In June of this year, we, the Educate Magis team, were delighted to welcome Fr. Johnny Go, SJ, Education Delegate for Asia Pacific, back to our office in Galway. As well as working on the adaptation of the ‘Learning by Refraction’ course to the Educate Magis platform and discussing our collaboration between Educate Magis and Asia Pacific, Johnny kindly facilitated a follow-up workshop for the Educate Magis team on the IPP and ‘Learning by Refraction’. For those of us who had attended Johnny’s workshop in Galway in 2019, it was a helpful refresher and a chance to dive deeper into the workshop content.

Johnny introduced the concept of ‘Learning by Refraction’ (the title of his book), reminding us that learning is about understanding and applying what you’ve learnt. So, as such, the fundamental aspects of learning are reflection and action. With this in mind, it is important when designing learning experiences to start with the learning goal or action goal. In the ‘Learning by Refraction’ book, and indeed in the workshops Johnny facilitated for us, teachers are encouraged to be designers, facilitators, and coaches (rather than lecturers) and students then become inquirers, meaning-makers, and creators.

We had one whole session on Reflection, where we discussed the importance of reflection as part of the learning experience and considered how we can design learning experiences which encourage and facilitate reflection. Johnny explained to us that reflection does not necessarily need to be spiritual or moral and there are different types of reflection, i.e., personal reflection, conceptual reflection, and metacognitive reflection. He also pointed out that reflection is not simply recalling information or reacting to it. Rather reflection helps the learner to connect with the material and organize it or make meaning of it. As outlined in the ‘Learning by Refraction’ book, in order to facilitate reflection, it is helpful to formulate an insight you would like the learners to gain through the learning experience. This insight needs to be something tangible and you need to be able to write it down. Johnny shared his guidelines on formulating these insights with us – they should be debatable, defensible, and deep-diveable – and we practiced identifying and formulating our own insights.

We had another entire session on Action, which was also very eye-opening. We were reminded that learning for action needs to switch from application later to application now and the learning needs to be applied in context, rather than out of context. We reflected on some of our own personal learning experiences which stood out to us and which we felt were effective and considered why this might be. The importance of being an active participant in the learning experience and applying the learning rather than simply listening to or reading about something became apparent.

Johnny also encouraged our team to apply the IPP to the learning projects and experiences Educate Magis is offering in collaboration with task forces and facilitators to make sure these provoke and promote Reflection and Action among participants.

One of the things which stood out to us during Johnny Go’s training with us was the importance of critical thinking. Designing learning experiences centred around reflection and action encourages critical thinking, not only in the students, but also in the teachers who are designing the learning experiences. This is becoming more and more important as we are living in a world where we are bombarded with so much information and so many opposing views and claims of truth. We were reminded of the dangers of superficial thinking and tending towards either fundamentalism or relativism. We watched the ‘Cultivating Depth’ video from the JESEDU-Jogja2020 virtual colloquium video which highlighted the importance of cultivating deeper and more critical thinking.

Ultimately, we were reminded of the importance and relevance of the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm in today’s world and explored ways in which we can adapt this to 21st-century teaching and learning. We all thoroughly enjoyed the training sessions with Fr. Johnny Go, SJ, and were even more inspired and encouraged to continue sharing tools and resources to support teachers in the incredible and often challenging work they are doing!