Graduated scenarios: Modelling critical reflective thinking in creative disciplines

This article describes the development and implementation of Jenny Moon’s ‘Graduated scenarios’ (2004, 2001, 2009) in the disciplinary context of media production. Graduated scenarios have previously been used to model different levels of critical thinking and reflection and have been based on situations and experiences that can be related to by a wide range of people. Our development of them in a specific creative disciplinary context, for use by students within that context, represents an evolution of the process, but we also consider the possible reception of such models in the context of debates around academic literacies and the degree to which they may be seen and used as contributing to an orthodoxy of expression. We acknowledge that this experiment in writing and pedagogy may be perceived as providing ‘exemplars of standards’, but argue that it actually models differing depths of thinking, and also opens up discussion about orthodoxies of academic writing. Our four models of different levels of critical reflective writing are provided as appendices, and may be used or adapted as necessary. The production of such graduated accounts is ‘effortful work’, but the process can help us (academics) to better understand our own, as well as facilitating learners’, concepts of depth and ‘good practice’.