ABSTRACT
Introduction This paper critically evaluates the use of journals as a pedagogic tool to encourage reflection, critique and self-analysis by students. Based within a postgraduate course on environment and sustainability, teaching and learning on this module were oriented around short lectures and longer focus group discussions, based on readings and questions. Reflexive journals encouraged students to apply these questions and concepts to the everyday realities of their own lives to critique the ‘do-ability’ of sustainability at the individual level (more information on the module can be found at Higher Education Academy funded website, www.citizensustainability.com1). This paper critically evaluates the use of such journals to enhance self-understanding and critical praxis amongst students. Due to limits of space, this paper will not explore in depth the lessons learned on sustainability itself through the process of journal composition, rather the paper focuses on the generic opportunities offered by reflexion through journals. It will demonstrate that, if undertaken in a supportive and respectful scenario, journals and auto-ethnography can enable critical self-reflection, engage students both intellectually
and emotionally in their learning process, and by doing so help realize the higher order pedagogic goals of critical, deep and transformative learning. Reflexive diaries have been used in academia predominantly in the ethnographic
tradition. As Cook and Crang (1995, p. 29) suggest, such journals and diaries have been adopted as
some kind of record to how the research progresses, day by day, and to chart how the researcher comes to certain (mis)understandings. Diaries . . . represent the doubts, fears, concerns, feelings, and so on that the researcher has at all stages of her/his work.
