Assessment #3 – 3 Reflective pieces (Graded)

Purpose
The capacity to reflect is an important element of professional life. It enhances the capacity to evaluate current knowledge and to understand and accept personal weaknesses and strengths. This assignment will enable you to:
1. develop critical reflection skills
2. recognise the value of critical reflection in professional life.
Task Description
The assignment requires the writing of three short reflective pieces. Each piece will reflect on a specific content within the course. The three pieces in total should not exceed 2000 words.
Each piece requires you to bring together:
1. information from relevant readings
2. concepts from the relevant part of the course
3. personal experience
Turn these over in your mind and reflect on the topic, and write in the first person about your considered view.
The total word length for this assignment is 2000 words. You may choose to allocate approximately equal words to each of the three pieces.
Specific information about the 3 reflective pieces
You are required to write three separate reflective pieces for this assignment:
1. The first reflective piece requires you to reflect on, why businesses should be concerned (or not concerned) about social sustainability.
Information: Ed Freeman’s seminal article on the stakeholder theory of the firm (e-Reading 7). You may, however, also choose to anchor your reflection in any of the other readings from the ethics section of the course.
Way of making sense: Useful conceptual background is provided by the segment of the course which discusses ethics and social sustainability.
Personal experience: This may be experience you have had of occasions where a business has placed undue value on profits with unfortunate consequences, or where concern shown by a business for society has had positive consequences, or some other personal experience.
2. The second reflective piece requires you to reflect on, how lack of cultural understanding might have an impact on you as a professional in your future career.
Information: A suggested reading is E-Reading 1 – Challenges of cultural relativism from Rachels, J (1993). Another relevant reading may be E-Reading 14 by Molinsky, A (2012) Code switching between cultures from Harvard Business Review.
You may, however, also choose to anchor your reflection in any of the other readings from the course.
Way of making sense: Useful conceptual background might come from the segment of the course about being professional.
Personal experience: This might be examples of people who have acted with or without cultural understanding and the consequences of that.
3. The third reflective piece requires you to reflect on, what you value the most in a career.
Information: Spend an hour working through the careers workbook. Choose one of the 56 career values listed on pages 4 – 6 of the Careers workbook as topic for this reflective piece.
Way of making sense: Useful conceptual background might come from the segment of the course which discusses being professional or from the part on ethics.
Personal experience: This may be experience you have had or experiences of other people who are memorable or influential because of values they displayed, or your own personal experience.
Reflective writing records the writer’s thoughts about individual learning and experience. Whenever you use ideas from a source, reference them using the UniSA version of the Harvard Guide.
Resources
A number of resources are available to assist you with this assignment:
1. There is a comprehensive Help resource for Assignment 3 in the Assessments block on the course website.
2. Relevant elements of the textbook include (but are not limited to) chapters 3, 5, 7 and 9.
3. There will be exercises in class to assist students in understanding the concept of reflection and to provide an opportunity to practise reflective writing. This will occur before the first piece entry need be written.
4. The Learning and Teaching Unit has a number of resources specifically addressing the practice of reflection, as well as an item on reflective journals in its Assessment study guide series.
5. The online resource ‘An introduction to reflective practice’ includes a section on reflective writing and is available at: http://resource.unisa.edu.au/course/view.php?id=246