SECTION 1
REFLECTION AND REFLEXIVITY:
WHAT AND WHY
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CHAPTER 1
REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN
INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 introduces and describes reflective practice, outlining its political and social
responsibility. Reflection and reflexivity are defined and explained. The particular
nature of through-the-mirror writing is introduced, its relationship to mindfulness, and
the way it can tell the truth while accepting the impossibility of objectivity.
We do not ‘store’ experience as data, like a computer: we ‘story’ it. (Winter
1988, p. 235)
You understand how to act from knowledge, but you have not yet seen how to
act from not-knowing. (Chuang Tsu 1974, p. 68)
I’m no longer uncertain about being uncertain: uncertainty is now my mantra.
(Reflective practice student)
RReefflleeccttiioonn
is a state of mind, an ongoing constituent of practice, not a
technique, or curriculum element. Reflective Practice can enable practitioners
to learn from experience about themselves, their work, and the way they
relate to home and work, significant others and wider society and culture. It
gives strategies to bring things out into the open, and frame appropriate and
searching questions never asked before. It can provide relatively safe and
confidential ways to explore and express experiences otherwise difficult to
communicate. It challenges assumptions, ideological illusions, damaging
social and cultural biases, inequalities, and questions personal behaviours
which perhaps silence the voices of others or otherwise marginalise them.
Reflective Practice can enable enquiry into:
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• what you know but do not know you know
• what you do not know and want to know
• what you think, feel, believe, value, understand about your role and
boundaries
• how your actions match up with what you believe
• how to value and take into account personal feelings.
This form of reflection seems to enable practitioners to explore and experiment
with areas of experience difficult otherwise to approach, such as:
• what you can change in your context; how to work with what you cannot
• how to value the perspective of others, however different they are to you
• how others perceive you, and their feelings and thoughts about events
• why you become stressed, and its impact on life and practice
• how to counteract seemingly given social, cultural and political structures.
Through-the-mirror writing is intuitive spontaneous, similar to initial drafting.
Writings then inform discussion in trusted confidential forums. Reflective
practitioners write for self-illumination and exploration, not to create a product.
We know a great deal more than we are aware, absorbing information
unwittingly, and data we do not use and think we have forgotten, and
challenging material shoved into boxes mentally labelled do not open.
Through-the-mirror writing can give confidential and relatively safe access,
using narrative and close and accurate observation. It enables the vital skill
to use knowledge thus gained (for perceptive diagnosis for example).
Constraining structures and metaphors can become clear, offering power to
take more responsibility for actions.
All action is founded upon personal ethical values. We are what we do, rather
than what we say we are. Yet it is hard to gain clarity about ethical values expressed
in practice, far easier to say what we believe (espoused values). Through-the-
mirror writing enables discovery of who and what we are in practice, and why
we act as we do (for an exercise, see Bolton, 2009). This process can be unsettling
(Pollner 1991) or even uneasy, leading to the uncertainty of genuine questioning,
the foundation of all education. Education is about perceiving and developing our
own searching questions, rather than being given answers. The search for
solutions leads to yet more pertinent questions and more learning. In learning
and understanding about human rights, for example, law students need to learn
‘not only the practice of law. Rather it means the practice of people, their lives and
the values, needs, beliefs that people hold and wish to protect, or promote, or
advocate’ (Hinett 2002; Williams 2002, p. 134).
Through-the-mirror writing can help practitioners towards perceiving and
taking full responsibility. It is never good enough to say: ‘I don’t have time to
do X’, ‘I did that because my senior instructed me to/it was in the protocol’,
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 5
‘I thought everyone did Y’, ‘Oh I’ve never thought about why I do that, or if
I should!’ There is much in life we are genuinely not in control of, such as
birth, death, illness, accidents, and others’ impingements upon ourselves
(for example, a bureaucratic rule-bound manager with no interest in
developing staff). We may not be in control of responsive feelings and
thoughts, but we are surely responsible for our actions.
Reflection and reflexivity are essential for responsible and ethical practice,
yet there have been arguments against it. One is lack of time (Copeland et al.
1993) and packed curricula taught by demotivated and over-stretched tutors
(Davis 2003). Current expectations of constant activity and busyness make
reflection a luxury; this, paradoxically makes it more important to point out
the value of reflection (Hedberg 2009). Reflection and reflexivity can be seen
as threats to position or status in organisations, where such practices are often
impeded by prescriptive meetings with a low level of engagement, high role-
based demarcated and political dimension, high degree of threat and task
orientation (Heel et al. 2006).
Reflective practice leading to change and development only happens in
learning organisations (Gould 2004), with supportive mechanisms of coach,
mentor or facilitator (Gray 2007), and not when top-down, organisational
visions are imposed leading to compliance (Senge 1992). Effectively facilitated
reflective and reflexive professional development is amply repaid however, as
practitioners take decisions more accurately and quickly by drawing upon
effective trustworthy intuition (Cartwright 2004). And organisations gain from
workplace reflection because critically reflective practitioners have increased
morale, commitment to clients, openness to multiple perspectives and
creative innovative non-dichotomous solutions, and clearer boundaries (Fook
2002). Reflection on the part of professional evaluators is also crucial, given
the inherently politicised and value-based nature of evaluation, and the need
for critical monitoring of bias (Clark/Keefe 2007).
Reflective practice which genuinely affects practitioners’ lives, and those
around them, needs confident experienced teaching and facilitating. Students
or employees required to write journals and accounts of practice without
being inducted and facilitated well are likely to experience feelings of
helplessness, frustration and eventual burnout (Gray 2007), be resistant
(Bulpitt and Martin 2005), negative (Hobbs 2007), or even ‘angry, challenged,
threatened, demoralized, shocked, and put off by the leap into the unknown’
(Trelfa 2005, p. 206), and they might focus merely on technical skills (Truscott
and Walker 1998), or write safely and hypothetically about themes rather than
specific experiences (Clarke 1998). Leadership development students in
business environments often block reflection due to negative ‘mindsets’
(Smith 2001) if appropriate educational environments are not created, and
tuition offered. There are no half measures: if organisations want reflective
reflexive practitioners they need to pay in time and facilitation.
