Reflective Essay Requirements

Reflect on your FWT experiences and consider what value they might hold for you. Think about how this FWT fits into broader contexts such as your education, your role in the world, and your growth as a person.

In a typed essay of 750–1,250 words, discuss one of the following topics. Enter online by pasting your formatted essay into the space provided first logging in with your Bennington email ID and password. Go to “students” then “essays.”

Keep in mind that the point of the essay is not for you to describe your daily experience in detail but to reflect on your experience and boil it down to key things you learned.

1. What does it mean to be “liberally educated”? What role, if any, do practical learning experiences like FWT play in your becoming an educated person? Provide examples from your experience to support your response.

2. It can be argued that every experience we have impacts the way we view our role in the world, by either challenging or confirming our current understanding of ourselves, the world in which we live, or both. Discuss whether your experiences during FWT this year impacted your view of yourself in the world. Reflect on how you view yourself personally, as a student, a worker, and as a community member. What experiences catalyzed changes in your views, and/or what experiences confirmed your existing beliefs?

3. “None of us knows what the next change is going to be, what unexpected opportunity is just around the corner, waiting a few months or a few years to change the tenor of our lives,” writes Kathleen Norris in Hands Full of Living. What unexpected changes occurred during your FWT this year? Discuss these instances, how you handled them, and what opportunities they created for you.

MAT students, BA/MAT students, and students completing FWT in a U.S. school who are planning on applying to the BA/MAT program: Please address the following question INSTEAD OF one of those above.

“How one conceives of education, we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of the culture and its aims, professed and otherwise.” (Bruner, 1996)

Describe and critique the culture of the school in which you worked. Include concrete examples to support your observations. Be sure to address factors that influenced this culture. Describe the culture’s effect on student learning. Consider the materials that were or were not available, who interacted with whom and the nature of those interactions, and the role the larger community played within the school community.

Reflective Essay Extension

Students who feel they cannot write an adequate reflective essay by the February 22, 2008, deadline may request a one-week extension. Extensions without academic penalty will be granted to students who request a reflective essay extension by February 22. All students who received an extension must submit their reflective essays to the FWT and Career Development Office by February 29, 2008. Late papers may adversely affect a student’s rating. Please note that extensions are for reflective essays only and employers’ student performance evaluations are still due by February 22.