Reflection, Critical Commentary, Portfolio - it's All Coming Together

If you're a student at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, there's a sporting chance you will be polishing off some kind of portfolio or reflective journal this weekend.  Lots of courses have critical assessments of some description due for submission very soon.

How can the library help?  Do you need to cite references?  Could you do with any more reading matter, just to give weight to a theory or argument? (Or, indeed, to argue with?)

Maybe you could use a book on reflective practice, or learning journals, to see what approach other people have taken?

Or are you wondering if there's anything you could access online, to save having to make an unscheduled trip into the library?  Articles?  Recordings?  Maybe a play or opera production?

We're here for you!  Get in early, ask us today and we'll offer whatever help we can.  And don't forget, there's plenty of information on the library portal, and even more on our e-resources pages.

• Portal (the Library is under Student Support)
• RCS Library and IT pages for our e-resources & contact details

E-Journals, E-Portfolios and Reflective Practice

New arrivals at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland may find they have a whole new vocabulary to learn - and not specifically about music, drama or dance!

This is the age of the reflective journal.  It's expected that we will reflect on our practice, whether it's teaching a subject, learning an instrument, or providing student support in the library or admin departments.  So ... students are asked to keep e-journals and e-portfolios, and - embracing new technology - to make use of the virtual learning network (Moodle), and to explore the brand-new Portal (based on Wordpress), for sharing documents in various formats.

But what if you're not used to this explicit reflection at every turn?  Sure, you think about what you do, but maybe you haven't sat down to write commentary about your practice before now?
 
Don't panic!  The Whittaker Library has plenty of material about reflective practice and reflective journals - both "real books" and electronic resources.  And of course, the great thing about e-resources is that you can access them from anywhere.  So, settle down with that tablet or laptop and have a quick read to see if there are aspects of your performing/compositional/creative practice that you never thought of reflecting upon before.

Reading list for Reflective Practice

Do you keep a Reflective Practice Journal? This Guardian blogpost might interest you

Top tips for early career artists was posted on the Guardian's Culture Professionals Network a couple of days ago.  I thought it might interest anyone who has to keep a reflective journal about their development as a performer.  Do take a look.  

The Culture Professionals Network is a thoroughly worthwhile blog to keep on your radar - you never know what may pop up to pique your interest!

Are you Reflective, Reflecting, a Creative Music or Drama Practitioner?

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE | ECITCARP EVITCELFER

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE | ECITCARP EVITCELFER

Has your tutor suggested keeping a reflective journal?  Or they might have called it a 'learning journal'?

Have they suggested looking at the documentation that other Masters students have submitted in previous years?

Here in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the Whittaker Library can help!  Take a look in our catalogue - we've done the searching for you here.

If you're not on campus today, don't worry - we have e-books which may also be useful to you, eg:-

• Reflective Practices in Arts Education (2006) click here.
• Jennifer Moon - Learning Journals (2006) click here.

Here's a direct link to our catalogue if you'd like to try searching further keywords.  Happy hunting!  

We are the very helpful Whittaker Library staff at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. We first posted this in April 2014, but it seems very relevant to what our students are doing right now, so we're reblogging it!

• Library catalogue 
• Library website 

Reflective Practice and Learning Journals: If you Do what you've always Done, you'll Get what you've always Got!

Group or Seminar Presentation Coming Up?

Many staff and students at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland have embraced the concept of  reflective practice - reflecting upon your creative practice, and allowing your reflections to inform future practice.  If you have to do a group presentation or seminar about a particular project or placement, maybe it's time for a bit of reflection and inner contemplation before you work out what to say?


If you check the Whittaker Library catalogue, you'll find various books and examples of learning journals.  Here are some useful keywords to search under!  (Don't miss our Learning Journals e-book, perfect for home study over the Christmas break when you tire of turkey and chocolates!!)

You could also try our Ingenta Connect database, to find useful articles that other people have written about reflective practice journals.

Here's the link:- Ingenta Connect - and you might start by searching Reflective Journal as your keywords.  Feel free to experiment!  (NB if you're off-campus, you'll need to login.  Find the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland - RCS staff and students can login once you've clicked on the Conservatoire's link.)

"If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got!" - it's one of Karen's favourite quotes.  So go on - reflect!

Starting a Music Degree? Here's How to Impress Your Lecturers!

If you're a performing artist, you'll probably be encouraged to keep a reflective diary, logging your progress as a musician or actor.  The Whittaker Library has books to help you develop your diary-keeping skills as a reflective practitioner.