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Creating this environment can be complex and perplexing, and
managerialism will always be a significant block to practitioner critical
reflection (Heel et al. 2006; Redmond 2006). The most effective education has
never been easy, as any reader of Socrates (Plato)’s dialogues knows. Good
facilitation can lead to: ‘83% of the professionals with whom I had worked
within the reflective teaching model considered that, over two years after the
end of the course, they were significantly more confident of being able to
introduce change within their organisation’ (Redmond 2006, p. xii).
Change and development take time, energy and commitment. Instructional
how-to and information-giving can seem to give instant ‘results’ making
reflective practice seem ‘soft and unquantifiable’ (Regan 2008, p. 219),
‘self-indulgent’ (Bulman and Schutz 2008).
Instruction resulting in neatly ticked competencies is tidier, less demanding
than challenging students and practitioners to question the very roots of their
practice, themselves as practitioners, and significantly critique their organisations.
According to Groom and Maunonen-Eskelinen, narrative exploration and
reflective practice are more used and valued in teacher education in Finland than
in the UK, where development of competencies is valued more highly. European
teacher training is less inhibited in promoting reflective practice as liberating force
than in the UK (Groom and Maunonen-Eskelinen 2006).
Write to learn
This third edition not only clearly and thoroughly explains what reflective
practice and reflexivity are and why they are essential, it also clearly and
straightforwardly demonstrates how to start and develop, with whom, when
and where. In this book you will discover how to write to learn as well as
learn to write. Reflective Practice offers practical and theorised methods for
understanding and grasping authority over actions, thoughts, feelings, beliefs,
values and professional identity in professional, cultural and political contexts.
It suggests processes for critical reflection upon the forms, values and ethics
of institutional organisations and structures in which professionals work. This
critique can result in radical movements for change. Most training and post-
experience courses include elements of reflective practice and reflexivity.
Danger lies in it being a separated curriculum element, however: it is a
foundational attitude to life and work, not a set of exercises.
A paradox is that systems require reflective practice as curricula or
professional development element. Since its nature is essentially personally,
politically and socially unsettling, it lays open to question anything taken for
granted. Enquiry-based education, ‘education for creativity, innovativeness,
adaptability, ease with difference and comfortableness with change ... [is]
education for instabililty’ (Reid and O’Donohue 2004, p. 561).
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 7
Smooth-running social, political and professional systems run on the
well-oiled cogs of stories we construct, and connive at being constructed
around us. Welcoming of diversity can be mere window dressing. Effective
reflective practice and reflexivity are transgressive of stable and controlling
orders; they lead cogs to decide to change shape, change place, even
reconfigure whole systems.
The structures in which our professional and personal roles, values and
everyday lives are embedded are complex and volatile. Power is subtle and
slippery; its location is often different from how it appears. Reflection
and reflexivity for development involve:
• recognizing authority over and responsibility for personal and profes-
sional identity, values, action, feelings
• contestation of lack of diversity, imbalance of power, the blocking capability
of managerialism, and so on
• willingness to stay with uncertainty, unpredictability, doubt, questioning.
The route is through spirited enquiry leading to constructive developmental
change and personal and professional integrity based on deep understandings.
It is creative, illuminative, dynamic, self-affirming. Academic study has lost
its suppressive attitude to artistry (Glaze 2002). ‘Any dinosaurian beliefs that
“creative” and “analytical” are contradictory and incompatible modes are
standing in the path of a meteor; they are doomed for extinction’ (Richardson
and St Pierre 2005, p. 962). People only learn and develop when happy and
benefiting personally. The route is not through angry confrontation: such
revolution leads to destructive cycles of action and reaction. Yet it is not a
thornless rose bed, as any dynamic process.
Einstein ([1929] 2002) was successful partly because he doggedly and
constantly asked questions with seemingly obvious answers. Childlike, he asked
why? how? what?, rather than accepting givens or taken for granteds. He ‘love[d]
the questions themselves like locked rooms’, and certainly ‘live[ed] the
questions’ (Rilke [1934] 1993, p. 35). Stories make sense of ourselves and our
world. This world and our lives within it are complex and chaotic: seemingly
governed by forces not only beyond our control, but beyond our understanding.
We tell and retell episodes both minor and major to colleagues, loved ones,
therapists and priests, strangers on the train, a wedding guest (Coleridge
[1834] 1978). A dynamic way of grasping understanding, it prevents us being
pawns in events seemingly beyond our control. The danger is that story making
can merely be tucking ourselves securely under a quilt patchworked out of safe
and self-affirming accounts: our stories can only too easily be essentially uncritical.
Or, even worse, they are censoring tools: ‘cover stories’ (Sharkey 2004). This
self-protectiveness can ensure our stories do not explore sensitive issues, but are
expressions of what we feel comfortable with, or would like to be.
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Knowing what to reflect upon out of the whole of one’s professional
experience is not a clear process. The more it is focused upon, the more the
truly important issues become elusive. It can become like looking for Piglet:
‘It was still snowing as [Pooh Bear] stumped over the white forest track, and
he expected to find Piglet warming his toes in front of the fire, but to his
surprise he found that the door was open, and the more he looked inside the
more Piglet wasn’t there’ (Milne [1928] 1958, p. 163). Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh
stories are celebrated because they express natural philosophy. Here Milne says
in simple terms how the more we look for something important the more it
is not there. Only with the courage to stop looking and trust the reflective
and reflexive processes, will we begin to perceive the areas we need to tackle.
Discovering what needs to be reflected upon, and how, can be an exhilarating
journey. Insights gained and inevitable changes seem obvious afterwards.
Although reflective practice has become a standard in initial and continuing
professional education and development, it is often elusive to curriculum
planners. Through-the-mirror writing is an educational approach which
makes the difference between 20 years of experience and one year of
experience repeated 20 times.
Through-the-mirror writing uses an intuitive spontaneous form, the way a
novelist or journalist writes their first draft. The writings then inform
discussion in trusted confidential forums. Reflective practitioners write in
order to learn: a self-illuminatory and exploratory process, rather than one
focused upon creating a product.
