Reflecting practice/curating practice

Although it has been suggested that practice is demonstrably able to speak for itself, practice cannot actually speak; it is practitioners who make explicit the tacit elements of their practice (Hall & Lloyd, 2016:np). One of the ways that practitioners are encouraged, indeed required, to ‘tell their practice’ is via reflective practice. Reflective practice is the process of articulating professional decision-making, of bringing to awareness the threads that shape interventions and judgments, and of becoming critically alert to the forces that influenced them. This is assumed as achieved through the provision of accounts of practice, stories, with a view that to do so will heighten understanding of and develop individual professional practice as well as the practice of organisations themselves. Mainstream approaches to reflective practice, then, consider accounts told in this way both as true and as a gateway to the development and improvement of practice. The predominant focus is on reflections on practice after the event generated via writing and dialogue. In the conference I offer that these notions are problematic and instead work with a conception of those engaging in reflective practice acting as curators of stories of their practice, with ‘curating’ being a decision-making process of selection of “what to keep and what to discard” (McCartney, 2015:137). Here the process before curation is an important focus of reflective practice. It then follows that the outcome of curation can be creative. To this conference I brought three pieces of interactive art created from my reflections regarding my practice as senior lecturer in higher education. I do not consider myself to be an artist; the point here is one of creative engagement that offers a radically different approach to reflective practice, with ‘radical’ meaning getting (back) to or expounding the roots of ‘the true principle’ of reflective practice (borrowing from Fromm, in Neill, 1960:xii).