The Power of Reflection

Guest blogger and SLANT 45 Community Heroes Art Exhibition Committee Chair Lisa Glasgow shares her thoughts on the importance of creative reflection.

Reflection is essential to learning. Teachers have understood this for hundreds of years. Parents know this intuitively. Given time and instruction on how to reflect, children are better able to make meaning of their experiences and integrate them into their values in meaningful ways. Yet in the pressed-for-time, test-based world our children are being raised in, too often time for reflection is the very thing missing from their lives.

Recognizing this powerful opportunity, the designers of SLANT 45 built a reflective component into their service learning program, which asks participants to consider the service they have performed – what that work has meant to their community as well as what it has meant them – in a piece of art. In this way we increase the likelihood that the lessons of service will be lifelong. And that is the goal after all: giving children a chance to understand that they can affect the world around them for good.

Now through October 31, 2010, the SLANT 45 team is gathering the reflective art of North Texas children and from it will create three art exhibitions – one at NorthPark Center, DFW International Airport and at the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. Each will tell individual stories of children who, through service to their communities, discovered their own capacity for problem solving, giving and grace. Each will be a celebration of the power we all have to make a difference in the world around us.

For more information about how you can participate in the Reflective Art component of SLANT 45, click here.