What is reflective practice?

‘Reflective practice’ broadly refers to approaches and tools facilitating critical interrogation of professional practice in the social professions, those “whose role it is to work with people who are regarded as in need of support, advocacy, informal education or control” (Banks & Nøhr, 2003, p. 8). Classroom practice of teachers,for example, is perceived as an ongoing interplay of individual, role, craft, context, setting and interpersonal dynamics; an effective practitioner would be one who can consider, critically evaluate and develop these elements. As a result, students on professionally qualifying programmes are increasingly required to engage in reflective practice. Indeed, the significance of reflective practice has grown such that in some countries (such as UK, USA), it is becoming recognized as a significant element of “graduateness” for all students at Higher Education level. This chapter charts the principles and practices encompassed by the term ‘reflective practice’ with the intention to enable readers to ‘map’ literature on and experiences of reflective practice

A Learning-Scape for Reflective Practice and Professional Identity Formation

Given reflective practice is posited as the “bedrock of professional identity” (Finlay 2008:2), it is embraced as “a professional imperative” (McKay 2009:70) in UK higher education (HE) programmes as well as in professional practice itself. Since professional identity formation is an evolving process “ideally grounded by structured experiences, personal reflections, and guided feedback” (Furze et al 2011:412), reflective practice is “an enormously powerful tool” (Finlay 2008:10), and much in vogue. However, research with students and qualified practitioners revealed vital issues at the heart of ‘doing’ and ‘using’ reflective practice. Constructivist HE discourses impacting on reflective practice stifle liberalising engagement and thus developing professional identities (Trelfa & Telfer 2013). A growing literature base endeavours to address this through refinement and improvement of reflection-on-action. However, this ‘only considers a small part of professional activity’ (Bronfman 2005:13). Reflection-in-action (Schön 1983) remains “the real challenge” (Bronfman 2005:16), neglected due to being “something of a tease” (Sweet 2006:187), a rather delightful hint at a complex learning-scape. This paper explores ways to consider this complex learning-scape by drawing on my current research. Focussing on students reflection-in-action whilst engaged in professional practice, I discuss role and responsibility (Shapiro 2010), context (Coulter 2001; Biesta 2007) and the dominance given to cognitive processes; highlight a dichotomy between facets they draw on in their creation of a professional act compared with those emphasized in literature and dominant discourse; and suggest a learning-scape that more appropriately engenders means and ends, influenced by sensory ethnography (Pink 2009), and experimenting with new technologies

Reflecting practice/curating practice

One of the ways that practitioners are encouraged, indeed required, to ‘tell their practice’ is via reflective practice. Reflective practice is the process of articulating professional decision-making, of bringing to awareness the threads that shape interventions and judgments, and of becoming critically alert to the forces that influenced them. This is assumed as achieved through the provision of accounts of practice, stories, with a view that to do so will heighten understanding of and develop individual professional practice as well as the practice of organisations themselves. Mainstream approaches to reflective practice, then, consider accounts told in this way both as true and as a gateway to the development and improvement of practice. The predominant focus is on reflections on practice after the event generated via writing and dialogue. In the conference I offer that these notions are problematic and instead work with a conception of those engaging in reflective practice acting as curators of stories of their practice, with ‘curating’ being a decision-making process of selection of “what to keep and what to discard” (McCartney, 2015:137). Here the process before curation is an important focus of reflective practice. It then follows that the outcome of curation can be creative. To this conference I brought three pieces of interactive art created from my reflections regarding my practice as senior lecturer in higher education. I do not consider myself to be an artist; the point here is one of creative engagement that offers a radically different approach to reflective practice, with ‘radical’ meaning getting (back) to or expounding the roots of ‘the true principle’ of reflective practice (borrowing from Fromm, in Neill, 1960:xii)

Telling stories in Organisations: Reflective Practice/Curated Practice

Stories are important to and within organisations. Those told through reflective practice focus on the experience of practice in relation to the teller with an aim of developing service to others. However, issues at the heart of the way this is typically approached result in the telling of familiar and fixed stories, eradicating creativity. The production of fixed, familiar stories compromises any positive potential that engagement may have offered. In this paper I propose that reflection-in-action offers a way forward. In particular I focus on the 'threshold concepts' (Meyer & Land, 2006) of Gaze, Glance and Letting Go that emerged during four years of doctoral research. The paper describes the first two of these, Gaze and Glance, and their contribution to 'mittere', an alternative reflective practice methodology for organisations. Mittere centres on telling stories through a process that is fresh, playful and creative

Journal of Research Institute: 2016 vol.53: Current Issues and New Thoughts on Reflective Practice

Part 1 Current issues and new thoughts What is reflective practice? Jo TRELFA Use of epistemological lenses on the ambiguity of reflective practice: What is it to reflect on experience? Ken TAMAI Reflection, emotion and knowledge of the self Mark MONAHAN Whatever happened to ‘reflective practice’? Jo TRELFA A reflective continuum: Development of reflection Atsuko WATANABE Part 2 Teachers and reflective practice Exploring, reflecting, and taking action through forms of ‘practitioner research’ and why professional development through research is essential for teachers and teaching Ian NAKAMURA How the intersubjectivity of teacher and learner reflections contributes to transformative learning experiences Joan M. KUROD