Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry

Nona LyonsEditor

Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry

Mapping a Way of Knowing for Professional Reflective Inquiry

EditorNona LyonsUniversity College CorkDept. EducationDonovans RoadCorkIreland

ISBN 978-0-387-85743-5 e-ISBN 978-0-387-85744-2DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-85744-2Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009930366

Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden.The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights.

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Often, those convinced of the possibilities of reflection and reflective inquiry, who wish to implement it especially for the professional education of students, find only conflicting ideas of reflection and little or no clear direction for how they might or could proceed. Some despair and give up. But surprisingly, in these deeply troubling times, when unprec-edented global and national change surrounds us with financial and ethical disasters and uncertainty, many professionals are turning back to educating for reflection and reflective inquiry with the hope for a new viability of their professions. John Dewey, who witnessed profound changes brought about by war and radical ideas in his own lifetime suggests the nature of the challenge of these times:

any significant problem involves conditions that for the moment contradict each other. Solution comes only by getting away from the meaning of terms that is already fixed upon and coming to see the conditions from another point of view, and hence a fresh light. But this reconstruction means travail of thought (Dewey, 1902, pp. 34).

This Handbook, addressing reflection and reflective inquiry, and acknowledging Deweys caution, aims to bring together in one source a robust state of the art re-view of reflection and reflective inquiry for professional life and learning. The goal is to make what might appear familiar and easily grasped strange again, open to fresh insight.

Visions of Reflection and Reflective Practice in Real-Life Projects

As a Prologue to this Handbook, I turn to explore the life and work of two pre-eminent practitioners of reflective practice, Maxine Greene, philosopher and teacher, of Columbia Teachers College and the Lincoln Center Institute for the Arts; and Lee Shulman, teacher educator and researcher, of Stanford University and former President of the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching. I had thought that at the beginning of this Handbook it might be useful to look at what it is like to spend a life in pursuit and support of reflection and of inquiry. So I consulted with these two people who care deeply about thinking and reflecting and have devoted their professional lives to it. I wanted to ask what has it meant to them? Why do they care? Must reflection and reflective inquiry be an aim of education

Originally I had asked Maxine and Lee each to project their vision of the future of reflective practice to be part of a concluding chapter in this Handbook. But as we talked in interviews, I found their responses to an opening question tantalizing: Looking back over what you have accomplished in a rich career, what stands out for you in your work with reflection and reflective inquiry? (Lyons, 2009).

Preface

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For each, a life story emerged and with it a narrative of how each approaches reflection. What was surprising was that both revealed that they engaged in reflection through a life project. Their visions and life projects though different and distinct Maxines project through the arts and humanities and Lees through research on teaching each offers a way to think about our own approaches to reflective practice. Their experiences open a theme for this Prologue, that is, the significance of sustained attention to reflection and its infinite veins of variability, risk, and satisfaction. This chapter contrasts in brief the different life projects of Maxine Greene and Lee Shulman, examines the beginnings of these projects, how reflective agendas entered their work, and the ways the projects unfolded. Here, reflection is defined as a deep consciousness engaged in how one thinks about and approaches a life work. This discussion makes possible ideas about how professionals themselves might be educated to consider their profession as a life project.

Maxine Greene: The Life Project

Anyone who meets Maxine Greene quickly learns of her passion for being wide-awake, for moving others to elevate their lives by a conscious endeavor, to discover each in his or her own terms what it would mean to live deliberately. Maxine has several touch-stones of being wide-awake. She often recalls Henry David Thoreau and his year (1846) of living at Walden Pond and writing about that experience. Thoreau came to see how necessary it is to arouse people from somnolence and ease:

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep. Why is it that men give so poor an account of their day if they have not been slumbering? If they had not been overcome with drowsiness they would have performed something. The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive (Thoreau, 1963, pp.6667).

Maxine also looks to philosopher Alfred Schutzs emphasis on the sense of wide-awakeness as a concreteness, to being in the world and having a purpose: Schutz elaborates:

By the term wide-awakeness we want denote a plane of consciousness of highest tension originating in an attitude of full attention to life and its requirements. Only the performing and especially the working self is fully interested in life and, hence, wide-awake. It lives within its acts and its attention is exclusively directed to carrying its project into effect, to executing its plan. This attention is an active one, not a passive one. Passive attention is the opposite to full awareness (Schutz, 1967, p. 213).