Writings often focus on non-critical incidents, or perhaps non-‘critical’
aspects of such events. Insight is gained by allowing reflective and reflexive
processes to light upon and enlighten that which most needs examination.
These areas might be simple daily habitual actions, rather than ‘critical’. Or
actions hitherto unnoticed because focusing upon them is more problematic,
often for unexamined reasons. ‘Critical’ incidents, described by Brookfield
(1990, p. 84) as ‘vividly remembered events’, such as giving the wrong vaccine
because they had been stored higgledly-piggledly in the fridge, will inevitably
be examined. The events we ‘forget’ most need reflection, and give rise to the
deepest reflexivity: ‘we need to attend to the untold’ (Sharkey 2004).
Jonathan Miller said ‘it is a passionate, almost religious belief of mine that it is
in the negligible that the considerable is to be found … The unconsidered is
deeply considerable’. A human resource development exercise is writing what
you do not remember (Goldberg 1991; Joy-Matthews et al. 2004). Plato, who
said ‘the life without examination is no life’ (Plato 2000, p. 315), reckoned
education is finding pathways to what we do not know we know.
This is probably a return to the original meaning of critical incident: critical
processes are brought to bear upon what might have been a routine or typical
event, rather than the event itself being critical. A problem has arisen with the
term, leading many reflective practitioner students to think they must focus
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 9
upon the dramatic, disturbing or otherwise seemingly significant. We need to
be critical about incidents.
Reflective practice and reflexivity are states of mind, an ongoing constituent
of practice, not a technique, or curriculum element, but a pedagogical
approach which should ‘pervade the curriculum’ (Fanghanel 2004, p. 576):
the pearl grit in the oyster of practice and education. To be effective they need
dynamic methods. The method of travel affects what happens along the way
and the destination. A medical student commented: ‘we spend so much time
studying medicine we never have time to study sick people’. Reid and
O‘Donohue (2004) argue that enquiry-based learning (a form of reflective
practice) should become the organising logic of entire teacher education
programmes, with students learning through enquiry rather than being prepared
for enquiry. Curricula need shaking up, and more enquiry-based methods
introduced. Curriculum is Latin for race course (Rome’s oval Piazza Navona
was one): perhaps we need to progress from chasing each other and
ourselves round a set track.
A story is an attempt to create order and security out of a chaotic world;
strong stories have unique power to make sense of issues (Weick 1995). Stories
penetrate human understanding more deeply than the intellect: they engage
feelings. All learning involves emotion as well as cognitive engagement.
‘Reflection without passion is meaningless’ (Gully 2004, p. 314). But for our
experiences to develop us – socially, psychologically, spiritually – our world
must be made to appear strange. We, and our students, must be encouraged
to examine our story-making processes critically: to create and re-create fresh
accounts of our lives from different perspectives, different points of view.
We must rewrite our stories to question assumptions about our own
actions, intentions and values, and every taken for granted about others,
particularly those with less power (patients, students, less dominant
colleagues), and every unthought-through acceptance of the status quo, even
that seemingly written in stone. And we must elicit and listen to the responses
of peers. Listening critically to the stories of those peers also enables
developmental learning from their experience. It is the exploration of
experience, knowledge, values, identity that matters, rather than any attempt
to arrive at a ‘true’ account (Doyle 2004).
Important knowledge about reality always comes out of [writing] … through a
… transformation of reality by imagination and the use of words … When you
succeed in creating something different out of … experience, you also achieve
the possibility of communicating something that was not evident before … But
you cannot plan this transmission of knowledge. (Llosa 1991, p. 79)
Postulating what other actors might have thought and felt, empathising with
them and the situation, as well as imaginatively reconstructing the situation in
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fresh ways, offers understandings and insights as no other process can. For
example, a practitioner can retell a story from the point of view of students or
clients, reconstruct it with the genders of the actors reversed, or create a
satisfactory ending in place of a horrible one.
Effective reflective practice and reflexivity meet the paradoxical need both
to tell and retell our stories in order for us to feel secure enough, and yet
critically examine our actions, and those of others, in order to increase our
understanding of ourselves and our practice, and develop dynamically.
What’s in a name?
The term reflective practice is not a terribly useful one. The metaphor it
embodies is limited: a mirror reflection is merely the image of an object
directly in front of it, faithfully reproduced back to front. What is the reflection
of shit? Shit.
Through-the-mirror, however, is a creative adventure right through the
glass to the other side of the silvering. Such reflective practice can take us out
of our own narrow range of experience and help us to perceive experiences
from a range of viewpoints and potential scenarios. It can do this by
harnessing a vital human drive – to create stories about our lives, and
communicate them.
The mirror image model of reflection suggests a me out there practising in
the big world, and a reflected me in here in my head thinking about it. This
model is located in unhelpful modernist duality: this as opposed to that, in
and out, here and there. An ancient Zen Buddhist text tells us:
You must first forsake the dualities of: self and others, interior and exterior,
small and large, good and bad, delusion and enlightenment, life and death,
being and nothingness. (Tsai Chi Chung 1994, p. 95)
The word reflection has static connotations, meaning ‘the action of turning
[back] or fixing the thoughts on some subject’ (Oxford English Dictionary),
with the associated definition of the reversed reproduction of an image.
Reflective practice is purposeful, not the musing one slips into while driving
home, which can be as dynamic as rumination, a sheep chewing smelly cud.
I have a cartoon of a sheep nose to nose with the reflection of herself and the
surrounding meadow. She’s saying: ‘I’m sure the grass is greener in the
mirror, but whenever I try to reach it, this ugly ewe bars the way and butts
me on the nose.’ The ‘ugly ewe’ is of course herself reflected. We need intensive
explorative and expressive methods in order not just to be confronted by our
own ‘ugly ewe’ reflection. We need to get beyond a notion that to reflect is
self-indulgently (or painfully critically) thinking about ourselves. Isolating the
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 11
pawn of myself to reflect upon away from the chess game is not helpful. It is
helpful to reflect in order to locate the white pawn which is me, clearly, boldly
and critically within the four-dimensional chess game of my life and work.
