Journal writing can be used for teaching and research in
higher education in both on-site and distance-education
modes.
Journal Writing in Higher Education
Peter Jarvis
Issues of teaching and learning, long accepted as important within adult
education, are rapidly becoming significant in higher education. Nevertheless,
journal writing, often referred to as a learning diary, is a teaching and
learning technique that has not received a great deal of attention in the literature
of higher education, despite the fact that diary writing is an old and
established practice. In fact, in a rather rapid survey of the current higher
education literature, I found very few articles on the subject; among the
exceptions are those by Morrison (1996), Bush (1999), and Jasper (1999).
Naturally, I refer to these works, but a great deal of what I discuss here is
drawn from my own professional experience.
Before I became an adult educator, I was a teacher educator. It was in
the early 1970s, in an early phase of my academic career, that I began to
introduce reflective writing on practice to my own students. It is something
that I have encouraged in different ways, at different stages, since that time.
Journal writing, however, is useful inasmuch as it “may help adults break
habitual modes of thinking and change life direction through reflective
withdrawal and re-entry” (Lukinsky, 1990, p. 212). Jasper (1999), however,
does point out that some students who keep reflective learning journals
have found this process threatening; consequently, the introduction of this
teaching and learning technique, as Fenwick points out Chapter Four,
should be undertaken with some sensitivity.
Journaling can be used more widely than as reflective practice; it can be
a teaching, learning, and research instrument in the fields of higher education.
My own concern with this form of practice was based on necessity, since
as a teacher-educator, I was expected to supervise students’ teaching practice
in schools in the geographic catchment area of the college at which I taught.
Academic staff were expected to observe students teach at least twice a week
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NEW DIRECTIONS FOR ADULT AND CONTINUING EDUCATION, no. 90, Summer 2001
© John Wiley & Sons, Inc.1
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during their eight weeks of teaching practice in their final year, and each
member of staff usually had about four students to supervise. However, staff
were also teaching the students in the other years of the college program. This
meant that while the students were teaching in schools, academic staff’s visits
were curtailed. In fact, I was able to observe only a maximum of about two
lessons a week for each student, which provided very little basis on which to
assist them with their teaching skills or to assess their ability to be a teacher.
The college expected the students to provide a lesson plan, setting out
aims, objectives, content, methods, and evaluation, for each lesson that they
taught. It was from these plans that I got the inspiration to ask students to
write about their practice. I asked the students for long, detailed evaluations
of their teaching sessions rather than the short, cursory evaluation notes
that they frequently made. Students had traditionally placed the emphasis
on their preparation rather than their reflections.
I explained to these student teachers that although I would observe
them teach twice a week, I would not always have the time to read their lesson
plans thoroughly before they taught. Rather, I would read them after the
lesson, and I would place greater emphasis on their own extensive evaluation
of each lesson they taught. In other words, their notes formed the foundations
for supervisory tutorials. Instead of my writing a few lines of
evaluation, I was asking the students to write pages of self-evaluation. I
asked them to evaluate every part of their lesson in terms of their practice
and the plans that they had prepared. I asked them to write about what was
good as well as what was not so good, how they had handled difficult situations,
why they deviated from their planned lesson, and so on. As students
began to write more, their evaluations gradually got sharper, and the tutorials
became lively affairs. In fact, long before the ideas of learning journals
or even reflective practice became the vogue, these students were writing
their own learning journals.
Because the School of Educational Studies at the University of Surrey,
where I teach, has always had an initial training course for educators of
adults, I continued to use reflective practice whenever I trained them. We
worked with a variety of professional groups: traditional adult educators,
nurse and midwifery educators, and even teachers of young adults.
Reflective practice found its way into the educational vocabulary with
the publication of Schön’s Reflective Practitioner (1983), a book that has
changed the way many people think about their practice and has led to
many innovations in teaching and research. At the same time, my own very
early experience with long evaluative reports written by the students about
their own practice was the time in my own academic career when I began
to question the traditional relationship between practice and theory. This
eventually lead to my writing The Practitioner Researcher (Jarvis, 1999), in
which I tried to work out something more about this relationship—but this
happened only after I had begun to get students to use learning journals in
their own doctoral research.
