Abstract:

Being reflective is became one of the most important capabilities of the contemporary people, of this 21 century professionals. We need to adapt to a very complex and dynamic societies so, we all have a special education objective related with Becoming More Critical Thinker, More Reflective. Our paper presents some of our conclusions after two years of implementation of an Erasmus + Project activities. On the part of the EU Commission, an active and informed European citizenship is the key: “Education and training are crucial to prevent and tackle poverty and social exclusion and discrimination, and to build a foundation on which active citizenship rests” [New priorities for education and training (ET2020)”, p.2]. Our project - The REFLECT LAB project intends to support universities, meaning the teaching staff (more specifically lecturers), to implement the currently discussed implementation of inquiry based learning. These socio-scientific teaching/learning laboratories - REFLECT LABs – are now developed and tested in five European universities. The objective was to establish an innovative course structure, which fosters self-directed learning at Higher Education Institutions (HEI). Students do autonomous research in REFLECT LABs with scientific methods towards pressing political and socially issues. Lecturers accompany and support this process and the critical discussions and debates. As such, the project sets a counterpoint to the widely criticized reduction of learning in HEI to only knowledge transfer. And, in the same time we pointed out some ethical issues related with our specific learning intentionalities. Our paper is a synthesis of these comments about experiential learning and daily Ethical Dilemmas which we have to deal with in our reflective teaching.

Keywords:

Reflective teaching, ethical dilemmas, self-directed learning, small groups activity, reflective lecturer.