Reflect and Improve on Professional practice Learning Contract

Skills and Knowledge

I wish to expand my ability to work with culturally and linguistically diverse
communities. Therefore, in the next 12 months I want to learn the skill of speaking
and writing Mandarin Chinese. I will achieve this by enrolling in a course at Open
Universities Australia. My learning will be demonstrated by the satisfactory
completion of the course and if possible by undertaking the official HSK Chinese
proficiency test administered on behalf of the Chinese Government by RMIT.
My reflective justification for this is that I have learned that I hate Welfare, and I am
desperate to leverage some of my learning in directions away from the sector, I
believe Chinese will on the one hand improve my employability in welfare but also
be useful in my Buddhist Studies and in broader life context.
Values and Ethics
I undertake to complete my Religion Studies major in the next twelve months by
completing the Contemporary Issues in Religion subject via Open Universities
Australia. This will continue to develop my understanding of values and ethics as
situated in a the discourse of contemporary religious thought and practices. The
learning will be demonstrated by completion of the unit. Evidence of my learning
will be a more spiritual and contemplative vibe that will be remarked upon by my
friends and collegues.
Change and Stress
I am completing these assignments as my wife prepares to upgrade her Masters to
a phd, we are expecting our second child in January and our first is now in his
terrible twos. Meanwhile we are preparing to move house in a fortnights time and
my parents have decided to go holidaying so our usual babysitters are away. I
receive a parenting payment of 200 dollars a week and am not currently working.
My learning goal is not to explode, kill myself, kill someone else or otherwise end up
in jail during this period. My success will be observable if I am still making Facebook
updates in 12 months time.
Critical Incidents
I hope to continue to develop my meditation practice as a framework for dealing
with critical incidents. This is subtle learning and very difficult to measure, however
magnetic resonance imaging studies have recently show that left prefrontal cortex
activity may be raised in persons who practice meditation and that this elevation
my persist after meditation is stopped due to neuroplasticity, it may therefore be
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possible to measure my brain and see if I am calmer after critical incidents than
non-meditators, but we would need to get funding for the experiment.

I used to be a bouncer and I was assaulted and once even glassed in the face. I
believe that meditation helped me deal with these incidents and I believe that it
continues to help me and that there is a growing body of scientific evidence to that
effect.
Supervision and Professional Development
My learning goal re supervision is to return to the monastery in Reservoir where I
was receiving meditation instruction from the resident monk. This will be
observable if you show up there at 9:30 on a Saturday morning and find me sitting
in the meditation hall with the monk.
He talks a lot, and I find him a fairly orthodox teacher of Buddhism, I regret falling
out of the practice of visiting him regularly.
Feedback and Self Reflection
I used to program websites but then I found myself working bars and guarding doors
after I spiraled into drug and alcohol abuse when I had a breakdown during the
collapse of my first marriage. Roughly simultaneously I met my current partner and
began to recommit myself to meditation and Buddhist study, and as a consequence
decided to try to change careers, stop supporting the alcohol industry as a
bouncer/barman and try to help people for a living. I quit my job and became a
lifeline telephone counselor , got a job as an admin at a CaLD service and enrolled
in Welfare. In the three years since I have realized that Welfare is not for me. CMY,
the CaLD service I worked for set about firing me as soon as they learned I was
trying to upskill to be a service worker. Lifeline was great but when you become a
parent its hard to commit to overnight shifts etc without pay, and the Welfare
course turned out not to be as interesting to me as I had thought it would be. I
enrolled in a Religions Studies course via Open Universities Australia after I left CMY,
and I have discovered that I LOVE the academic study of the phenomena of Religion.
I want to pursue it and I will.
Hopefully I will get my Welfare Diploma. I have spent 4 years down a cul-de-sac and
I would love to have something to show for it beyond the memories, especially since
I have never managed to stick to a post-high-school educational institution for so
long. With Welfare, hopefully Chinese, and the Religion Studies degree I hope to be
able to travel, and find work. The evidence will be in seeing where I am in a few
years time I guess.

Joseph Zizys