World View Reflection Paper
ELRC: 7612 Student Development Theory
Dr. Kourtney Gray
September 13, 2020
When I read through the prompts for this paper and the heart behind it, I was really excited and intrigued to dive into these themes. These are themes that I find so important for students to really think through and it was even really life-changing for me. I’ll speak to the following points: for me, the nature of reality has been formed from religion and my understanding of good and evil, what is true, how I find research to have good characteristics, how information is valid to me, and I’ll explain the key moments that hold to why I believe what I believe.
First, my nature of reality has been formed mainly through religion and how I was brought up to believe in good and evil. I grew up attending church and having a church be a major component of my life. I very quickly took to these ideas as a child, that God formed the earth and that Jesus was sent as a messiah to us. Church and church functions came a part of my weekly life. However, starting in college I began fighting these ideas a little bit. I started to not see the world in such a black and white stance. Growing up in the church, and in the church, I was attending, there always seemed to be a certain answer for my questions. After college, I really found that I didn’t identify with the typical Christian church and it started to become very hard for me to find a place where I felt like I could commune with God. A lot of what changed for me was that I had experienced emotional abuse and it changed the way I responded to leadership and leadership from men. It’s not that some of my beliefs changed, it’s more about how I saw it. To me, it wasn’t hard and fast if you are gay, you’re living in sin and going to hell. It’s that I know the God I’ve experienced and he’s so full of life and love and I don’t find that that’s the character he would uphold. He loves no matter where we are and what we’re doing, it isn’t conditional. So, I’ve thankfully found a place where I feel that people are thinking similar to me and aspiring to see God in the world how I am. But, my understanding of God has really shaped the way I see reality. That and therapy. Having gone to therapy I’m able to see how much more there is to a person: physical, spiritual, and emotional. With that being said, there’s good and evil in all of us and all of it is real because our experiences have shaped us to be who we are within the mix of good and evil. With that being said, I would say that I align more with positivism and constructivism theories for myself and how I developed (Abes, 11, 2016). Henri Nouwen is one of my favorite writers and priests, he said once, “In solitude we become aware that we were together before we came together and that life is not a creation of our will but rather an obedient response to the reality of our being united,” greatly describes my view of reality is community it’s to learn and be knit closer together and to be there for one another (Nouwen, 14, 1990).
The next theme I want to speak on is knowing how something is true. I’ve found that therapy has also really helped to emotionally and for my own self know what is true. Often, I’m in a predicament and it’ll make me feel a certain way, but by having experience in therapy I know that this feeling isn’t the dominating truth. As well, I’ve learned over time to intake information and find within myself what I know to be true. To be honest, I’ve found that I’ve always been that way. I’m not one to just quickly believe you unless I completely trust that you also intake information similar to mine. “Constructed knowing involves the integration of subjective and objective knowledge, with both feeling and thought present,” best describes how I intake information as understanding truth (Patton, 325, 2016). However, as a teacher of finding the truth, I connected with “connected teaching respects and supports first-hand experience as a source of knowledge and encourages student-initiated work patterns rather than imposing arbitrary requirements,” (Patton, 326, 2016). This transitions me to explaining if my beliefs have changed over time. For the most part, they haven’t for me. However, in my lifetime I’ve seen a large change in fake news when dealing with politics and that’s where I’ve really questioned fake news. I’ve found I really have to make sure the news source isn’t biased and is willing to report the true news no matter what it says. I found that I stand with this quote when it comes to talking to others and when others ask about my stance on news, “educators have an obligation to help students equip themselves with complicated ideas that are both self-supporting and inclusive of others,” (Patton, 332, 2016).
Speaking of understanding false information that leads me to the next theme of knowing how to tell research is good research. Similar to the text, seeing how there’s a method, plan and result is very important to receive all the details completely written out and to see the plan of action to see the results that will accomplish a certain ask is very key in research. As well, seeing that information is coming from reputable sources and from people who are experts in their field is very important to me as finding this as good research. As well, I identified with this quote from our reading, “with regard to the latter, student-faculty interaction demonstrated support for the importance of validation, support, and sense of connectedness for women’s intellectual and personal development,” this explains very well how I download if the information is and reputable (Patton, 325, 2016). My beliefs if research is good research hasn’t really changed. This is mainly because I came from a family of research scientists so learning how to intake true information came very quickly in life. I don’t ever remember a time of either not knowing it was well-informed research or not knowing how to know.