The through-the-mirror reflective practice writing model involves wide
potential interactions, opens up developmental reflexive and reflective space.
‘Reflection is the central dynamic in intentional learning, problem-solving and
validity testing through rational discourse’ (Mezirow 1981, p. 4). Yes, true, but
there is an awful lot more than just the ‘rational’ for us to explore.
Professionals can be enabled to think and discourse way beyond the
rational using the methods outlined in the following chapters. They can
explore the wide and rather perplexing other side of reflection, questioning
everything, turning their world inside out, outside in and back to front.
Reflective practice: a political and social responsibility
Practitioners need to take responsibility for all their own actions and values,
and their share of responsibility for the political, social and cultural situations
within which they live and work. Reflective practice can fall into the trap of
becoming only confession. Confession can be a conforming mechanism,
despite sounding liberating, freeing from a burden of doubt, guilt and anxiety
(Bleakley 2000b). Confession has a seductive quality because it passes
responsibility to others.
The desire to hold an audience with a ‘glittering eye’ (Coleridge [1834] 1978)
is strong. Jennifer Nias, a researcher into the experience of women teachers
(Nias and Aspinwall 1992), noted with surprise that all her potential
interviewees were keen to tell their autobiographies at length. People always
are, but they do not want their stories questioned: this is the role of reflective
practice.
Reflective practice is more than an examination of personal experience; it is
located in the political and social structures which are increasingly hemming
professionals in (Goodson 2004). Their right to make moral and professional
judgements is being eroded; they are being reduced to technicians, their skills
to mere technical competencies. Practitioners are increasingly under pressure
to perform, to have ‘strong and stable personalities and to be able to tolerate
complexity’, are pushed destructively and distortingly by obsessive goals
and targets in a masculine culture of assertiveness and competitiveness
(Garvey et al. 2009, pp. 97, 153, 217). A supported process which allows,
encourages even, doubt and uncertainty paradoxically gives them strength in
the face of such attempts to control. In order to retain political and social
awareness and activity, professional development work needs to be rooted in
the public and the political as well as the private and the personal.
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To this end, examinations of practice need to be undertaken alongside
open discussions with peers on pertinent issues, an examination of texts
from the larger field of work and politics, and discussions with colleagues
from outside practitioners’ own milieu. Reflective practice work can then
become politically, socially as well as psychologically useful, rather than a
mere quietist navel-gazing exercise. It supports, demands even,
practitioners thinking about values. Stephen Pattison et al.’s experience is
similar: if we had asked people to talk about their values in abstract terms,
we would have received generalised responses. By asking them to tell
[write] stories about important experiences, we were able to see something
of how values reveal themselves in a complex, varied and shifting way in
practice (1999b, p. 6).
Values in practice are rarely analysed or questioned. Espoused values (those
readily stated as being foundational to practice) are recognised and routinely
stated both by organisations and individuals. Through reflexive practice
professionals realise dissonance between their own values in practice and
their espoused values, or those of their organisation, leading them to make
dynamic change. This might not be easy, particularly if they realise an action,
or an aspect of their organisation has been (or is) against their own ethical
code, or that they are in an untenable but unalterable situation (Rowland
2000). Examining such fundamental areas requires a supportive, confidential,
carefully facilitated environment.
Goodson creates a distinction between life stories and life history. The
latter is the former plus appropriate and challenging data from a wide range
of sources, and evidence of vital discussion with colleagues. ‘The life history
pushes the question of whether private issues are also public matters. The life
story individualises and personalises; the life history contextualises and
politicises’ (1998, p. 11). In a similar process (currere, coined by Pinar 1975;
Grumet 1981) education postgraduate students play with the method
(Gough 1998).
Gomez et al. (2000, p. 744) found how education students’ reflection was
unchallenging and non-risk-taking, because they only wrote personal
narratives of their classroom teaching, from their own point of view: ‘The
nature of personal stories as ones that people actually lived limited the ways
in which they could be interrogated. Questioning the viewpoint resulting
from an event in someone’s life was tantamount to challenging her overall
integrity.’ Future student narratives will be written from multiple perspectives,
enabling challenge and insight. Medical students write from the point of view
of patients (Engel et al. 2008).
Cartoons in another study offered a ‘playfully ironic dimension for
intensifying the process of critical reflexivity’ (Cavallaro-Johnson 2004, p. 423).
Visual images, which allow subtexts to appear unwittingly, enabled the
autobiographical stories to be critical, examining values in practice for
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 13
example, preventing them from being merely confessional. I would argue that
a range of different forms of text, such as from different points of view, can
similarly offer layers of unwitting subtext for critical review.
Trainee cognitive therapists reported a ‘deeper sense of knowing’ of
cognitive therapy (CT) as a result of reflective practice writing (Bennett-Levy
et al. 2003, p. 145). ‘The written reflections are, in my view, crucial to the
process, enabling trainees to look in depth at the implications for themselves,
for their clients, and for cognitive theory’ (ibid. p. 205).
School students are encouraged to write reflectively too. Science students
‘write to learn … to help acquire a personal ownership of ideas conveyed in
lectures and textbooks … [which] promotes the production of new
knowledge by creating a unique reflective environment for learners engaged
in scientific investigation’ (Keys 1999, pp. 117, 119). Phye (1997) reports
school students similarly writing reflective portfolios. Kim (1999) reports a
highly supported model: nurses write and share descriptive narratives in
interview with a researcher, developing depth of description and reflexive and
reflective critique.
Reflection and reflexivity: demystification
Through-the-mirror writing enables both reflection and reflexivity. There is a
clear distinction between the two.
Reflection is learning and developing through examining what we think
happened on any occasion, and how we think others perceived the event and
us, opening our practice to scrutiny by others, and studying data and texts
from the wider sphere.
