roy.canning@stir.ac.uk

Reflecting on the Reflective Practitioner: muddled thinking and poor educational practices

‘I must confess to having anxiety dreams such as finding myself in front of the class in my nightie, or attempting to show the class a video on social policy which turns out to be Kylie Minogue in concert’

Overview• Original concept of Reflective Practitioner and

lack of conceptual clarity• Reflective theory • Poor educational practices• Alternative approaches teacher education

Reflective ? Practice ?

• Thinking about what you do, feel for, intuitive knowing

• Surfacing tacit understanding and frame experiments

Key ideas of RP

• Experience of ‘uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict’

• Reflection-in and on-action

• Theories-in-use

• Problem Solving Cycles

Critique of RP• Conceptual and practical confusion (Kinsella,

2007) Polanyi and Ryle• Overly individualistic and lack of

emancipatory dimension (Beverley and Worsley, 2007)

• Technology of surveillance (Erlandson, 2005)

Epistemology of Reflection

• Re-flection in Latin ‘to bend back on itself’ • Pre-reflective (antedates consciousness)• Reflexive (problematising and emancipatory)

Heidegger ‘all modern philosophy from Descartes to Kant and Hegel have been notional variations of the philosophy of reflection’

Reflective Theory

• Empiricism

• German idealism

• Pragmatism

• Descartes pure reflexive subject is a contemplative subject

• Locke’s self-referential subject –reflection comes to the fore –second order

• Knowing, rational, self-conscious subject – tabula rasa of the mind

Post-Kantians

Schelling ‘ absolute identity is irreducible to the happening of reflection’

‘The ability of the I to reflect on the I’.. Thinking that has no other object than itself’

Fichte‘For me to be aware of myself I must distance myself, make myself an object of my reflection; but in the sense that the same I is both doing the reflecting and is that which is reflected on presupposes a more direct acquaintance with the I that cannot itself be a matter of reflection’

Clearly what is able to know itself must be more than what it knows…’prior site of disclosure’Fichte: absolute self of I and not-I negated self, pre-reflective site ‘that cannot be given to us but must be brought forth’

German Romantics; immediate and infinite aspects of reflection, an ‘endless regress’ that is prone to disintegration

Hegel’s ‘universal self’ and Husserl’s phenomenological reduction’

Pragmatism• Dewey’s reflective thinking ‘dissolves the

question’ - instrumentalism• Reflection becomes part of problem solving • Behaviourist theory of thinking and knowing• Darwinian ‘control of the environment’

deterministic move

Reflective theory• Reflection is not a privileged form of

knowledge that is self legitimising• Prior site of disclosure; pre-reflective, inter-

subjective, embodied, intuitive • Nietzsche ‘distance from milieu’ and

Heidegger ‘rootless ness from the world’

Educational Practices (ITE and CPD)

• Narrating of experience

• Objectification of otherness

• Instrumental Determinism

Narrating of experience

Experience: Erlebnis and Erfahrung

Lived experience: immediate, pre-reflective and un-theorised practice

Elongated notion of experience based upon a journey or adventure

Withered and diminished notion of experience; post facto re-counting and thinking about what we already know

Conflate experience with a ‘knowledge of experience’ can’t understand experience by examining experience

Initial Teacher Education (Narrating experience)

• distance from the world

• substitute for experimentation

• submerging a pre-reflective awareness

Objectification of Otherness

• Freedom from being determined as an object (Hegel) subject/object split

• ‘for-us’ or a ‘thing in itself’

• ‘judging agent and set of causal relationships’

Objectification of Otherness

• ‘sideways-on view’ taken to be absolute

• Other as a subject- mutual interdependency

• Importance of the experienced teacher ‘present of things past’

Instrumental Determinism

• Spontaneous and the mundane

• No empty spaces and ‘things in themselves’

• Retreat from political and social conditions

Instrumental determinism (ITE and CPD)• acquaintance with the indeterminate

immediate• That some things can only be ‘hinted at’ and

must be ‘brought forth’ • That being may just be as important as

thought

Conclusions• Schon's RP is a muddled concept• Based upon a naïve form of Pragmatism• Reflective thought is insufficient; inter-

subjectivity, intuition, embodied practice and historical determinism

Poor educational practices

• Form of Pietism: personal and group reflection on the mundane rather than the esoteric

• Nothing changes but our interpretations and prejudices, inordinate subjectivism

Poor educational practices

• Effusive autobiographies

• Fictional reflections

• Post hoc application of theories

• Trajectories of self-improvement

What are we doing if not reflecting onpractice?• Anticipating and engaging in practice• Initially being over-reliant on others• Sharing experience- return to practice• Creating spaces- refrain from practice

Reflecting on the Reflective Practitioner• publication of its time and context• disillusionment with an intrusive state• disenchantment with ‘technical rationality’ re-

claiming ‘neo-liberalism’• intellectual stature of pragmatism

Overly subjective, horribly instrumental,

discourse of performativity

- a far cry from the exuberance of German Idealism and largely unrecognisable to Dewey and his vibrant world of experiential learning