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Journals in Undergraduate and Postgraduate
Education
Morrison (1996) notes that since 1990, the University of Durham has
required students to keep their own learning journal throughout the whole
of their academic program at the university, although his own research was
conducted with higher degree students. Indeed at Durham, the learning
journal must be used as part of a compulsory assignment, requiring students
to draw on data from the journal and reflect on them in terms of their own
actions and their personal and professional development, although the contents
are always confidential to individual student. The journal serves two
reflective purposes. First, it helps students to become reflective learners,
recording data about reading, study habits, and attitudes. Students are also
invited to write about their own personal development; that is, they can
record information about their increasing knowledge and their increasing
ability to identify and articulate issues, and they can reflect on important
decisions that they have taken since they enrolled in the program. Second,
students can examine their own self-development and their own feelings of
empowerment. In this regard, Morrison (1996) cites the work of Prawat
(1991) to demonstrate this fact. Morrison notes that when reflective practice
prospers, “it is seen as by many students as a major significant feature
of their development in all spheres” (p. 328).
Bush (1999) records that he kept a journal while teaching adult student
nurses about “spirituality and spiritual care in nursing practice” (p. 20). His
entries, which were made within six hours of teaching and reexamined
within two days, illustrate how he was grappling with both the teaching of
the subject and the mature learners whom he was teaching. He recorded his
thoughts about the teaching and the participation of students in this rather
emotive but significant topic and concluded, “The keeping of a journal provided
the educator with an opportunity to connect thoughts, feeling and
action and relate them to what was happening now, as opposed to writing
about what has already happened. . . . It encouraged the author to trace the
development of any emerging interest and provided a personal account of
any growth with a factual reference, that was repeatedly examined in order
to create some personal meaning” (p. 26). As a result of his experiences,
Bush (1999) has decided that in future courses, he will also ask students to
keep their own journals about the program.
Jasper (1999), in a research project on the use of journaling that used
grounded theory, discovered that all the students who used journaling
thought that they had changed and developed as a result. However, she also
discovered that one could not assume that students knew how to write a
reflective journal; these skills had to be taught. Once the students had
acquired the skills, however, journal writing could be used as a learning
strategy, and it became an instrument for both personal and professional
growth.
82 PROMOTING JOURNAL WRITING IN ADULT EDUCATION
The Personal Use of Journals in Postgraduate
Distance Teaching
I have been involved with learning journals in distance and mixed-mode
delivery professional education. The first use is based on the idea of reflective
teaching and learning through the medium of traditional distance education,
and the second is about relating practice and theory in mixed-mode
delivery, professional, continuing education.1
One of the traditional criticisms of distance education is that there is a
tendency for the delivery of the teaching materials to be didactic, and much
of it is. However, it is possible through the use of journals to make the
course reflective and almost interactive. The department in which I work at
the University of Surrey introduced distance-learning master’s degree programs
internationally in the early 1980s. They followed what has now
become a rather traditional format of textbooks, study guides, and assignments,
but more recently in my own courses, I have introduced the learning
journal. I have used the learning journal in two different ways: to help
students see how their own ideas are changing and developing as the course
proceeds and to test their practice against the theoretical ideas to which they
have been introduced.
Both the prescribed textbooks and the associated study guides are provided
by the School of Educational Studies, although learners are encouraged
to read more widely. At the beginning of the course, I suggest to the
students that they start a learning diary, and I inform them that they will be
given exercises and activities that can be usefully undertaken in such a
learning journal. Two examples will suffice here. First, in a module on theories
of learning, students are asked at the start of the course to record in
their learning diary their own definition of learning; they are informed that
they will refer to this definition frequently. As the students examine different
theories and theorists, they are asked at different stages to write down
their current definition of learning or to revisit their original definition and
revise it in the light of their current understanding. In this way, students can
trace their own learning through the program, becoming critically aware of
their initial assumptions and developing other insights.
Second, since the department has students from around the world, we
try not to be culturally imperialistic and expect learners from other cultures
to accept Western scholarship unless it is valid in their own situation. Consequently,
students are told that they should not accept uncritically what
they read; when we give them activities or ask them questions about the
Western theories they are studying, they should be critical and try things
out in their own practice. If they work, then they might discuss in their
learning diaries why they are valid. If the ideas do not work, their practice
is not necessarily wrong, but they might want to consider the reasons that
the Western theories seem inappropriate for their own practice. In this second
exercise, the relationship between theory and practice is problematized
83JOURNAL WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
because there is no assumption that a Western theory has any validity for
non-Western societies. Naturally, this view brings into question the traditional
Western assumption, prevalent since the Enlightenment, of a universality
of knowledge. It also acknowledges Foucault’s idea of the power of the
dominant discourse (Sheridan, 1980) of Western theoretical approaches.