Reflection is an in-depth consideration of events or situations outside of
oneself: solitarily, or with critical support. The reflector attempts to work
out what happened, what they thought or felt about it, why, who was
involved and when, and what these others might have experienced and
thought and felt about it. It is looking at whole scenarios from as many
angles as possible: people, relationships, situation, place, timing, chronology,
causality, connections, and so on, to make situations and people more
comprehensible. This involves reviewing or reliving the experience to bring it
into focus. Seemingly innocent details might prove to be key; seemingly vital
details may be irrelevant.
Reflection involves reliving and rerendering: who said and did what, how,
when, where, and why. Reflection might lead to insight about something not
noticed in time, pinpointing perhaps when the detail was missed.
Reflexivity is finding strategies to question our own attitudes, thought
processes, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions, to strive to
understand our complex roles in relation to others. To be reflexive is to
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examine, for example, how we – seemingly unwittingly – are involved in
creating social or professional structures counter to our own values
(destructive of diversity, and institutionalising power imbalance for example).
It is becoming aware of the limits of our knowledge, of how our own behaviour
plays into organisational practices and why such practices might marginalise
groups or exclude individuals. And it is understanding how we relate with
others, and between us shape organisational realities’ shared practices and
ways of talking. Thus, we recognise we are active in shaping our surroundings,
and begin critically to take circumstances and relationships into consideration
rather than merely reacting to them, and help review and revise ethical ways
of being and relating (Cunliffe 2009b).
To be reflexive involves thinking from within experiences, or as the Oxford
English Dictionary puts it ‘turned or reflected back upon the mind itself ’. This
feels like a pretty difficult contortion: hence the need for innovative illuminative
methods, like the through-the-mirror model recommended in these pages. A
reflexive-minded practitioner will ask themselves, why did this pass me by:
where was my attention directed at that time? Reflexivity is: ‘What are the
mental, emotional and value structures which allowed me to lose attention and
make that error?’ This deep questioning is missed out if the practitioner merely
undertakes reflection as practical problem-solving: what happened, why, what
did I think and feel about it, how can I do it better next time?
Reflexivity is making aspects of the self strange: focusing close attention
upon one’s own actions, thoughts, feelings, values, identity, and their effect
upon others, situations, and professional and social structures. The reflexive
thinker has to stand back from belief and value systems, habitual ways of thinking
and relating to others, structures of understanding themselves and their
relationship to the world, and their assumptions about the way that the world
impinges upon them. This can only be done by somehow becoming separate
in order to look at it as if from the outside: not part of habitual experience
processing, and not easy. Strategies are required such as internal dialogue, and
the support of others. This critical focus upon beliefs, values, professional
identities, and how they affect and are affected by the surrounding cultural
structures, is a highly responsible social and political activity.
Reflexivity involves coming as close as possible to an awareness of the way
I am experienced and perceived by others. It is being able to stay with
personal uncertainty, critically informed curiosity as to how others perceive
things as well as how I do, and flexibility to consider changing deeply held
ways of being. The role of a trusted other, such as a supervisor or peer-reader
of an account, is vital.
Reflexivity is a stance of being able to locate oneself in the picture, to appreci-
ate how one’s own self influences [actions]. Reflexivity is potentially more com-
plex than being reflective, in that the potential for understanding the myriad
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 15
ways in which one’s own presence and perspective influence the knowledge
and actions which are created is potentially more problematic than the simple
searching for implicit theory. (Fook 2002, p. 43)
A definition of reflective practice is that it ‘is designed to facilitate
identification, examination, and modification of the theories-in-use that shape
behaviour’. It is a process of professional development which ‘requires change
in deeply held action theories’ (Osterman and Kottkamp 2004, pp. 13–14).
In order to create a clear and straightforward method, readily adapted to
classrooms and individual portfolios, this book does not differentiate between
reflection and reflexivity. The through-the-mirror method enables a reflexive
and reflective journey without analysing which is taking place at any one time
(though this could readily be done if required).
Mindfulness
An invaluable approach, mindfulness, a conscious exclusion of other elements
of life, apart from that which is being attended to (Johns 2004), is achieved
when senses and awareness are tuned into present action: the opposite of
multi-tasking (Epstein 1999). Being mindfully aware develops accurate
observation, communication, ability to use implicit knowledge in association
with explicit knowledge, and insight into others’ perceptions. Frank speaks of
practical wisdom, from Aristotle: ‘Phronesis is the opposite of acting on the
basis of scripts and protocols; those are for beginners, and continuing reliance
on them can doom actors to remain beginners’ (2004, p. 221).
The observation skills and awareness required of a reflective writer develop
mindfulness, and are developed by it. Both require an acute focus upon what is
happening at any time. Being fully conscious of actions can also enable awareness
of their likely or possible outcomes, and therefore the appropriateness of the
intended action. Mindfulness resembles reflection-before-action, which
Wilson (2008) considers has immense value: for example it might have
prevented the abuse and death of Victoria Climbié (Knott and Scragg 2007).
Doctor-writer Verghese exhorts: ‘We should be ministers for healing [and
educating], storytellers, storymakers, and players in the greatest drama of all:
the story of our patients’ [students’ or clients’] lives as well as our own’
(2001, p. 1016).
Ours is an age of anxiety, tension, hyperactivity (multi-tasking, hot-desking,
hitting the ground running), an era of inflated public emotion (a sea of
flowers for a dead princess, road rage, televised war-torn victims). There is
little reflective, reflexive, or simply mentally absent space allowed: ‘A poor life
this if, full of care, / We have no time to stand and stare (William Henry Davies).
We have lost even more than Davies’s everyday consciousness of ‘squirrels’
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and ‘streams full of stars, like skies at night’. It is loss of professional agency
and responsibility, because we are unaware of things of which we so need to
be aware.
An example: Sam, a midwife, brought a furious account of an angry mother
she had attended as a National Health Service (NHS) midwife: ‘stupid, hostile
upper-middle-class bitch who felt she had the right to boss me around, tell me
what to do’. The birth had been exhausting and disastrous for both mother
and midwife: Sam still felt bitter 25 years later. The reflective practice group
offered insight and comparative cases, and suggested Sam wrote an account
from the mother’s perspective.
