Diffracting reflection: a move beyond reflective practice

Abstract

Reflective practice has become a core component in higher education studies. In the health sciences, reflective tasks are required throughout the undergraduate programmes, yet many students struggle to find value in these tasks for their present and future professional practice. Benefits that can be derived from the process are undermined by this lack of motivation for reflective engagement. Concern around the static, contained, individualist nature of reflections that often face judgement through assessment can be addressed by opening up the process to generate new potentials. In this paper, I draw on new materialism and the Baradian (2007) philosophy of diffraction to move beyond the reflective practices of representation and sameness by affirmatively working with/through differences. I refer to data collected in an ethics approved research study at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, to explain a context of unjust practices in which students learn. I demonstrate how students' reflective texts shared online on the Google Drive platform can be productive and transformative material forces that enact new knowledge, valued by students. The apparatus of text-students-events is put to work creating new possibilities to enable a socially just pedagogy in medical education.

Embodying Affective Intra-Actions Online: Enacting Posthuman Methods in Virtual Spaces

“…Online learning scholars have deployed diffractive readings as a method of data analysis in both formal (Hilli & Tigerstadt, 2020) and informal digital settings (McKnight et al, 2017; Renold & Ringrose, 2017). Rather than using diffraction as an after-the-fact analytical tool, Mitchell (2017), an educator of medical students online, applied posthuman concepts to design and deploy an online posthuman pedagogy. She found that “[t]he intra-active materiality and agency of Google Docs expanded possibilities for mapping different experiences and insights, producing deeper thought and dialogue across the previously bounded reflective process” (p. 177) that unfolded in traditional online discussion boards.…”

Changes in self-reflective thinking level in writing and educational needs of medical students: A longitudinal study

“…It has been reported that in terms of reflection portfolio activity, students are pressed to complete the portfolio by focusing more on completion itself rather than on self-reflection. In addition, many students view reflection as an assessment they are obliged to complete [39] or as meaningless [40], and they do not want to dedicate time to self-reflection [41]. Despite the many advantages of self-reflection, students' motivation to participate in this process is low.…”

Academic Reflective Practice: Tools Supporting the Self-Evaluation Approach

“…The issue of reflective practice is comprehensively explored in pedagogy by many researchers (Dewey, 1933;Gołębniak, 2001;Marcos, Miguel, & Tillema, 2009;Mezirow, 2000;Mitchell, 2017;Mizerek, 2017a;Perkowska-Klejman, 2019;Schön, 1983).…”