Knowing through reflective practice in higher education

Abstract

This article explores the use of reflective practice statements as sources of data. Under certain conditions reflective practice statements can be interpreted as providing insight into the underlying mechanisms at work in organisations. The article presents an analysis of reflective practice statements produced by lecturers in higher education who have participated in a course for research supervisors. Reflective practice in higher education has not yet become institutionalised as a form of professional socialisation and the article argues that participants were actively engaged in meaning making. Such statements can be seen as productive of real insight. The data is analysed in terms of the craft skills involved in supervision, the contradictions of maintaining a sense of expertise in modern universities, the significance of emotion at work and in terms of institutional power relationships. The article concludes that properly contextualised reflective practice can produce knowledge of the mechanisms at work in the contemporary academy.

The Implementation of Progress Files in Higher Education: Reflection as National Policy

“…Henkel 2000;Moore 2001;Clegg 2003;Morley 2003) and an equally expansive literature from Scho¨n (1983Scho¨n ( , 1987 onwards detailing the challenges of reflection from both a critical stance (e.g. Ecclestone 1996;Clegg 1999Clegg , 2000Bleakley 2000) and in terms of an elaborated pedagogy (e.g. Moon 1999;Atkinson and Claxton 2000).…”

Reflection on teaching and epistemological structure: reflective and critically reflective processes in ‘pure/soft’ and ‘pure/hard’ fields

“…'Epistemological structure' continues to be a central theme in the higher education teaching literature (e.g., Becher 1989;Donald 2002;Neumann 2001); so is 'reflective practice ' (e.g., Beaty 1997;Clegg 2000;Campbell and Norton 2007). Nonetheless, empirical studies investigating whether academics' reflective practice on teaching takes on distinct forms due to differences in the epistemological structure of their chosen field are scarce.…”

On the problem of theorising: an insider account of research practice

“…The local policy context was given by my role as a higher education researcher working alongside academic developers in a large, English, urban, post-92 university, where the Pro-Vice Chancellor Academic was keen to develop an institutional approach to implementation. The personal driver was my own intellectual concerns with critical realism, my background in Marxist and feminist thought, my strong hunch that that PDP was an incoherent subject for research, representing as it does numerous disparate practices, and a sense that I not did not quite 'get' it, particularly as I had already researched and written about the conceptual and pedagogical problems of 'reflection' (Clegg 1999(Clegg , 2000Clegg, Tan, & Saeidi, 2002). The wider research context was given by the funded systematic review of PDP (Gough, Kiwan, Sutcliffe, Simpson, & Houghton, 2003), which was the first systematic review completed in higher education and which was, in turn, heavily influenced by the broader political and methodological debates about 'evidence' (Clegg, 2005).…”