The following week saw a very different Sam: ‘I don’t know exactly what was
wrong, but I do know, having relived it from this mother’s point of view, that
she was upset and confused. Because I saw her as a stupid, middle-class bitch
who thought she could have everything she wanted her way, I never listened
to her properly. I think I’ll see demanding mothers in a different way in
future.’
Telling the truth?
The narratives we tell and write are perspectival. Looking in through a
window at experience objectively to reflect on it from outside is impossible.
To be objective is to be ‘not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in
considering or representing facts; impartial, detached’ (Oxford English
Dictionary). Humans, however open about themselves and their practice,
can only perceive and understand from their own viewpoint, broad and
empathic and professional as that might be. ‘We don’t see things as they are,
we see them as we are’ (Nin, quoted in Epstein 1999, p. 834).
Individual perspectives, values and understanding can be widened and
deepened. One can look on the glass and only see one’s self reflected, or
through it to whatever is the other side as in George Herbert’s poem: ‘A man
that looks on glass, / on it may stay his eye; / or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, /
and then the heav’n espy.’ Lewis Carroll’s Alice does even better: she crawls
right through the looking-glass, leaving her stuffy Victorian rule-bound world,
entering a world in which everything ‘was as different as possible’, things are
‘all alive’ (Carroll [1865] 1954, p. 122), where dynamic connections are made
between divergent elements.
A creative leap is required to support widening and deepening of
perspective, and the effective ability to mix tacit knowledge with evidence-
based or explicit knowledge. The professional arena can be opened up to
observation and reflection through the lens of artistic scrutiny. We are still
anchored to our own perspective, but these perspectives will be artistically
and critically widened. We cannot really pass through the mirror’s silvering,
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 17
and can inevitably reflect only upon ourselves, our own thoughts and
experiences. Artistic processes such as writing can, however, enable a
harnessing of, for example, material such as memories which we do not know
we remember, and greater access into the possible thoughts and experiences
of others. The perspectival nature of such writing is acknowledged (that is,
they do not purport to be objective or true), and many of the skills used are
those of literature.
Professional writers are being heard clearly, both students (for example,
Charon 2006; Gomez et al. 2000) and practitioners (Charon 2006; Clough
2002; Helman 2006; Loughran 2004). Samuel Shem says fiction writing has
been an essential way of humanising medicine (2002; see further Annals of
Internal Medicine: Physician-Writers Reflection series).
Writers acutely observe small details and subtle nuances of behaviour and
situations. A teacher- or clinician-writer observes details missed by good
observant teachers or clinicians (see Charon 2004, 2006). Try it. Observe a
student or client walking into your practice place. Capture on paper how they
hold themselves, breathe, move their limbs, their characteristic gestures and
sayings. What do they remind you of – a cat? A soft deep armchair? A locked
filing cabinet?
A writer has the unparalleled privilege also of entering into the life of
another. That this person is a character on a page does not make it any less of
a insight-creating privilege. Deep understandings can be gained by entering
(virtually) another’s feeling, thinking, perception and memories. This is
writing beyond what you know, and has to be: if you know where writing is
going to take you, start at that known point, and write on into the unknown.
Try it. Take the person you have just described. Write the conversation they
might have had on returning home that night. Remember this is an artistic
exercise: do not think about it, let your hand do the writing, free of your
normal controlling thought processes. If you add in something about how
they got home, where they live or drink, you really are allowing your
imagination to take you through the glass. You tap into latent understandings
which have possibly not been so fully exercised before.
This is fiction; the writing has been invented imaginatively: it removes the
straitjacket of what really happened. Writers are therefore free to draw deeply
upon their imagination and aesthetic sense, and upon their intuitive
knowledge of social and human areas such as relationships, motives,
perspective, cause and effect, ethical issues and values.
You bring what you understand and think about this person into the
forefront of your mind. It matters not a jot that you do not depict what
actually happened, or what your student or client really thought. Medical
students write patients’ illness stories in the voice and vernacular of the
patient, imaginatively and vicariously entering patients’ contexts. They
‘become the other’ through creative writing (Engel et al. 2002, p. 32, 2008).
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It is not quiddity we seek – the real nature or essence of a thing – but our
experience of it.
Sharing this writing with a colleague can offer effective reflection upon
understandings. Rewrite with the fresh insight gained. And perhaps a
colleague, also present at the encounter with the patient, might write an
account. Reading each other’s account will offer the different perspectives
from which you unwittingly work.
This method of reflection does not jeopardise professional accuracy of
perception (Mattingley 2000). Neither does it impose distorted interpretations
about patients (Garro and Mattingley 2000) because its purpose is to
explore and express what is already there in clinicians’ and educators’
understanding and perception. It brings this to the fore to be reflected upon
critically and effectively. It also brings to the forefront of attention the
perspectival nature of our perception. No one can know what really
happened in any situation. Perhaps it might become clear that the doctor
understood the patient very differently from the nurse, or the teacher might
think and write one thing today, reflect upon it perhaps with peer(s), and
write something different tomorrow, their perception enhanced by the
writing and discussions. Such a collection of stories can build up a composite
picture, and what was thought and felt – getting as close as possible to what
really happened.
Kevin Marsden, a special-school teacher, and Master’s in Education
reflective practice student, tells a classroom story:
Malcolm
One morning we were doing number work. Malcolm was struggling to recognise sets
of two. He was troubled by the book in front of him and sat slumped on an elbow.
I had one of those ‘bright ideas’ teachers tend to get. Let’s make it more
practical. ‘Malcolm,’ I said. ‘Look at Darren. How many eyes has he got?’
Malcolm looked at Darren. Pointing with his finger he slowly counted in his
deep voice, ‘One … two’.
‘Good, well done,’ I said. ‘Now look at Debbie, how many eyes has she got?’
Pointing carefully again Malcolm intoned slowly, ‘One … two’.
‘That’s great, Malcolm, now look at Tony, count his eyes.’
‘One … two.’ Let’s take this a step further, I said smugly to myself.
‘Now Malcolm, look at Matthew. Without counting can you tell me how many
eyes he has got?’