Now taking this perception of how to know if research is good research and apply it to how to know if the information is valid. To find information valid I find that it’s stepping into another’s perspective and feeling their emotions and where they’re coming from to really see if I register it as “valid.” As well, something to note is that wisdom has a large play in understanding if something is valid. By having wisdom you’re able to see where the person is coming from and register their emotions. “Wisdom is a construct comprised of six interrelating dimensions: self-knowledge, understanding of others, judgment, life knowledge, life skills and willingness to learn,” the dimensions that are filled in wisdom shows how knowing yourself and others helps to register valid information (Brown, 137, 2004). I found the article we recently read to be really helpful in describing how I personally find something to be valid.
“Grounded in the data, wisdom became defined as a construct comprised of six interrelated dimensions: (a) self-knowledge, (b) understanding of others, (c) judgment, (d) life knowledge, (e) life skills, and (f) a willingness to learn. Wisdom develops when students go through the core learning-from-life process, comprised of reflection, integration, and application. The conditions that facilitate the development of wisdom by directly or indirectly stimulating the learning-from-life process are the student’s (a) orientation to learning, (b) experiences, (c) interactions with others, and (d) environment,”
from this description of wisdom, I find that using these dimensions to register them to a situation and measure if the situation is coming from a wise and thoughtful place is valid information (Brown, 137, 2004). To be honest, I don’t think I’ve always found this way of measuring validity in my life. I think often was much closer minded and felt that if I couldn’t understand or another person couldn’t understand me then all was lost. I changed from this way of thinking because I became stronger in my self-knowledge, life knowledge, and understanding of others, by being more empathetic and more emotionally intelligent I was able to step out of my own comforts and see if the information was valid even if it didn’t align with maybe how I felt or how I had felt. Now, I see that information has to go through dimensions.
There are definitely key moments for me that shaped my beliefs. For starters, I remember being in Sunday school when the idea of evolution was taught as irrefutable and I distinctly remember not totally understanding why that had to be untrue. As well, in middle school, I had a very distinct moment when I remember really believing God was real and I wanted to live a life serving for good and the God I experienced. I know that this is what shaped my belief in wanting to be a Christian. This soon after led to the idea of good and wanting to live a life where I was striving for a better world with others and was creating a community where I felt known and others did as well. I don’t necessarily have a distinct memory that I remember being taught what is true or what characterized good research, but more so I had many conversations with my parents. I would mainly talk to them because I know that they strive to always have well-informed research and look for truth in everything. However, I do remember struggling to find what is valid for me. As I said before – wisdom leads to this understanding of validity, this took me a lot of experience to understand. I remember going through therapy and having a really hard time thinking my experience was valid because I struggled to understand my own emotions. Although I don’t have a distinct memory of this change or where my understanding took place, I do have small tokens of when this changed. Going through therapy I found that understanding myself and learning for myself that my experiences are true and real that others who experience these same things or something similar. As well, I remember having many of these moments where I just felt like I didn’t stand with whatever narrative was being told to me. It took time to understand these feelings, experiences to come to my belief. “…a primary goal of higher education is to teach ‘students to engage in reflective thinking and to make reflective judgments about vexing problems,” really identifies how I found my understanding of these things, that I have to reflect within myself to come to the understanding I’ve found (Patton, 329, 2016). This is what I would want for other college-aged students. To question and realize how the experiences before them have gotten them to where they are, but also what is and isn’t true about that narrative and how to know what is true to get them to where they’d like to go.
Overall, it takes living life to really understand who you are and what you believe to be real and true of your reality. I’ve really fought a lot of my experiences and remembered the truth of myself and my experiences which has shaped what I believe today. Continuing to be reflective and to search for what I know to be true and to know my values is so important and I’ll continue to do these practices.
References
Abes, E. S. (2016). Situating Paradigms in Student Development Theory. New Directions for Student Services, 2016(154), 9-16.
Brown, S. C. (2004). Learning Across the Campus: How College Facilitates the Development of Wisdom. Journal of College Student Development, 45(2), 134-148.
Nouwen, H. J. (1990). Clowning in Rome: Reflections on solitude, celibacy, prayer, and contemplation. Hong Kong: Logos Book House. Patton, L. D.,
Renn, K. A., Guido, F., & Quaye, S. J. (2016). Student development in college: Theory, research, and practice (Third ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, A Wiley Brand.
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