Assignment: Critical Reflective Essay
Length: 2000 words.
Task aim: To critically reflect on how your own culture, life experiences, worldview and dominant cultural paradigms, influences your perceptions of, and interactions with, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in health care.
Task rationale:
Critical reflection of an experience, situation or performance allows for deeper learning, insight and conscious decision making to improve and transform professional practice (Walker, Schultz & Sonn, 2014). Critical reflection is identified in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Curriculum Framework as an important process to lifelong learning (Department of Health, 2014).
Task description:
Part A
Create a detailed concept map that explores a subject that has resonated with you in the First Peoples Health and Practice course To assist you, you should ask yourself:
1. What has resonated with me the most in this course?
2. What are key concepts within this subject that stood out to me?
3. How did these concepts make me feel and/or how did I react when I heard this?
4. Why did I feel or react this way?
5. Continue to ask yourself 'why' to unpack each concept in detail, from your personal, professional and the dominant cultural lens.
Part B
Using the concept map completed in Part A as a guide, write a 2000 word critical reflective essay, applying the Critical Reflection Framework adapted from Walker, Schultz and Sonn (2014)
1. Define and discuss the subject and its key concepts and then choose one concept to write about.
2. Reflect on how your own culture as well as your professional culture, influences your understanding of the concept.
3. Analyse the viewpoints and assumptions of others and the dominant cultural paradigm relating to the concept.
4. Discuss what you have learnt from this critical reflective process and how this learning influences your perceptions of, and interactions with, Australia's First Peoples in the health care setting?
5. Discuss how your future practice may be transformed as part of this process.
References
Department of Health. (2014). Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health curriculum framework. Canberra, Australia: Commonwealth of Australia.
Walker, R., Schultz, C., & Sonn, C. (2014). Cultural Competence - Transforming Policy, Services, Programs and Practice. Dudgeon, P., Milroy, Walker, R. (Eds.). Working Together: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health and Wellbeing Principles and Practice (pp. 195 - 220).