Malcolm looked at me as if I had gone mad. ‘OK that’s fine Malcolm, you just
count them like you did the others.’
Relieved he slowly repeated his methodical counting: ‘One … two’.
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 19
There is a magical moment in teaching, when the penny drops, the light goes
on, the doors open. Success is achieved. I was starting to worry. We weren’t
getting there!
‘Malcolm, how many eyes has Naheeda got?’ Malcolm counted slowly, as if it
was the first pair of eyes he had ever seen. ‘One … two’.
‘Good, you’re doing really well.’
We carried on round the class. Eager faces looked up to have their eyes
counted. I was growing desperate as we ran out of children. Was I leading
Malcolm on an educational wild-goose chase? Were we pursuing an idea that
was not yet ready to be caught?
The last pair of eyes was counted. ‘One … two.’ The finger carefully went from
eye to eye. There was only me left. ‘Malcolm,’ I said, trying to hide my
desperation, ‘how many eyes have I got?’ Malcolm studied my face carefully. He
looked long and hard at my eyes. I waited expectantly in the silence. His brow
furrowed. Finally he spoke.
‘Take your glasses off.’ (Kevin Marsden)
Kevin read this to his established sub-group of five teachers. They trusted
and felt confidence and respect for each other’s professional abilities and
views. Kevin was able to share his frustrations and sense of failure; the group
learned about the methods, joys and problems of special-school teaching.
They were able to explore the probability that Malcolm had had a different
understanding of his task than did Kevin. Possibly Malcolm thought he was to
count the eyes, rather than ‘guess’ how many each had. To do this he would
have had to ask for spectacles to be removed so he could see clearly. The
situation of a mismatch between a teacher’s intentions and a child’s
understanding must happen so often.
Why reflective practice now?
The grand stories of patriarchy/patriotism, religion, family and community no
longer bind society. We look to counsellors, psychologists, teachers, clerics, police,
life partners, general practitioners (GPs) or social workers for essential support.
Marriages founder and professionals increasingly experience stress as they now
bear the burden previously carried by a nexus of local and family community.
Faith in that great god science has also been shaken: ‘Science, in my view,
is now at the end of certainty’ (Prigogine 1999, p. 26). There has been a
powerful frontier (boundary) between science (and scientific professions like
medicine) and the arts since the Enlightenment. A blinkered view of what
constitutes knowledge and experience cannot be held for much longer.
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The assumption that an objective view of the world (Kantian) is ‘grown-up’,
that we should shed our subjective view along with sand and water play, is
being questioned (see also Sacks 1985, pp. 1–21). Paul Robertson (Director
of the Medici String Quartet) supports this argument from the artistic
perspective: ‘If any of us are out of touch with any part of ourselves we are
in an impoverished state. The dominant culture is scientific, but the scientist
who concentrates on this side of themselves exclusively is as impoverished
as is the musician or writer who concentrates only on the artistic’
(Robertson 1999).
An ethnographer can no longer stand on a mountain top from which
authoritatively to map human ways of life (Clifford 1986). Clinicians cannot
confidently diagnose and dictate from an objective professional or scientific
standpoint; teachers do not know answers; lawyers do not necessarily know
what is right and what wrong. The enmeshment of culture and environment
is total: no one is objective.
‘Since the seventeenth century, Western science has excluded certain
expressive modes from its legitimate repertoire: rhetoric (in the name of
“plain” transparent signification), fiction (in the name of fact), and subjectivity
(in the name of objectivity). The qualities eliminated from science were localised
in the category of “literature”’ (Clifford 1986, p. 102). These categories have
returned from that 300 year marginal position, to be embedded alongside the
scientific approach.
Holistic coherent understandings which might support us out of our alienated
mess are increasingly entertained. ‘We now see the world as our world, rather
than the world’ (Reason 1988, p. 28). Complementary healing considers our
wholeness, not just within ourselves, but also within our environment and
community. ‘We seek a knowing-in-action (and thinking-in-action) which
encompasses as much of our experience as possible’ (Reason 1988, p. 30).
Ideal professionals, gathering data on which to base their pedagogy diagnosis
or care, are like social anthropologists. Geertz suggested that successful
ethnographers create a ‘thick description’: a web of ‘sort of piled-up structures
of inference and implication through which the ethnographer is continually
trying to pick his way’ ([1973] 1993, p. 7). The reflective practice writer who
explores and experiments with different writing approaches, using whatever
seems appropriate at the time, is like Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur (1966). This
knotted nexus has then to be understood and interpreted to some degree: ‘a
good interpretation of anything – a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an
institution, a society – takes us into the heart of that of which it is the
interpretation’ (Geertz [1973] 1993, p. 7). An effective reflective practitioner
attempts to understand the heart of their practice. Understandings gained in this
way, however, are always partial; the deeper the enquiry, the enquirer realises the
less they know and understand: the more you know, the more you know you do
not know. Geertz also stresses that it is vital not to generalise across cases but
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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 21
within them. Having got somewhere near the heart of clients’ or students’ stories
and poetry, practitioners can begin to act upon this understanding.
Professionals writing about their work, sharing it with colleagues in order to
offer insight, and relating this to a wider field professionally and politically, are
together engaged in an activity rather like Reason’s co-operative enquiry
method, in which researcher and subject collaborate in all the stages of
research, including reflecting on the experience and making sense of it
(Reason 1988). The practitioner takes a full share of responsibility. There is a
similarity with heuristic research (Etherington 2004; Moustakas 1990). All too
often professionals act in the mould of traditional researcher; acting on
people: collecting data, and coming to conclusions in camera.
‘In this way, it may be possible to avoid providing care which is dry, barren
and – perhaps the greatest sin of all – unimaginative’ (Smyth 1996, p. 937).
Through-the-mirror writing can enable care or education which is alert and
alive to the client’s or student’s needs and wants, whether professed or not.
It can enable the practitioner to use their skill, knowledge and experience
creatively and lovingly, and look forward with a greater confidence.
