Inaugural Professorial Lecture
Professor Graham Ixer
University of Winchester, Winchester, England
19 November 2014
Critical Reflection: A panacea or an illusion?
Deputy Vice Chancellor, distinguished guests, students and colleagues,
partners and my family and friends – thank you for attending and welcoming
me to my inaugural professorial lecture.
If two years ago anyone had said I would be here today delivering this lecture
I would have thought this was so far removed from reality – but such is the
unexpected nature of life that twists and turns in a way we can never know in
advance. This is what makes life so interesting and rewarding and when I
look back at an entire career in public service, I feel very lucky and grateful.
I guess having spent the past 15 years in central government bodies working
closely with ministers and national figures one might feel that I have many
more interesting things to say about government policy and its ideological
basis for ‘human good’ than I might in discussing critical reflection. However
I am going to be self-indulgent here and focus this lecture on an area of
personal passion of mine that has led my interest for the past 25 years, that
is: critical reflection: a panacea or illusion?
So why have I chosen the topic of critical reflection, what is it and why does it
interest me so much? Some of you will work with this every day, others may
have read about it whilst the rest may ponder how could anyone spend up to
an hour talking about something so ethereal and opaque – what can I
possibly say about this? What I will say however, is controversial, which will
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make this lecture above all things at least interesting or in the words of Karl
Popper: (SLIDE)
Whenever I am invited to speak in some place, to develop some
consequences of my views which I expect to be unacceptable to the
particular audience. For I believe that there is only one excuse for a
lecture: to challenge. (Popper 1976: 124)
When people talk about 'reflecting' they normally mean taking time out to
contemplate, think more deeply about, or theorise on a dilemma or problem.
This in itself is not problematic as we have been doing this since time began.
However, during the past years teacher training, social work and nursing have
introduced reflection as a formal assessment requirement as part of their
assessed professional training. Moreover, professional bodies such as
construction, finance, engineering, legal and technology are seeing reflection
as an answer to the criticism that CPD claims are more about a description of
the training activity than the learning achieved. Reflecting on learning
demonstrates a more active achievement of CPD. The problem is there is no
grand theory or agreed understanding of what is reflection. Therefore to
assess something that cannot be measured is both unethical and misleading.
This lecture will demonstrate the problematic nature of reflection and give
some indicators to the future direction in this area for all industries.
The story goes back a long way. In 1991, I ran a social work programme and
the regulator of the day CCETSW introduced a new requirement – ‘All
students had to reflect on their practice’. This meant I had to introduce an
assessment method for this new requirement that measured a student’s
ability to reflect. This appeared quite unproblematic so I began the task to
develop an assessment methodology. I soon realised this was not easy
because the concept of reflection was not a definable phenomenon. I was left
with the problem how to design a measurement tool and assess something
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that is either indefinable or doesn’t exist. This was the beginning of a journey
that is still on-going today.
This was the area of my doctoral research although I soon realised that the
subject became more important to me than acquiring another degree. Having
established a wide-ranging literature review, which took me over 5 years to
complete, I soon realised that the concept of reflection was problematic yet
fascinating. In 2000 I published an article on my research in the British
Journal of Social Work that began a new debate not just here in the UK but
internationally as well. It was called ‘There is no such thing as Reflection’ and
in 2010 the article was re-published in full in International Social Work. So
what were the issue and nature of the debate?
In the 1980s an American educationalist Donald Schön wrote a couple of
books on ‘Reflection in Action’ and ‘Reflection on Action.’ His thesis is we
spend much time thinking intuitively without knowing why, causing a gap in
our theory and practice. His idea was that through a process he clearly does
not explain, we bring to the conscious part of our mind action we are taking
and the learning deriving from our contemplation of this. This is what he calls
reflection. His work was based on the theory of John Dewey, an American
pragmatist in his seminal work from 1910 How we Think. Dewey believed
that we only reflect on matters that are perturbing, problematic, or an issue
to us. Everyday unproblematic matters are part of our tacit ’knowing in use,’
we just ‘do things without thinking too much about it’. So far the story seems
clear.