In both examples, the journal is a reflective learning tool based in the
cognitive domain. However, in a recent professional continuing-education
course, for a master’s degree for management consultants, the learning journal
was used in a different manner. This course has a mixed-mode delivery
in which there is a set textbook, but the study guides are written for each
module of work rather than based on the textbook. In this situation, the
practice becomes the foundation for study, because the study guides are
written by practitioners, although they contain a great deal of theory. In
addition, the learners are professional practitioners who have had considerable
professional experience and are taking this course in their spare time
while they work. They were asked to base many of their reflections on their
practice. This example of work-based learning uses journals as one means
of learning in practice. However, practice is not merely cognitive; therefore,
the learners are asked to include attitudinal and emotive dimensions in
their reflection. The journal helps practitioners to focus on the wider
aspects of their practice, such as emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1998),
beliefs, and attitudes. Because this was a mixed-mode delivery course, the
learners had occasional face-to-face study days in which they were asked
to bring their journals and raise issues that had occurred in their practice
and their studies. Their journals, however, remained entirely private; they
were not seen by academic staff or fellow students unless the writers privileged
others with access.
The Use of Journals in Research
As qualitative research is gaining acceptance in research in the education of
adults, the use of the journal in the research process is becoming more
widely recognized. For instance, in all forms of anthropological studies,
researchers have always had to keep field notes (see Tandon, 1981, as an
example of how the journal might be used), and I have had educational students
conducting doctoral research in different societies and with people of
different cultures. Their field notes form the record of their research findings.
Moreover, action research (Carr and Kemmis, 1986), participative
research (see Eldon, 1981, as an example), and practitioner research (Jarvis,
1999) are approaches within the qualitative domain of research that doctoral
students increasingly are using. Their own record of the events becomes part
of their research data. Practitioner researchers are frequently using their own
practice as a research site, and their own involvement is part of the research
process. In recent years, I have had doctoral students using journals in a
variety of research situations.
84 PROMOTING JOURNAL WRITING IN ADULT EDUCATION
A nurse educator who worked with me tried to understand how the
subject of care might be taught to nursing and midwifery students. As
part of her research, she spent twenty days as an observer in different
types of care situations. She also was encouraged to keep a journal of her
observations and reflections on the caring processes during this period.
Her notes became the basis for the subsequent interviews that she conducted
with the carers, so that she could ask quite incisive questions
about specific care situations. In this way, she was able to probe the carers’
understanding and reasons for what they were doing. She kept notes
of the interviews as well, and by synthesizing her journal and the notes
that she took during her interviews, she was able to understand more
about the carers’ own understanding of the relationship between practice
and theory, more about reflective practice itself, and begin to understand
how care can be learned, if not taught, in a formal mode. The journal
became a significant part of her research data in the final presentation of
her thesis. (In Chapter Five, Gillis gives other examples of how the nursing
profession is using learning journals.)
Keeping a journal also became very important in a piece of action
research relating to the teaching of art to adults that another doctoral student
undertook. Many adults come to art classes to learn to draw and paint
through copying already produced works of art rather than learning to
become creative artists themselves. Trying to get them to change their
approach to art is a difficult process, especially since these classes have to
be financially self-supporting. Losing dissatisfied students can put the
classes’ viability at risk. But merely teaching students to reproduce other
people’s art can be less than satisfying for art teachers; consequently, some
give up teaching. A doctoral student, who was also the head of an art department,
kept a journal about the way that a creative art degree was introduced
and the cognitive and emotive reactions of the students and his own staff
involved in the process. A full learning diary was kept, both of his own
experiences and those of his students and staff that he was able to ascertain
over the period of many months. These entries became data on which interviews
with staff were conducted and also the issues on which a focus group
of art teachers concentrated. This approach highlighted many problems that
are prevalent in adult education in the United Kingdom at this time, but
since this in-depth piece of research focused on one college, he was only
able to frame hypotheses about teaching adults art in the wider society.
The final piece of research to which I want to refer here is another doctoral
study. Seeking to understand more fully all the aspects of the role of
human resource development personnel, another of my doctoral students
kept a journal of everything she did and everything people said to her about
human resource development in the performance of her professional role.
