging the ePortfolio for Integrative Learning by Candyce Reynolds. It’s not meant to be a textbook – it’s meant for instructors – but I found it beneficial for students to think about integrative learning. In the US the use of the e-portfolio has been increasing quite dramatically: more than 50% of American higher education institutions require students to produce an e-portfolio, but unlike us, the e-portfolio component may not be taught in a module, but as a not-for-credit course.

Some universities see e-portfolios as a way for students to get a sense of who they are and to prepare them for post-university life. Something I tell my students is that the e-portfolio is a much more substantial statement of who you are, your values, what you have learned, and how you’ve put that into practice. In contrast, the CV or resume is a descriptive document that itemises things in a chronological sense and quantifies your achievements. But what, for instance, does it mean to graduate with first class honours or a GPA of 4.5? Employers are looking for more creative ways you can put those numbers into more qualitative assessments of yourself. So we can use e-portfolios from an employment or educational perspective.

Dr Yew Kong Leong:

One of the difficulties is identifying what counts as critical reflection and how to get different people to teach it. As instructors, we’ve had to think about how capable we are in teaching critical reflection because none of us, except for Dr Brantner, has had that sort of training. But most of the first instructors have been humanities and social science people. Over time, we’ve also had a handful of STEM people teaching USR: Profs Low Boon Chuan and Martin Henz and Drs Philippe Raynal, Edmund Low, and Chan Chi-Wang. But these were more one-off teaching stints, and perhaps because of their other commitments or level of comfort with teaching critical reflection, we’ve not been able to get them more frequently involved. But in general, it’s been a lot tougher getting STEM instructors interested in it.

Another issue was that we don’t get enough purchase from students. I wonder if we’ve stressed on the word “critical” hard enough, and if students misunderstood what we mean by reflection. And I often see complaints from students asking what’s USR about and why the need to learn how to reflect when they feel they already have the ability to do so.

I always give this example to explain: I might be rushing to work and I rush for the bus only to trip and hurt myself. That becomes a potential point for reflection that maybe it’s not worth it for me to run for the bus and risk getting hurt. That’s a casual form of reflection that’s informal and more instinctive. But if I sit and think about why I was rushing for the bus in the first place, why did I feel so compelled to run after the bus – maybe I don’t want to be late for work, maybe the boss likes people to be punctual, maybe I’m competing with someone else to be earlier at work. We are pushing the envelope further; this is a form of reflection you don’t normally do.

We can go beyond that and think about a class you’ve taken: “oh, I took a class about Marxist notions of labour and power, and I learned about where my intention to run after the bus comes from.” Here, we’re getting closer – these very basic experiences get a more profound meaning when you connect them to what you have learned in university. The point of this example is to stress that critical reflection is not about recalling – which anyone can do – but to look back after a few years and try to make sense of those experiences in a different way. By applying your intellectual and conceptual frameworks, you can get new meanings, new ways of understanding yourself, and the world. Critical reflection is not something that can be done ad hoc or casually, it often needs to be written and rewritten, and it’s actually quite challenging.

In execution, USR is the only module that doesn’t have a topic – even WCT, which is heavily skills-focused, has a topic. This means it’s hard to establish a common language to speak with fellow students. At one point in time we did select semesterly topics that we’ve hoped were broad and fundamental enough to engage each cohort of students. But in the end you will still find students who will say “I did mechanical engineering, I can’t see how any of my mechanical engineering knowledge can link to food,” although I think the instructors try very hard to get the students to make this connection. This is why we moved away from topics and decided to leave it open.

Dr Yew Kong Leong:

I realised that we needed textbooks so that students can feel there is a central set of ideas they can gravitate around. In critical reflection, there’s very little content to deliver. Most of it is “process learning”, essentially higher-order critical skills that are fundamental to and outside of learning “content”. Having a textbook like Gillie Bolton’s Reflective Practice or Barbara Bassot’s The Reflective Practice Guide helped because I could use certain aspects of the textbooks to teach those skills.

For instance, I made use of concepts like “Kolb Cycles”, developed by some pedagogical psychologists. They’re a series of cycles around how somebody learns. You have different stages of learning, from identifying a problem to experimentation to implementing a solution. Depending on the type of learner that you are, where you start in that cycle is different, so there are learners’ styles like theorists, pragmatists, and activists. I get students to read that chapter and think about where they fit in those cycles, though it’s not perfect and sometimes they see themselves straddling between different learning style. In class, I would group them into groups of diverse thinking styles and give them time to think about hypothetical problems and how they would approach those problems. After the discussion they share their different approaches and reflect on how easy or difficult it might have been for them to locate themselves in the cycle or imagine a learning scenario.

The point of the exercise is to reflect on themselves as learners. Once they know where they are in that cycle, they have the framework to reflect on a particular experience. “I did an experiment in molecular biology and I realised it didn’t work for me; now I know why I took this step and that step. Even though I didn’t find the solution at that point, what else did I go on to do to find the resolution?”

Dr Yew Kong Leong:

The textbooks didn’t exactly meet our pedagogical needs. Most of these were usually pragmatic and written for reflective practices in the caring professions like healthcare, elderly care, education, and social work. They do tend to be very interested in critical reflection, but do not give detailed ideas on how to reflect on the kind of varied curriculum and educational experiences in an honours programme like ours. For instance, Bolton’s book has a heavy nursing orientation. She’s trained as a nurse and the way nurses practise reflection is fascinating. How do you maintain a logbook that reflects on your own clinical experiences? How do you handle difficult patients, how did you administer medication, what mistakes did you make, and how do you become more critical and self-reflective to find creative solutions? But there still is a pragmatic orientation towards it. So our needs and different, and because there aren’t many other university courses that teach reflection in this way, publishers don’t have a big enough market for this kind of textbook.

Still I persisted with Bolton and Bassot, used their textbooks and introduced them to other instructors. Dr Leung and Dr van Wassenhove also make use of them, although more selectively.

Dr Yew Kong Leong:

USR has always been a bit contentious throughout its history. There have been some instructors who taught USR before and said “never again”. But I found it quite worthwhile and I enjoy the fact that students find it useful to frame themselves, to find out more about themselves, and what they can look forward to. If that’s what they end up doing, then, I’m satisfied with what we have done with USR.