As a consequence of Dewey, during the 1980s a new nirvana arrived in what I
call the ‘Schön years’. Everyone was talking, writing, publishing, acting and
thinking about reflection ‘in and on action’ without question. We had found a
new way of thinking that was particularly helpful to busy professionals who
needed to develop more enhanced thinking skills. Therefore a new era of the
reflective concept was born. An excitement in the sector was developing,
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hence regulators in education, nursing, teaching and social work were keen to
make reflection a requirement as part of pushing up standards for the
professions. However, trying to capture the essence of Schön’s concept and
translate this into my teaching and assessment was problematic to say the
least. My academic colleagues were grasping Schön without question and
teaching reflection but more worryingly, assessing students’ performance of
such. It didn’t seem problematic to them. Why was I the only person at the
time questioning how it is possible to assess student performance of
reflection if we cannot define what it is? Schön’s explanation of how one
goes about reflecting in and on action is insufficient. At that time another
colleague Professor Michael Eraut from Sussex was beginning to see Schön’s
work through a more critical lens and in a live panel debate in London
destroyed his argument. Moreover, Eraut felt that the form of meta-cognition
that busy practitioners develop requires enhancement with speed to ensure
that whatever type of reflection we use in practice, for example during those
challenging times where we face a problematic dilemma, we must think and
act quickly - all of which Schön ignored. Urgency of the situation one
encounters is therefore linked to practical reasoning and decision making.
In tackling this problem and understanding it more I felt I needed to go back
to the original source of reflection. However, to do that one had to go back
to the origins of thought - but where does this begin? One cannot
conceptualise the idea of thinking in isolation from how we think.
Philosophers have argued for centuries about the nature of existence: the
metaphysics of being. All I am attempting in this lecture is to extend the
debate, not solve the mysteries of the universe. We have moved away from
religious orthodoxy as the only example of how the world exists to one where
science offers an alternative view in that unless it can be observed and
verified it doesn’t exist. The argument of what is good science is as prevalent
today as it was then in the times of Plato, Aristotle and Empedocles.
However such matters are more complicated today because our existence is
not so much determined by science as it is by our relationship with the social
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world, which is made up of societies and communities. Within cultural and
social norms, institutions construct social identities for individuals to conform
and be controlled. Issues of power and therefore oppression are key
constituents within this concept. So what exists becomes as much related to
political control as it does by science. There is much more I could say on this
but I use this merely to illustrate the complexities of a postmodern society.
In my own empirical research, albeit limited, I discovered that reflective
thinking was not purely a metacognition – or a form of rational thinking
process. It was entrenched in our combined private and empirical
understanding of the world, our socialisation into society from which rules,
norms and power dominate. In essence we cannot think outside of our
experience of the world we live in. Therefore it is impossible to have a pure a
priori thought uncontaminated by the senses. Historically some have argued
this is possible, as shown by the philosopher Plato who claimed ideas are only
accessible through reason not through the senses. However, where does
reflection sit in the history of thought? Prof. Jan Fook cites Socrates who
talks of a form of reflection – ‘It’s about ethical and compassionate
engagement with the world.’ These issues therefore have a distinct
biography.
In my own work I developed four key domains that whatever reflection is will
become essential to this. These are cognition – rational thought: values –
beliefs and faith that control our moral imperatives: social – our empirical
integration with the world, in other words our knowledge is dependent on
experience and empirical evidence: and finally emotions: our relationship
with feelings and perception as a social dimension of the world. I am
convinced from the literature and my own empirical study that all forms of
thinking involve these domains, therefore logically, reflection must be
contained within this framework of thought construction. But how can this be
verified?
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The way we think determines the way we act. A term like reflection is a
significant index of how we think. Meer’s significant work on Race and
Ethnicity talks of a ‘term’ or ‘concept’ such as racism, offering interpretive
order to our understanding of the social world, but it can also offer something
more ‘weightier.’ However I am not sure the concept of reflection helps in
this sense as there is neither weight nor agreed interpretation.
