200717 Employment Relations Professional Practice
Assessment 3 – Reflective Journal
Overview
This assessment is a reflective journal which reflects on the issues discussed in class and the potential implications of your learning for professional practice. Through its completion students will reflect on their learning experiences and the potential relationship to current or future practice of employment relations. The focus is on learning through practice. The journal is to cover any three topics in the program schedule. As a rough guide, each topic should be covered in around 500 words up to a maximum of 1,500 words in total.
Additional information
Guidelines for choosing 3 topics for reflection
Topic 1 –Acting responsibly – What have you learned about ‘acting responsibly’ through HR practices (people, the planet and the bottom line…)
This question relates to the Course Learning Outcome ‘Acting responsibly’ – Evaluate economic, social, and environmental decisions and practice and make recommendations, including contingencies, alternatives and future implication for professional or enterprise practice in HR/ER practices.
To demonstrate this Course Learning Outcome, students should be able to:
- Evaluate economic, social and environmental (CSR) decisions and practice using appropriate HR/ER perspectives
- Recommend course of action including contingencies, alternatives and future implication for professional or enterprise practice
Therefore, in reflecting on how we can ‘act responsibly’ in HR/ER practices, it would be useful to consider some of the following questions in your reflection:
- Can you describe an example or area of HR/ER practice that you thought about/read about/discussed during the quarter where you could see the relationship between HR/ER practices and economic, social and/or environmental outcomes?
- Were there any readings that helped you think about responsible HR/ER practices?
- How did thinking about the requirement for HR/ER to ‘act responsibly’ make you feel?
- What recommendations would you make to a peak body such as AHRI to help spread the message of the need for HR/ER practitioners to act responsibly? What types of professional development might be useful?
Key readings – the following readings presented during Q2 each dealt with issues related to ‘acting responsibly’. You may refer to one or more of these readings in your reflection.
- Sustainable HR – Week 5 reading Jarlstrom M, Saru E & Vanhala S, 2018 Sustainable Human Resource Management with Salience of Stakeholders: A Top Management Perspective, Journal of Business Ethics (2018) 152, p703–724
- CSR and HR – Podgorodnichenko, N, Edgar, F, McAndrew, I 2019, The role of HRM in developing sustainable organizations: Contemporary challenges and contradictions, Human Resource Management Review
- Greenwood MR & Simmons J, 2004, A Stakeholder Approach to Ethical Human Resource Management, Business & Professional Ethics Journal, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 3-23
- Khan SI, Bartram T, Cavanagh J, Hossain MJ & Akter s, 2019, “Decent work” in the ready-made garment sector in Bangladesh: The role for ethical human resource management, trade unions and situated moral agency, Personnel Review, Vol. 48 1, 2019, pp. 40-55
Topics 2 and 3 – free choice topics
What to include?
You may discuss any aspect of the unit that has impacted, changed, developed or inspired your learning.
This can include:
- a selection from the 7 HR competencies we’ve looked at
- Any unit content including assessments
- Seminar experiences
- Group processes
- Research undertaken
You should not need to conduct any additional research for this assessment in order to complete it but you should make reference to specific sources that were part of your learning.
Details
Loo and Thorpe (2002:135) used the following figure below to exemplify the reflective process. As you can see, it starts off with an awareness of the learning situation or event. This awareness might trigger some emotional reaction (positive or negative) or thoughts about the learning event. The second stage of the process is to undertake a “critical analysis”. This involves critically analysing the relevant knowledge and experience you have as well as how you can apply this new knowledge. Self-awareness becomes the focus of this stage. The third stage relates to how this ’changed perspective’ has changed your emotional, cognitive (thoughts) and behaviours as a result of your critical analyses. The main objective of a reflective journal is to “translate theory into practical action, that is, a praxis”(Loo and Thorpe, 2002: 135).
In writing the reflective journal, you could ask yourself the following questions:
- What was the learning situation or event?
- What thoughts and feelings did I have about the learning situation or event?
- In what ways do I currently apply the things that I have learned?
- In what ways have I changed (or have not changed) my thinking of the situation? (Describe how or why not it has been changed using critical analysis.)
- How can I use this new knowledge and competence? (That is, using the ’changed perspective’ or maintenance of past perspective.)
- Reflective reports, therefore, relate to your own experiences about the topic for discussion. Thus, unlike most other kinds of academic writing, reflective reports require you to write in the first person, that is, using the “I” and “my” words.