Abstract:

It is a challenge to teach students how to overcome the conventional thought that media industry professionals, especially those in the creative industries, are at constant odds. Experiential learning is one of the more “innovative” ways to draw out the understanding that the communication disciplines have a competitive-cooperative relationship. Yet even with its attractiveness, the reflective aspects of experiential learning remain highly underdeveloped. The current study examines the reflective process within “the Trifecta”, an experiential based simulation that brings together three communication and media courses so that students could practice working on building inter-organizational relationships. The act of reflection occurred through weekly structured podcasts, which were transcribed and analyzed using a grounded practical approach. The results show that reflection occurs on two levels: a surface level, where the tools of reflection dominated, and a deeper level, where the groups actively engaged in meaning making. The presence of these two levels relates to a debate within the communication disciplines over the terms communications and communication. As it seems, a similar dichotomy exists in reflection(s) and thus the current study advances several proposals that maximize the value of reflection(s) as a meta behavior: one where students engage in both transmissive and constitutive processes.

Keywords:

Reflection, communication, communications, media education.