Facilitating reflective practice in higher education professional programmes

: Reclaiming and redefining the practices of reflective practice

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to reclaim, redefine and re-imagine reflective practice in the context of higher education. Literature concerning mainstream understanding and practice highlights how reflective practice, popularised by Donald Schön, takes the form of reflection-on-action, retrospective critical inquiry into one’s implicit and explicit social professional practice judgements, decisions and activities. Contending that only by fully scoping the discipline of professional practice can one come to a rich, deep appreciation of the professional artistry involved and the essential role and nature of reflective practice, this thesis offers Professional Practice: Connected Practice. Yet bringing that theory into juxtaposition with lived experiences of 16 “percipients” (Myers, 2008) engaged in reflective practice during Practice-Led-Research via Reflective Practice Groups brings to light significant issues: reflective practice has always, or has become, appropriated by neoliberalism formulating it as a reified, cognitively dominated, panoptical form of therapeutic analysis and professional assessment, a narrowing process into which students/practitioners are ‘broken-in’ (Lefebvre) through a slow incremental violence of imposed habitualised and repetitive routines. ‘Percipients’ (Myers), purposefully employed, values their lead in the entire research process, through which the method of critical phenomenology approached via dialogue emerged. Here they signified reflection-in-action, the least theorised, most confused element of Schön/Schönian-inspired reflective practice. In the liminoid space of social science and the arts, and drawing on European phenomenology, the contribution of this thesis is to theorise understanding and practice of percipients ‘threshold concepts’ of: Gaze, mainstream reflection-on-practice, offering a reimagined creative, playful alternative; Glance, embodied and bodied reflection-in-action
informed by Gendlin’s Focusing; and, the ‘insight cultivator’ of Leaving Go. These being interwoven, ‘rhythm’ and ‘rhythmanalysis’ (Lefebvre) lends to further appreciation and their facilitation. Named Mittere, the frame for the rhythm of this radical reclaimed, redefined and re-imagined reflective practice is proposed, becoming organising chapters for the thesis.

Date of Award	3 Sep 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Winchester
Supervisor	Olu Taiwo (Supervisor), Richard Cuming (Supervisor) & Inga Bryden (Supervisor)