[e-mail]

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roy.canning_at_stir.ac.uk

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

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• 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

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• Overview
• Original concept of Reflective Practitioner and
  lack of conceptual clarity
• Reflective theory
• Poor educational practices
• Alternative approaches teacher education

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• Reflective ? Practice ?
• Thinking about what you do, feel for, intuitive
  knowing
• Surfacing tacit understanding and frame
  experiments

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• Key ideas of RP
• Experience of uncertainty, instability,
  uniqueness and value conflict
• Reflection-in and on-action
• Theories-in-use
• Problem Solving Cycles

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• 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)

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• 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

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• Reflective Theory
• Empiricism
• German idealism
• Pragmatism

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• Descartes pure reflexive subject is a
  contemplative subject
• Lockes self-referential subject reflection
  comes to the fore second order
• Knowing, rational, self-conscious subject
  tabula rasa of the mind

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• 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

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• 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

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• Clearly what is able to know itself must be more
  than what it knowsprior 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

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• German Romantics immediate and infinite aspects
  of reflection, an endless regress that is prone
  to disintegration
• Hegels universal self and Husserls
  phenomenological reduction

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• Pragmatism
• Deweys 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

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• 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

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• Educational Practices (ITE and CPD)
• Narrating of experience
• Objectification of otherness
• Instrumental Determinism

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• 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

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• Withered and diminished notion of experience
  post facto re-counting and thinking about what we
  already know
• Conflate experience with a knowledge of
  experience cant understand experience by
  examining experience

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• Initial Teacher Education (Narrating experience)
  
• distance from the world
• substitute for experimentation
• submerging a pre-reflective awareness

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• 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

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• 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

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• Instrumental Determinism
• Spontaneous and the mundane
• No empty spaces and things in themselves
• Retreat from political and social conditions

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• Poor educational practices
• Effusive autobiographies
• Fictional reflections
• Post hoc application of theories
• Trajectories of self-improvement

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

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• 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

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• 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