The way thinking is determined is the way we seek to be the ‘Virtuous Being’
in the Aristotelian tradition and the enlightenment years of Immanuel Kant
show how we lead our life determined by moral imperatives, all of which are
ignored by contemporary researchers and commentators in the literature on
reflection today. The relationship between rational thought and practical
thinking derives from the Kantian concept of practical reason. Furthermore
the dialogical relationship between our external voice and the world we
inhabit is what Aristotle calls Phronesis (practical wisdom) and our inner
dialogue what Isocrates calls Kairos (doing something right), which helps
make sense of what some academics such as Tsang (2007) call ‘Reflective
Practice’, i.e. the relationship between the inner and external dialogues.
So where does this lead us? I’m confident that reflection is linked to thinking
and thinking is a complex process that is as much determined by the moral,
social and political worlds we inhabit as it ever is by our rational thought
processes alone. In essence the evidence thus far doesn’t really help us
determine ‘what is the nature of reflection that when we recognise it we may
judge a student’s performance?’ As academics this essentially is our task.
But how can we perform ethical and fair assessment by seeking to measure
the phenomenon of reflection when we don’t know what it is? This was the
crux of my argument in the article ‘There is no such thing as reflection.’
As a consequence of that article a new discourse developed for the first time ‘What is the nature of reflection that when recognised can be measured?’
Having published a number of articles following on from this I completed a
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study of what had changed, and in 2010 published another article ‘There is no
such thing as reflection: ten years on’. I concluded that little had really
changed. The sector was still uncritically promoting and requiring reflection in
assessment.
Research in this area is poor and there have only been two empirical studies
during the past 10 years, Redmond in 2004 and Wilson in 2013, and both
acknowledge the validity issues with studies that are based on self-reporting.
However, I did discover a new language developing. Reflection was changing
to critical reflection and researchers such as Professor Jan Fook and Stephen
Brookfield began to link reflection with critical theory and postmodernism, and
view reflection as a new hybrid theory.
In fact Jan Fook is the only professor in the world with the title Professor of
Critical Reflection, whose sole task is to develop a methodology for reflection
so it can be empirically researched. She together with her colleague Fiona
Gardiner developed a model to aid practitioners become critical reflective
thinkers. She presented her model at one of our master classes here at
Winchester in September. Her work is both interesting and useful to
practitioners who through a structured approach to thinking are able to reflect
on an issue or problems linked to their practice, and with new insights change
their intended action. She talks about ‘unsettling the settled.’ There are two
parts to her model. Stage 1 is to unsettle our dominant, implicit assumptions
and identify our hidden private theories of an issue. Stage 2 re-formulates
the theory by gaining new awareness. Therefore through a structured
approach in thinking we change our intended practice. But Fook concedes
that without empirical evidence she is still uncertain whether what we call
reflection is reflection.
As human beings we strive for stability and predictability. This is our comfort
zone. Fook along with other commentators such as the child protection
expert Professor Sue White talks about challenging our early hypothesis of an
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issue leading to changing our thinking through evidence rather than comfort,
e.g. I act upon rational thought rather than through the senses alone.
To explain this more clearly the following story is a good example. As a social
worker you arrive at the doorstep, having already made up your mind about
certain things. The door opens and there you see a mother with her one-year
old child. You have already formed an early hypothesis about what is
happening in the household based on reading existing records and first
impressions deduced from private conclusions. You then proceed to seek
evidence to prove the hypothesis, thus maintaining one’s comfort zone as the
primary objective. It is easy to see with hindsight why social workers get it
wrong but how do we see ‘getting it wrong’ when we are in the moment? For
example, in the Victoria Climbié case was it easier for the social worker Lisa
Arthurworry to accept the great aunt’s explanation that Victoria was sleeping
and OK instead of checking her safety when in fact she was dying, lying in
her own urine, with over 128 injures in a cold bath? The comfort zone of
proving the early hypothesis enables social workers to leave the front door
early rather than confronting what might be a very difficult or even dangerous
situation for them. In this I mean the personal challenge to the early
hypothesis: what if I have got it wrong, what if Victoria is not asleep, what
evidence is telling me she is safe, what if I am being misled, how sure am I
and what makes me so sure?
