Using Critical Reflection to Understand Practice

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Using Critical Reflection to Understand Practice

• Jan Fook
• South West London Academic Network

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What are the current challenges to professional
practice?

• A crisis of
• Knowledge
• Values
• Power

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Crisis of knowledge..

• How do we work effectively in uncertainty?
• outcomes are uncertain,
• contexts change,
• meanings differ and
• interests conflict

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Crisis of values.

• How do we maintain integrity when there is
  increasing technological/bureaucratic/economic
  pressure?
• How do we ensure the welfare of service users
  when systems often work against them?

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Crisis of power

• How do we maintain quality practice when the
  power to control our practice is increasingly
  questioned?
• Contexts and uncertainty
• Pressure from management
• Increased accountability to the public
• The new professionalism
• Inter-professionalism

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• Therefore there is a need to understand and
  represent practice in ways which
• Identify uncertainties
• Incorporate values
• Are both responsible and responsive

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The challenge of understanding practice in these
terms.

• ..there is no one agreed way of framing it which
  incorporates the complexity of the experience in
  a holistic way ie.
• The multiple (and often conflicting)
  responsibilities and perspectives
• the changing contexts
• the value and technological dimensions.

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Enter critical reflection!

• What happens in critical reflection?
• The complex and integrated nature of experience
• Articulating the experience of practice
• Learning from and making meaning of experience
  (combining different knowledges, values, skills)
• The role of emotion
• Reaffirming fundamental values
• Finding a place for integrity (combining values
  and actions)

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What is critical reflection?

• Learning from/making meaning of experience (eg.
  Boud, Mezirow)
• Process of unearthing deeper assumptions (eg.
  Schon)
• What makes it critical unearthing fundamental
  (dominant) assumptions about power ideology
  critique (eg. Brookfield)

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Related theories

• Reflective practice the gap between theory and
  practice (eg. Schon)
• Postmodernism/deconstruction/the linguistic turn
  how our language/discourse constructs our
  knowledge
• Reflexivity how who we are (socially and
  personally) constructs our knowledge (eg. Taylor
  and White)
• Critical perspectives how personal experience
  is linked with social arrangements, and how
  social awareness leads links with social change
  (eg. Brookfield)

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Basic method/process

• Focuses on
• Specific instances of practice (critical
  incidents)
• To unsettle (dominant) implicit assumptions
  (stage 1)
• In order to discover and change relevant thinking
  and practices (stage 2)
• Uses critical reflective questions derived from
  theories
• May be used in a number of ways (eg. Small
  groups, self-reflection)
• In an ethical climate
• a process of analysing (deconstructing) practice
  in order to reframe (reconstruct) it in a way
  which represents the complexity and integrated
  nature of experience

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Critical reflective questions

• Reflective what does my practice imply about my
  fundamental values? What am I assuming about the
  nature of human beings? Society? power and
  conflict?
• Reflexive where do my assumptions come from?
  How does who I am affect what I see? How do my
  emotions affect my knowledge?
• Postmodern/deconstructive what language
  patterns do I use? What binaries exist? What
  other perspectives am I leaving out?

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Questionscont

• Critical perspectives how does my social
  context influence my personal experience? What
  has this got to do with power? How does my
  changed awareness contribute to my changed
  practices?

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Critical incident

• An event which is significant in some way to the
  learner/participant
• Used as raw material for reflection

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The ethical climate of critical reflection

• Trust respect
• Acceptance not affirmation
• Focus on professional learning
• Right to draw limits
• Focus on story or construction
• Openness to multiple and contradictory
  perspectives
• Responsibility (agency) not blame

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An example of critical reflection

• Barbara..
• A social worker/manager in a large government
  income security bureaucracy
• Incident from personal life she intervenes
  between 2 men in angry argument
• Didnt want to be a control freak
• Assumptions about control, someone needing to be
  in control, and equated with the need for action
• Reflected on her own needs to be in control and
  assumptions about good professional practice
  equated with need to take action

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Barbaracont.

• Fear of uncertainty?
• Emotions and assumptions come together in the
  experience
• Caught herself telling a staff member that he
  needed to stay with the uncertainty.

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The reconstruction..

• Therefore a need to reconstruct her desired
  practice as being powerful in uncertainty or
  structured uncertainty
• She spoke of creating her own emotional
  scaffolding to help her in new situations

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What does this help us understand about practice?

• Framing the experience (recognising and naming
  it)
• Giving meaning to the experience (putting it into
  a framework which allows it to relate to other
  experiences)
• Connecting emotions and assumptions and actions
  (positive/creative use of emotion - emotions are
  more than phenomena to be contained or resolved)

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• Recognising complexity
• Framing the experience in a way it can be acted
  on (allows integrity) (connecting theory and
  practice)
• Creating practice theory or knowledge directly
  from experience itself

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New understandings of practice?

• Implicit knowledge which underpins actions
• Processes of knowledge creation
• Actual knowledge/practices created
• How different knowledges/values/interpretations
  combine to influence decision-making/actions
• Personal/social meanings and their influence
• The influence of different aspects/types of
  experience

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Therefore we may better understand

• How people handle incongruity and contradiction
• How practitioners sustain integrity
• How practitioners deal with uncertainty?
• The certainty in uncertainty?
• How/why good practice works?

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Advantages of using critical reflection in social
work research

• A method for representing complexity
• Addresses the problem of the gap between saying
  and doing
• Focuses on the power of the hidden
• Functions also as learning
• Includes values/emotions/outcomes
• Links personal and social
• Provides a language for practice experience and
  helps reaffirm it?
• Accesses practice in ways other research methods
  do not?