Reflection is more than just a team meeting. It means regularly creating a safe place for all team members to identify, describe and analyse how the project is going. It also means including perspectives from those outside the project who are affected by your research. This approach allows your goals to evolve and gives room for considering a project’s wider impacts. Overall, reflection helps to keep your project on track and to adapt to changes along the way, while ensuring everyone involved is working to the same shared goals. Sharing learning can help ensure that others benefit from your experience to improve future projects.
Research funders expect you to deliver your projects efficiently and on time. Regular reflection keeps you on course. It helps you to work effectively as a team, respond to change, and act on lessons learned. Documenting reflections also allows you to keep track of insights that you may want to share more widely with other researchers. Your findings may even prompt new research agendas. Ultimately, reflection and learning are stepping stones towards a more self-aware research culture.
Valuing Voices is a partnership project between colleagues from the University of York and Mahidol University.
Valuing Voices is a two-year project funded by Wellcome under the Institutional Funding for Research Culture grant.