This study entailed far more than merely arranging training courses. The
journal highlighted the amount of time she spent performing roles as
diverse as needs analyst, strategist, administrator, consultant, counselor, and
85JOURNAL WRITING IN HIGHER EDUCATION
even spokesperson for management. Her journal not only helped her to
understand more fully her role in her own doctoral research, but it became
the basis of a handbook on human resource development that she and I subsequently
wrote (Hargreaves and Jarvis, 2000).
In all of the research that I have described, the phenomenon under
investigation is not some object lying outside the being of the researcher;
rather, it is about making meaning of lived experience that cannot be replicated.
The researchers are either recording and making meaning of their
own experiences or interpreting the experiences of others. In all of these
cases, the researcher is an interpreter and the reflective journal a means for
recording and analyzing data; it is both research and lived experience (Van
Manen, 1990).
Conclusion
Although this chapter contains a great deal that is autobiographical, it
nevertheless reflects the practices of others with whom I have discussed
the education of adults, and it is also in line with the literature on the
subject.
In higher education in the United Kingdom, there is an increasing
emphasis on record keeping, especially records of students’ progress.
Although the purpose is often portrayed as managerial, there is another
sense in which such records might form the basis for some academic staff
to keep their own journals. However, the fact that this approach is perceived
by many to be a managerial exercise and a paper chase might inhibit the
development of reflective journal writing among faculty.
Writing full, reflective journals is a time-consuming process, and the
lack of extra time of many academics might also inhibit this development.
There is little record in the literature regarding the amount of time that
needs to be invested in this process, but I recall from my earliest experiences
that students lacked the time to write the full evaluations for which I was
asking. It is significant that Jasper (1999) does not mention time as an
important issue in writing reflective journals, although this was not the
focus of her research.
Nevertheless, keeping a journal is not only a useful learning exercise;
it is essential to some forms of research. Keeping journals illustrates that the
relationship between practice and theory is problematic and encourages critical
reflection in different approaches to teaching and learning. Using reflective
journals might be even more useful in lifelong learning as data are now
being downloaded from the Web in greater amounts, without any guidance
as to their validity.
Above all, writing learning diaries is an invaluable tool that can lead
to personal and professional enrichment and empowerment. It should be
practiced and taught much more widely in higher and continuing edu-
cation.
86 PROMOTING JOURNAL WRITING IN ADULT EDUCATION
Note
1. This approach to learning practice reflects ideas that have been developed by the
Human Potential Development Group in the School of Educational Studies, a member
of which I worked with in the development of this course.
References
Bush, T. “Journalling and the Teaching of Spirituality.” Nurse Education Today, 1999, 19,
20–28.
Carr, W., and Kemmis, S. Becoming Critical: Education, Knowledge and Action Research.
Bristol, Pa.: Falmer Press, 1986.
Eldon, M. “Sharing the Research Work: Participative Research and Its Role Demands.”
In P. Reason and J. Rowan (eds.), Human Inquiry. New York: Wiley, 1981.
Goleman, D. Working with Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books, 1998.
Hargreaves, P., and Jarvis, P. The Human Resource Development Handbook. (Rev. ed.) London:
Kogan Page, 2000.
Jarvis, P. The Practitioner Researcher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1999.
Jasper, M. “Nurses’ Perceptions of the Value of Written Reflection.” Nurse Education
Today, 1999, 19, 452–463.
Lukinsky, J. “Reflective Withdrawal Through Journal Writing.” In J. Mezirow and others
(eds.), Fostering Critical Reflection in Adulthood. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990.
Morrison, K. “Developing Reflective Practice in Higher Degree Students Through a
Learning Journal.” Studies in Higher Education, 1996, 31, 317–332.
Prawat, R. S. “Conversations with Self and Conversations with Settings: A Framework
for Thinking About Teacher Empowerment.” American Educational Research Journal,
1991, 28, 737–757.
Schon, D. The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books, 1983.
Sheridan, A. Michael Foucault: The Will to Truth. London: Tavistock, 1980.
Tandon, R. “Dialogue as Inquiry and Intervention.” In P. Reason and J. Rowan (eds.),
Human Inquiry. New York: Wiley, 1981.
Van Manen, M. Researching Lived Experience. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990.
Peter Jarvis is professor of continuing education, University of Surrey, England.