In essence, Fook and others suggest that through critical reflection we
challenge the private early hypothesis we construct and travel to the
uncomfortable zone of unpredictability and uncertainty to confront what
psychologists call ‘cognitive lock up.’ The social workers allow themselves
time in this zone enabling new insights about what might be going on in the
family because it helps probing questions to develop the early hypothesis into
something new, maybe a new hypothesis. This is an issue others have
explored. Munro (2008:137) found that children’s social workers were
reluctant to change their perspective on a given case. They tended to
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interpret new information so it would fit with their existing analysis: if it was
conflicting it was often disregarded. The single most pervasive bias in human
reasoning is that people like to hold on to their beliefs. Do we believe too
easily?
Whether Victoria Climbié’s life would have been saved if the social worker had
intervened differently, we will never know. It’s not about fault or blame as
these are unhelpful labels, but how professionals struggle in extreme
circumstances to do their very best and sometimes get it wrong, which is
different from reckless practice. However, it is the challenge to ourselves that
helps to develop a new personal theory, which might for example see the
world differently. Going back to the case of Victoria Climbié, the social
worker could have thought differently: ‘I need to see Victoria (Task), I will
come back in 30 minutes when she is awake (strategy), and then check she is
OK (Outcome)’.
Holt suggests that a good assessment in child protection requires the
translation of knowledge, skill, competence and confidence into analysis and
reflection. One must avoid the rule of optimism that this form of fixed
thinking achieves as it restricts one from stepping back to see the risk
holistically. For many social workers, especially inexperienced, the
overwhelming nature of the demands in some families is just too much,
resulting in being over-optimistic about the management of risk. It is
sometimes emotionally easier to see the glass half full than pursue a
continuing sense of doubt when the glass is half empty. However as Prof.
Harry Ferguson reminds us, we must strive for a balance between optimism
and pessimism – all failing families have many good qualities that can get lost
in the mire of risk. It is not the fault of social workers; it’s the problem of
overstretched organisations trying to cope. Lord Laming’s report on the
death of Baby Peter and Prof. Eileen Munro’s on child protection both agree
on the need for social workers to focus more on getting out there to build
relationships than pander to targets. The recommendations in these reports
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were accepted by the government but in particular social workers need more
support and time to reflect on these difficult problems. Yet despite this the
very same politicians are being critical of social work education for not
adequately preparing social workers to have a more forensic understanding of
families especially during student placements, which only the employers
control. Social workers need the tools to do the job most of us avoid.
I would suggest that good social work practice is helping practitioners to not
only develop a forensic understanding of the family they work with but a
framework that takes them outside their comfort zone to challenge their own
thoughts and skewed perceptions of a situation, either given or developed.
This is a message to all employers and government. So what is the problem
with critical reflection? Although we can’t define exactly what critical
reflection is, as long as we articulate our own interpretation of the reflection
then the assessment would be ethical. This was my argument in a 2003
article ‘Making the unethical ethical’. But then we have another problem of
consistency in the quality of assessment.
The problem only really emerges when reflection is being assessed. This
takes us back to what I said earlier about the relationship between our inner
and external voices. Some philosophers argue that the construction of rational
a priori thought is possible and external of language. This essentially means
that we can think about phenomena in their original uncontaminated form –
thinking outside of language. Bryan McGee in his view of the work of
Strawson sees the modern school of Oxford philosophers as accepting that
we only think through language. Language is a social construct and a
culturally determined phenomenon that directs our action. We create a
concept such as reflection and according to Brewer it becomes a blank
cheque - its potential value depends on its use. We classify its value by our
empirical reality of such, conceived through language. Therefore its utility
becomes its existence. Is this a satisfactory explanation of existence – the
way we use it becomes what it is as accepted knowledge?
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The analytical philosopher Wittgenstein suggests that we should understand
language as a coherent set of common rules, but this is different from other
traditions such as structuralism which views language as a system which can
be studied through the rules deemed to have structured it. Words like
reflection are collective products of social interactions, which are essential to
us in articulating our world. However, unlike terms like racism, which have a
historical, political and sociological biography, it is unclear whether the
concept of reflection can be seen in the same way. It is a social construction
that may have developed out of a common fad of its time to become more
professionally and academically fashionable than it ever did from empirical
evidence. Reflection in this sense might be no more than a fad.
