1. Maria Francesca Freda, Giovanna Esposito, Maria Luisa Martino
FOSTERING REFLEXIVITY IN HIGHER EDUCATION: TRANSFORMATIVE FUNCTIONS OF NARRATION
Maria Francesca Freda, Giovanna Esposito, Maria Luisa Martino
University of Naples Federico II, Italy
INSTALL International Final Conference
Reflexivity in Higher Education:
Research and Models of Intervention for Underachieving Students
20th-21st March 2014
Naples – Italy

2. REFLEXIVE COMPETENCES IN HIGHER EDUCATION:
AN OVERVIEW
Nowadays, there is a rapidly increasing demand to implement formative methods in university contexts to promote reflexive competence.
This competence is considered central to methodological thinking (Seale, 1999) and it is also reputed to be conducive to job acquisition and productivity (Levett-Jones, 2006; Esposito & Freda, submitted)
Nevertheless, reflexive competence is a controversial subject in psychology, pedagogy, and philosophy. Various definitions have been proposed (e.g. Moore, 2011). .

3. Reflexive Competences
We need to connect
Reflexive Competences
Narration
Learning To Learn

4. Starting from Reflexive competences
We argument this process in a semiotic perspective.
We propone a distinction between two dimension of reflexive competence: Reflection and Reflectivity
We Propone that Reflection is a stepping stone for attaining reflexivity.

5. Reflexivity and reflection share a Latin root, from the verb re-flectere (=bending back).
In physics, the word 'reflection' refers to the phenomenon that makes a light waves change the direction of its route, once it crashes into an obstacle.
In psychological terms, it generally refers to the mental ability of a thinking subject to gain knowledge about himself by redirecting his thinking ability back on itself.

6. The subject can think itself as a subject of knowledge implied in experiences mediated by processes of symbolization.
The phenomenon of reflection in psychological terms requires a symbolic process. It requires that the information is shown in the form of representation.
It is the representation, as a semiotic production, that allows the person to think about himself as involved in the processes of relational experiences. 
If through reflection the subject can recognize himself as a subjective seal of the semiotic production (he reflects himself)
through reflexivity he is enabled to think about the inter-subjective and relational processes in which he is involved, starting from the position that the subject assumes within them.
Reflexivity enables the subject to became aware about the process of positioning himself in the relational field. The Process trough which the subject contributes to building and giving direction to the relational field of experience.

7. The reflective process aims of re-thinking the relation between the map and the territory
The reflective process has the effect of suspending part of the actions of the person, to rethink the direction of actions in contextual terms, to change perspective through a repositioning.

8. Fostering Reflexivity allows that subject learns through:
to see and recognize him/herself while acting,
to combines emotional, cognitive and social dimensions,
to give him/her a strategic direction.

9. NARRATION AND REFLEXIVITY
Our model of reflexive competence assigns a central role to narrative devices in promoting representation and re-signification of events in one's own life.
Narration is a subjective theory about reality, it builds configurations of the experience in which each element is connected to the whole.
Each narration constructs meaning through the communication of a story, organized in a tale by means of a narration act.
In this sense, we can also say that the narration, through the frame of the story, speak of the world—of what happens outside the text. Through the frame of the tale, it speaks of itself, of the processes of message coding, of its coherence, of its author, and lastly, through the institution of a discursive frame it speaks of the processes of interpretative collaboration and constructs the progress in the relationship

10. Steps of the Narrative reflexive work
1) First, it is necessary to represent the experience by means of signs. The subject produces a narration in terms of story (account of 'facts'). The story is the dimension of the text that refers to narrated facts as a set of events in their logical and temporal succession. Through such an initial semiotic action the subject is able to recognize the reflection of himself in the story.
2) In order to recognize himself as a subjective mark of the semiotic production, the reflexive work should consider its role of telling ; the tale is the plot, the architecture of the story in which a succession of happenings is concatenated trough a subjective point of view. Trough the tale, the subject is able to reflect-himself in his own role of sense maker.
3)To think about himself as involved in relational processes, the reflexive work should consider the narration. The narration is the action itself of telling a story to someone.
When the subject operates an interconnection between his own tale and the relational-contextual system within which it has been plotted, his textual production can get the value of discourse. In this third passage, we believe the process of reflexivity emerges.

11. In this passage, we believe the process of reflexivity emerges.
In a discursive perspective,
the narration functions as a relational proposal, as organizer of the specific and contingent ties of reciprocity and at the same time reactualizes, in the hic et nunc of the narrative exchange, models of symbolization relative to the relationship between the narrator and the context of the narrated experience.
This helps to reflexively comprehend the link between the construction of meaning and the function that such meaning assumes in imprinting a direction, a sense, on the relations between the self and the context.
In this passage, we believe the process of reflexivity emerges.

12. AND FINALLY …
The narrative inputs are intended as obstacles to the propagation of information flows that the narrator sends in its environment.
The produced Text  becomes the object of reflection, allows the subject to recognize himself, to become aware of the self in action, to recognize, elaborate on, and regulate the representation he has of himself.
The definition of narration as an object produced by me, as an expression of myself, results from a process of reflection,
The identification of the process through which I gave shape to such a text and the identification of the process through which I gave direction to the relation with the context by narrating this text, That refers to the reflexivity.

13. And Learning to Learn ?
From our semiotic point of view, such a competence consists in the acquisition of the awareness of one’s own process of learning and one’s own needs, identifying the available resources and the obstacles to overcome in order to learn in an effective way.
Therefore, it is a reflective meta-competence or a high-order competence and consists in becoming aware of what one knows, how one knows, and why one knows.
Among the eight key competences identified by the European Union, the Learn to Learn competence is widely considered as essential to foster adaptability to new contexts and participatory inclusion in education and work environment.

14. Thank You

15. WHY STUDENTS CAN BENEFIT FROM REFLEXIVE COMPETENCES?
Underachieving students lagging behind with their studies often show a bias in their signification of university experience while under stress.
They often evince reflexive impairments when dealing with specific university-related events and relationships, or specific developmental milestones (transition to university, fundamental exams, etc.) (Twelow, Fonagy & Sacco, 2005).
Fostering reflexivity can be conducive for them to finding a balance between cognitive and affective dimensions (Christie et al, 2008).
Reflexivity, in fact, is considered capable of sustaining the complex process of learning (Taylor, 2011) and it may also provide a scaffolding to sustain learning (Freda, 2013), which, in turn, can direct one's conduct at university in a responsible, independent, and goal-oriented manner.