Semester Reflection

Throughout the semester, you have been reading, watching, and listening broadly to the different history and systems of psychology. Reflection is a purposeful activity to help you analyze your experience and process what you have learned.

For this semester reflection, you will be writing a short 2-3 page paper based on the readings and discussion from this course and your own experiences. While writing this paper, you should pay attention to how your own positionality (e.g. race, class, gender, sexuality) and experiences shaped and influenced your thoughts and seek to balance your theoretical analysis with it. The paper should not just be a description of the materials and/or discussions, or just a recount of what you think and
feel. Rather, reflective writing begins with a clear line of thought and uses the examples (e.g. materials and discussions) to illustrate your reflections and an analytical approach (e.g. why is the reading important to you?).

You can also use the ORID Model to help you organize your paper (University of Waterloo):

Objective: Relates to Concrete experience. What did you observe, read or hear? Who was involved?

What was written? What happened as a result of your contributions?

Reflective: Relates to Affective experience. How did the experience make you feel? Did your apprehension change or your confidence grow? Did you feel effective, knowledgeable or effective?

Interpretive: Relates to Cognitive experience. What did this experience make you think? How did it change your thinking? What did you learn? What worked and why?

Decisional: Relates to Ability to incorporate experiences. What decisions or opinions have you formed?

How will you use this new information, new skill, or new technology?

***Some of the topics we discussed in class this semester includes the video The Changing Face of Feminist Psychology; Mental and physical abuse in group homes for the mentally disabled; Watsons theory on human behavior; non white psychologists in the early 1900s; the willowbrook school scandal; etc..