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Is this a good reflective statement?


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The purpose of the reflective statement is exactly what is stated on the rubric: How has your cultural and contextual understanding of the text been developed through interactive oral. Focus on the CULTURAL and CONTEXTUAL aspects. I wrote my reflective statement in a way that answered exactly the question they asked, addressing only the cultural and contextual issues, and emphasised how I gained such understanding through the interactive oral.

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*Development* of your understanding (or appreciation - however you like to phrase it) of context is a key idea. You must show that you have *developed* in this respect.

Every work is -- in the view of the IBO -- embedded in a cultural context (social, historical, political, religious, scientific... pick whatever is most obviously relevant to an understanding/appreciation of the work under consideration). I find this strangely naive.

Cultural context does not really exist "out there" but is embodied and enacted by the reader. It is strange then that the reader is never mentioned by the IBO as a necessary aspect of context. Because meaning, quite simply, cannot exist outside of the reader. There is no meaning in a text.

Anyway, when getting at cultural context, there are two extremes in approaches you want to be aware of, best represented by gross versions of Marxist theory and by any form of New Criticism. While Marxist theories tend to dwell on context almost to the exclusion the written work itself, some forms of close reading (New Criticism) ignore context completely and suggest that all meaning is in the word itself -- nowhere else.

Both extremes distort a fuller appreciation for what a work achieves.

Edited by Blackcurrant
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