Angela Mohtashemi, management consultant, shares reflective writing
experience:
As I help organisations become more effective through better communica-
tion and engagement with their employees, I introduce reflective writing
wherever I can as a tool for teamwork, learning and development and
coaching. The workplace is a tough, manipulative environment where people are
often expected to comply without challenge, to ‘live the company’s values’, to ‘display
the right behaviours’ and even to adopt the corporate language. One’s sense of self
can become fragile and this limits potential. Whenever I have used writing
with groups or individuals they have commented on the sense of liberation and the
feeling that they are getting to the heart of things.
Sometimes I have run workshops or team sessions specifically to explore reflective
writing, sometimes incorporate it into other situations. A writing activity, such as
writing about your name, can be a great icebreaker. I recently ran a session
on writing for personal and organisational development as part of a leadership
course my firm runs jointly with a university business school. The session incorporated
learning theory, my own experience, principles of reflective writing and practical
activities. These activities were typical of the techniques I use and included free
writing and using unfamiliar imagery to look at the daily work experience.
Free writing, although very simple, fulfils many purposes and is often a
revelation to people. A number of participants went to their action learning sets
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keen to use free writing to explore organisational issues before discussing
them with the group. They were excited about the patterns that emerged and
about the honesty of a conversation with one’s self. I encourage people in
action learning sets to reflect about the experience afterwards. One wrote to
me later:
I spent almost 2 hrs writing up how I felt during our discussion and how I
intended to change my behaviour as a result. It was tremendously therapeu-
tic and enjoyable, which I found surprising, as I have, until now, been avoiding
writing down anything about how I feel – so Thank You!
Sue Smith wrote:
Bringing the issue was like opening a door and seeing a crack of light –
and seeing a very small slither [sic] of a room. Once the door was opened
fully – which happened when I started to look at the amount of change I’d
undergone – I could see the room in its entirety – and appreciate how full
and intricate the things in there were.
Sue Smith has a tremendous opportunity to change people’s lives. Writing helps
her find a way to pause and reflect, to argue with herself until she believes what
she says and can then find the voice to persuade others. In that way, writing can
be a powerful force for change.
When I first began this work I feared the response would be cynicism and
doubts about its relevance. After all, most workplaces are based on rational
and ‘scientific’ management practices: plans, budgets, facts, timelines,
blueprints etc. There is little place for emotion and individual expression.
My fears were wrong. Every time the response has been very positive and
unleashed the power people can have when they bring their whole selves
to work. One team member said the writing was ‘one of the most exciting,
interesting and engaging things I’ve done since I’ve been with the firm’.
(Angela Mohtashemi)
Reflective practice and reflexivity according to the principles and practice
outlined here is a valuable developmental process for any professional or
student. It can take its non-judgemental camera down to any aspect of
practice, with patients, colleagues, administrative and other staff, the interface
of home and work, and the impact of experiences in the past on present
actions. No feeling, thought or action is too small or too big for this zoom or
wide-angle lens.
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Read to learn
Cunliffe, A.L. (2009a) Reflexivity, learning and reflexive practice, (Chap23) in
S. Armstrong and C. Fukami (eds), Handbook in Management Learning,
Education and Development. London: Sage.
Davis, M. (2003) Barriers to reflective practice: the changing nature of higher
education, Active Learning in Higher Education,
44
(3), 243–55.
Fook, J. (2002) Social Work: Critical Theory and Practice. London: Sage.
Write to learn
Each chapter ends with Write to learn. These exercises can take very different lengths
of time. Some are very affirming, some challenging, all result in positive writing.
Each can be done individually or by a facilitated group: many are useful for initial
group forming. How to start writing preliminaries is useful (see Chapter 6). For now
all the advice you really need is:
• This is unplanned, off-the-top-of-the-head writing; try to allow yourself to
write anything.
• Whatever you write will be right; there is no critic, red pen poised.
• All that matters here is the writing’s content; if you need to adjust grammar
and so on, you can – later.
• Ignore the inner critic who niggles about proper form and grammar, and even
worse, says you cannot write.
• This writing is private, belongs to the writer who will be its first reader.
• No one else need ever read this, unless the writer decides to share it with
trusted confidential other(s).
• Writing can be shared fruitfully with a group or confidential trusted other, if
this seems appropriate once the writer has read and reflected on it first.
Advice for facilitators
• Each writer reading silently back to themselves before reading to group or
partner is vital.
• Participants need to know at the start they will be invited to read out; they
can choose not to read if it feels inappropriate.
REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 23
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• Many exercises will occasion laughter, some tears: both are fine.
• These exercises are best done with facilitator giving instructions in numbered
order, as participants finish each section.
• I suggest participants complete each section before being given the next.
• Participants do not need to know why they are doing each element: people
are usually keen to ‘play the game’ unburdened with decisions, if they trust
the facilitator.
Exercise 1.1 Names
1. Write anything about your name: memories, impressions, likes, hates, what
people have said, your nicknames over the years – anything.
2. Write a selection of names you might have preferred to your own.
3. Write a letter to yourself from one of these chosen names.
4. Read back to yourself with care, adding or altering positively.
Exercise 1.2 Milestones
1. List the milestones of your life and/or career, do it quickly without thinking much.
2. Read back to self: delete or add, clarify or expand as you wish.
3. Add some divergent things (for example, when you first really squared up to
your head of department).
4. Choose one. Write a short piece about it. If you wish, continue and write
about others.
5. Read back to yourself with care, add or delete (without listening to your
negative critic).
Exercise 1.3 Insights
1. Write a quick list of 20 words or phrases about your work.
2. Allow yourself to write anything; everything is relevant, even the seeming
insignificant.
3. Reread; underline ones which seem to stick out.
4. Choose one. Write it at the top of a fresh page. Write anything which occurs to you.
5. NOBODY else needs read this ever, so allow yourself to write anything.
6. You might write a poem, or an account remembering a particular occasion, or
muse ramblingly. Whatever you write will be right.
7. Choose another word from your list, if you wish, and continue writing.
8. Add to your list if more occurs to you.
9. Reread with care, adding or altering, using only a positive approach.
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