Reflective Journal

Reflective Journal Entry 2
In the second tutorial for Academic and Professional Communication I believe I started to understand the method of reflective thinking a lot better. When first reading the Dewey text ‘How We Think’ I was quite confused, some sentences made sense and some didn’t.
During the tutorial we discussed the text in a group of four and had to come up with a poster to match our beliefs of what the text was trying to portray. When focusing on part one of the text – idle thinking, I realised this is most common style of thinking and is those thoughts that are ‘in our heads’ or ‘go through our mind’ hundreds of times each day. An example of these thoughts may be someone pursuing happiness and thinking of being on a white sandy beach with crystal clear blue water. A major part of our lives will be spent in this state of idle thinking with hope for that one day these thoughts may come true. I can very much relate to this style of think as I feel I m someone who is always pursuing happiness and always thinking of what it is that will bring that happiness.
In the second stage of the text I think it moves into thoughts that a lot of the time is based on fiction and not fact. It helped me to learn this part of the reading when we related it to thoughts that enter our mind when watching movies such as Harry Potter and Shrek. When watching these movies or reading a fictional novel or looking at a make believe picture we will sometimes think that maybe this fictional thought may really is exist, there are no grounds to say that it doesn’t and it is a thought that that has never been examined. In the text it states that these thoughts ‘do not aim at knowledge, at belief about facts or truth’ and thereby they are marked off from reflective thought even when they most resemble it. People who can express such ideas and thoughts often receive a lot of credit for produce such unique and interesting stories.
The third stage was a little hard for me to get my head...