Learning Journal

Learning Journal – Notes

          So a Learning Journal is more than an academic interest in the human process of reflection. However is a vehicle for reflection on guidance, encouragement, questions and on exercises leading to a revue that can have a worthwhile consequence to my learning and artistic development.

          Within the MA I believe it is a document that could be considered as recording of evidence like a portfolio that reflects my work and the progression of the work as well as a record of my reading, in using a blog site I can reflect and create a commentary that is continuous and as time goes on will grow and expand allowing me also to retain knowledge gained and debated but not just as a private log or diary. The blog site is also a reference for other students and Lecturers to see my development but also my reflective documentation. As stated on page 2 – Background.

“In this book, by ‘learning journal’ we refer to an accumulation of material that is mainly based on the writer’s processes of reflection. This accumulation is made over a period of time, not in one go”.

My blog is one main place for me to show my creative processes, my past work, and then there are extended areas that has enabled me to include the other subject matters on the MA course which are ‘Visual Enquiry’ and Contextual learning’ in doing this it has enabled me to work across all the subject matters individually but also to pull these individual aspects together in one place, so there can develop a cross over between the subjects.

“Education, as Friere noted rightly, can be used to free people or to domesticate them; when students write reflectively, I think they are being liberated. (Sanford, 1988) page 6 Backgrounds.

          I also use my blog as a way of not only referencing my work but also as a record of the varies stages that I explore through a painting, and as time goes on to explore why a painting does not work, and when a painting works and by recording these happenings to develop more of an understanding and a language as well. Furthermore the more I use the blog as a site of exploration of my work and as a learning tool I will be able to extend the vision through my paintings.

“Her meticulously recorded material on the four years of – what she called – an ‘uncomfortable experience’ led her to see painting as an interplay between objective and subjective views of the world: ‘imagination and action, dream and reality, incorporated environment and external environment” (Milner, 1957:129). Page 6 Backgrounds.

As I work on the blog and as I work at developing my art, the two become intertwined like a network and the root of all of the building and in keeping the information, visual and written is to strengthen the theoretical and practical essence of reflection.