About the author & the blog

Who are you?

My name’s Marise Lehto and I’m from Timaru, New Zealand. However, nowadays I live in Turku, Finland. I left secondary school at the age of 16 and now at age 47 I am about to embark on a PhD. People have sometimes described me as a bit of a tortoise – which is probably quite apt – given my propensity towards lifelong learning and the fact I can’t swim. I am reflective by nature; I like to ponder, take my time to get things done and am generally in no hurry.

What is this blog about?

The main image you can see above you should, I hope, give some kind of hint as to the nature of this blog. To the left I’m standing on about 20 cm of ice – here in the beautiful Finnish archipelago. To the right, I’m standing on the beach in New Zealand – the country where I was born, raised and lived half of the life I’ve lived so far. This image makes me feel quite complete and I get a great sense of the ‘whole’ when I look at this picture.

And that’s what I read, write, speak, educate and learn about. Looking at learning from both a top-down and bottom-up perspective so to speak. The whole elephant. The big picture.

I believe that for us to become better at learning we need to become better at seeing how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together. We need to:

• define what learning really is for our particular context
• develop a view of professionalism that challenges certain routines that keep us frozen
• better understand our motivations and the consequences of our actions

Why ‘reflection on … on learning’?

The title of the blog is a bit of a play on words. Let me explain. The word for ‘is’ in Finnish is ‘on’ – as in  – she is = han on.

This blog is about reflection and how it supports our learning processes as well as giving us greater insight into our behaviour. But we’re not just going to reflect ON learning. Because I also believe that reflection IS learning and the title could just as easily be ‘reflection is…is learning’. I’ll let you decide which works for you. So the posts will mainly be on the role that reflection has to play in our world of learning. In particular, the world of leadership (educational and corporate), innovation and change management to name but a few. My world that I would like to share with you. I both appreciate and encourage your comments and will make every effort to respond within a 2 week time frame.

Come reflect with me and join in what I know will be a very rewarding dialogue on the whole interconnectedness of this messy but very beautiful world we live in.

Marise