Language is politically dominant within economic and class-based ideology, as
we can see from the work of Marx and others. We speak not with what we
think but what we believe we are – our social identity. To do differently
places us at risk of deviating from the norm. A good example of how we
misunderstand language is in the problematic nature of mental health
diagnosis. Mental health could be said to border more on social and political
conformity, imprisoned by language than by science-based evidence. This
highlights the clash of medical cultures and ideologies. Medical treatment in
the West is based on empirically verified scientific evidence, whereas for
example in some countries in Africa faith and spirituality dominate mental
health diagnosis - but who is right and what evidence is best to verify
validity?
Therefore, if reflection is a higher form of metacognition, as Eraut suggests,
the concept of the dialogic interaction between our inner thoughts and the
world we experience is even more problematic because of the way language
translation alters the very nature of our original thought. Language acts as a
filter to the cultural, social and political dominance of power in society. To
explain this simply, scholars appear to suggest reflection as a process of
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deeper and higher-level metacognition that can somehow more easily be
communicated once identified and known. Yet if we think in language as
suggested then the reflective thought becomes limited because language is a
restricted form of communication translation, redefining the original message
through social coding or in the way Habermas the German philosopher talks
of ‘speech acts.’ Therefore language becomes a function of communication
that is much more complicated than we perceive it to be.
However if it is possible to think free of language in the way Socrates and
Plato envisage then a purer form of reflection should be possible. This may
relate to the way Fook and others argue in the ‘critical’ element of reflection
that enhances critical thinking to critical reflection. The problem is not solved
there, as academics want to assess student performance of reflection. The
evidence of critical reflection performance is normally presented in essay form
using English language text because it lends itself to national quality
assurance systems to ensure minimum standards. As an external examiner at
another university I have seen many examples of reflective essays and the
variation in the assessor’s comments such as ‘you need to reflect more or
have greater critical depth’. What does this mean? What is enough depth to
feed the implicit assumptions of the assessor? When reflecting, the original
ideas emerging from this process change into something different. Language
cannot satisfactorily communicate complicated ideas.
Let me give you an example. Think of something you want to say to your
partner that is complicated in language but is an expression of your love, loss
or anger. Because of your relationship you would have already built a
sophisticated code between yourselves that is exclusive to you. Language
becomes less important than the senses in the way you communicate,
physically and emotionally. But then when you try to explain this to another,
external of your private social code, let’s say in marriage guidance because
your relationship has broken down, you can’t find the words to translate the
feelings, understanding and emotional intelligence of your experience
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because the senses in your relationship get in the way. Therefore your
description of what is happening in your relationship is inadequate.
Language is a limited form of communication that does not lend itself easily
to translating complex ideas such as those that would generally derive from
advanced thinking reflective acts. Van Manen says for example, that
‘Reflection is more difficult to capture in language’ and goes on to say, in
talking about teachers, ‘it’s impossible to critically reflect because if you act
with doubt in the way Dewey suggests you cannot also simultaneously act
thoughtfully and critically at the same time’. Reflection in action is an
impossible skill. Teachers are in the phenomenology of an existential
moment when they teach. The ontology of this is clearly different to Schön’s
theory – but is it right? So why do we insist on students and professionals
writing about their reflection of practice?
Because language is politically and culturally contextual, anything that
deviates from the norm as determined by the assessor may not be seen as an
acceptable form of reflection. A good example of this is in the way we write
about our reflection of anti-oppressive behaviour. Social work values are
presented in political language and therefore inadequately translate their
original intention. Although the students may have successfully reflected
upon their own ideas, the presentation of such may not be recognised by the
tutors as outputs of reflection because their own private and implicit notion of
reflection is different to the student.
Just imagine this. I have an original idea about an issue I am reflecting upon
that solves a problem and has caused me some concern for weeks. I think of
this at a deeper level in my consciousness – a form or metacognition where I
am reflecting upon my reflection. As I start the task to write this up in an
essay I have to translate my thinking into language; straightaway that
restricts the original idea and alters the construction into something different
because of the limitations of language. For some once this has been
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achieved they may have to translate again from say Hindi to English where
English is not their first language. You can see that translating one’s personal
theory in the way Fook suggests is problematic yet academics are not
questioning or even acknowledging this issue.