However, there will be essays and topics to research, too.  So take a tip from a librarian: keep a record of everything you read, as well as everything you play.  And in your note-taking, never copy out a quote without noting the page where you found it. Make sure you put inverted commas at the start and end of the quote, then there's no risk of you accidentally using those words without citing who wrote them!  The form of referencing used at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland is called the Harvard system.  (Don't worry if you forget the name - you'll be reminded soon enough!)

If you keep a bibliography (list of books read), note the author, title, publication place, publisher and date. Also the edition, if it's not the first.  It's a good idea to keep your list in alphabetical order by author, so you can find things later.  A Word document will do fine!  

If you enjoy downloading apps and freeware, you can even save your bibliography to the cloud so that you can access it from any computer you use.  

Take a look at Mendeley or Zotero - two useful free resources.  They help you control that growing list of references, and assist with formatting the bibliographic details so they're always consistent.  Come and see us if you need a bit of help getting started. Sometimes it's a good idea to annotate your bibliography with any earth-shattering discoveries you made whilst reading.  These apps will offer you a place for making such notes if you think they would help. ("Chapter 8: author describes harmonics in clarinet timbre.  Chapter 10: bagpipes as a martial instrument.")

Congratulations!  You're already well on the way to being one of the most organised freshers in town!  Your lecturers will be seriously impressed.

Are You a Reflective Practitioner?

RILM to the Rescue!

We've been looking at our electronic databases to see what information you can access.  "Reflective practice" seemed a good place to start, so we searched RILM, a database for music abstracts.  Surprisingly, the first result was about reflective practice in dance, which just goes to show that sometimes you get more than you expected!

Find our subscription to RILM on the Whittaker Library's electronic resources pages. If you're a Royal Conservatoire of Scotland student or member of staff, you can gain access from anywhere, on campus or off-site.  If you're off-site, remember to pick the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland from the list of colleges and universities, then use your usual RCS login.

We are the Whittaker Library at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, here to assist our performing artist community with their teaching and learning information needs.

Scottish Journal of Performance - CFP

Reminder: CALL FOR PAPERS: Scottish Journal of Performance (Volume 2, Issue 1)

"The Scottish Journal of Performance is a peer-reviewed open access journal focusing both on performance in Scotland (contemporary and historical) and / or wider aspects of performance presented by scholars and reflective practitioners based in Scotland. We invite contributions from a wide and diverse community of researchers, providing opportunities for both established and early career scholars to submit work. We encourage a wide range of research methods and approaches, including practice-led research and practice as research. Possible submission formats include audio and video recordings with commentary, practitioner reports, reflective journals and scholarly articles."

SUBMISSION DETAILS

Deadline for submissions: 27 June 2014
Publication date: December 2014

Please see the SJoP website (http://www.scottishjournalofperformance.org/) for further details and the full Call for Papers.

Reflective Journals, Learning Journals

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE | ECITCARP EVITCELFER

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE | ECITCARP EVITCELFER

Has your tutor suggested keeping a reflective journal?  Or they might have called it a 'learning journal'?

Have they suggested looking at the documentation that other Masters students have submitted in previous years?

Here in the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, the Whittaker Library can help!  Take a look in our catalogue - we've done the searching for you here.

If you're not on campus today, don't worry - we have e-books which may also be useful to you, eg:-

• Reflective Practices in Arts Education (2006) click here.
• Jennifer Moon - Learning Journals (2006) click here.

Here's a direct link to our catalogue if you'd like to try searching further keywords.  Happy hunting!  

LIBRARY OPENING HOURS

• We close at 5 pm today (Friday 28th March) and are only open on weekdays from 9.00 to 17.00 pm during the vacation. 
• We're not open in the evenings or at weekends during this period. 
• Normal hours resume on Tuesday 22nd April (9.00 - 20.30 pm.) 

Reflection, and Reflective Practice

Whittaker has been notified of a blogpost on reflection as part of research.  As we performing artists know, reflective practice is crucial to what we do.
 
So it follows that Patter's posting will be useful to many, if not all in our creative community:-

 

Mulling it over – a thinking tool for reflecting on a research experience

SEMPRE - Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research

Performance practice conferences coming up:-

• The Reflective Conservatoire: Performing at the Heart of Knowledge (Guildhall School of Music and Drama, 17-20 March 20120
• 40th Anniversary Conference, 14 Sept 2012 (Institute of Education, University of London)

Call for papers: The Call for Papers for the 40th Anniversary Conference is available now in pdf format.  The deadline for submission of abstracts (maximum 200 words) is Friday 24 February 2012.  See website for details.  This CFP will also be added to Whittaker Live's CFP page.

• SEMPRE Conferences website
• SEMPRE homepage