ABSTRACT
In many Education courses and degrees in Australia, assessments measure the extent to which students have developed knowledge of the ‘deep’ and ‘critical’ reflective practices valued in the discipline. In these assessments, students submit reflective tasks where they must connect and apply educational theories to their teaching and learning experiences. Making explicit the often-tacit nature of this specialized form of critical reflection presents challenges for both educators and students. This chapter describes an intervention drawing on the concept of semantic gravity waves from Legitimation Code Theory, which explores degrees of context-dependency, to inform the design of pedagogic materials targeting critical reflection assessments in two successive units of an Education pathways course. It reports on the collaboration between a content specialist and an English and academic language specialist, detailing the enactment and recontextualization of semantic gravity waves within the intervention. The success of this intervention was measured through data and feedback from students, the course coordinator, and external moderators, demonstrating the practical potential of semantic gravity waves in explicitly developing critical reflection in Education students enrolled in pathways courses.