Much of the 1980s and 1990s saw educationalists argue away from the
competence-based assessment and now in social work we have moved to the
era of capability. However the reductionist way we are attempting to assess
critical reflection does the very job we are trying to avoid - seeing reflection
as a competence output. This is the very problem that Schön argued against
in his emancipatory approach to managing the ‘messy lowlands’ and what it
called ‘the highlands of practice.’ When I first started researching reflection I
completed an initial search from the Eric database and 30k references came
up, mainly in education - such was and is still today its popularity and
interest. However, I must acknowledge that in all my searches I have only
looked at western literature, while recognising that eastern traditions of
thinking may also have useful contributions. Razek writes a lot about the
state of ‘mindfulness’, which is about taking time to listen to our internal
voice. Other forms of mindfulness from the Buddhist traditions may also have
something to say; however, we do not know whether this is reflection or just
thoughtful contemplation, or one and the same. In a recent lecture here by
Dr Rowan Williams I was tempted to ask him this very question but didn’t and
now wonder what his response would have been from a theological
perspective to ‘What is the nature of thought?’
So what is the answer? Going back to the philosopher Bryan McGee, the
purpose of curious enquiry is to constantly ask critical questions. But how we
speak of things does not always represent how we understand things. It
often misses important information or is limited by binaries. Over the
centuries philosophy may have only brought us one thing and it is not our
quest in life for answers, but moreover, in the way Karl Popper postulates, it’s
the construction of good questions that in itself delivers good solutions. For
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me as a professional social worker this could fit well with the critical reflective
practitioner idea in suspending our quest for answers and focus more on
reconstructing new but good questions to allow the enquiry to continue. In
essence my job as a professional is not about providing answers for people’s
problems but the reconstruction of good questions to allow the process of
personal curiosity and doubt to continue and not end. It is for the individual
service users to construct solutions for themselves, which is far more
empowering. To do otherwise ends the enquiry and the enquirer becomes no
longer interested; as Professor Eileen Munro claims: ‘The social worker has
become too complacent and too believing in the family’s story to have a
healthy scepticism and curiosity to challenge.’ Could this be the same for
reflection? Therefore, maybe it doesn’t matter that we cannot define
reflection but rather we should maintain a healthy, active and purposeful
challenge to the status quo through our re-examination of phenomena
through good questions. Perhaps this will be sufficient and good enough.
I am confident reflection is learning from experience through our senses
rather than purely a priori and is adaptive not restrictive, but such a process
is private and does not lend itself easily to the external and scientific world of
validation, which is the Jewel in the Crown for universities whose universal
claim to consistent quality is sacred.
Until such time as we develop a grand theory of critical reflection that is clear
and measurable we should stop assessing students’ ability to reflect and allow
students to assess their own performance through their critique and analysis
of learning achievement. Why would we want anything else? We should
support them in constructing their own meaningful questions when
encountering problematic practice, as Popper theorised, especially in the way
he views all knowledge as problematic and consequently the engine of
learning. It is how you construct the question that determines the solution,
rather than the question itself.
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However, I am clear about one thing: if we pursue what I see as the folly of
assessing reflection then at the very least we should define our own
interpretation of reflection for the student to understand prior to the
assessment taking place to ensure the process is ethical and fair. This sets
clear boundaries and makes the assessment transparent. I was recently
tempted to team up with a group of clinical psychologists who were
interested in developing a critical reflection perception scale to help measure
reflection, but I felt that this methodological approach would reduce the core
concept to no more than a technical rationality and therefore resisted my
intuition to accept their help.
To end, I leave you with a quote.
By three ways we may learn wisdom
1. By reflection, which is the noblest
2. By imitation, which is the easiest
3. By experience, which is the bitterest
Confucius
But if this is so and we become wiser, how can we be sure that we achieved
this through reflection rather than other forms of contemplation?
Consequently, are we still no nearer knowing whether reflection is our
panacea or just an illusion of the senses, or does it really matter at all?
(Film clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOYO5ZYRYR8)
In true government fashion: let’s pause and take time to reflect on the nature
of reflection.
Thank you
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