Schutzs points out that heightened consciousness and reflectiveness are meaningful only with respect to human projects, human undertakings human beings define themselves by means of their projects, and that wide-awakeness contributes to the creation of the self (Greene, 1977, p. 121).

In 1977, Maxine revealed how these ideas connected her to a life project, that is, pro-moting human consciousness through education in the arts and humanities. She says, If it is the case, as I believe it is, that involvement with the arts and humanities has the potential for provoking precisely this sort of reflectiveness, we need to devise ways of integrating them into what we teach at all levels of the educational enterprise (Greene.1977, p.121). For Maxine a life project is found in the arts and humanities as they provided ways into wide-awakeness. She sees:

It is, at least on one level, evident that works of art Moby Dick, for instance, a Hudson River landscape painting, Charles Ives Concord Sonata must be directly addressed by existing and situ-ated persons, equipped to attend to the qualities of what presents itself to them Works of art are human achievements, renderings of the ways in which aspects of reality have impinged upon human consciousness. But all art forms must be encountered as achievements that can only be brought to significant life when human beings engage with them imaginatively (Greene, 1977, p. 121).

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These ideas of Maxines carried over the years changed overtime. 10 years later, in the late 1980s, in her book, The Dialectic of Freedom, Maxine wrote of that time as one of carelessness and thoughtlessness so like our own. She found that then a kind of anxiety, an uncertainty of purposes, the kind of time Virginia Woolf spoke of as embed-ded in a nondescript cotton wool in contrast to living consciously (Woolf, 1976, p. 70). Maxines book addressed human freedom, the capacity to surpass the given and look at things as if they could be otherwise. John Dewey, one of Maxines mentors, said that he sought freedom in something which comes to be, in a certain kind of growth, in consequences rather than antecedents (Dewey, 1960, 280). We are free, he said not because of what we statistically are, but in so far as we are becoming different from what we have been.

Maxine reveals how she finds an anchor in consciousness.

Consciousness, it so happens, involves the capacity to pose questions to the world, to reflect on what is presented in experience. It is not to be understood as an interiority. Embodied, thrusting into the lived and perceived, it opens out to the common. Multiple interpretations constitute multiple realities; the common itself becomes multiplex and endlessly challenging, as each person reaches out from his/her own ground toward what might be, should be, is not yet (Greene 1988, pp. 2021).

Maxine cautions that human beings create themselves by going beyond what exists, by trying to bring something into being:

There is, however, no orientation to bringing something into being if there is no awareness of something lacking in a situation. The lacks, as we have seen, may be due to what has happened in the past, to injustices in the present, to the deficits and discomforts associated with being alive at a particular time and place. They may be due to unreflectiveness, to the incapacity to interpret lived situations. It seems evident that all this holds relevance for a conception of education if education is conceived as a process of futuring, of releasing persons to become different. Action signifies beginnings and in education, beginnings must be thought possible if authentic learning is expected to occur (Greene, 1988, p. 22).

Thus Maxine links consciousness to education and to freedom, the consciousness of authorship has much to do with the consciousness of freedom. Maxine makes these links because she sees:

Human beings, of course, devise their life projects in time against their own life histories and the wider human history into which these histories feed.

When asked about the beginnings of her concern about wakefulness and why that became important to her, Maxine recalls her family.

I think partly because it seemed to me, maybe in my own family, that people were disinterested in so many of the things I was interested in. They werent awakened to the sound of music or painting. It was, [that] they distanced themselves. It has nothing to do with their experience. And what the world called a kind of somnolence scared me, that being half asleep.

Thoreau used the word wide-awakeness. And so many people live below the level of awareness and I associate that with reflectiveness, because I think of Hannah Arendt and other people who talk about thinking about what they are doing, thinking about being alive. And that means taking the risk of looking inside, taking the risk of asking yourself, why am I doing this?

And growing up I was lucky enough to live across the street from the Brooklyn Museum. And Sundays they had a free concert in the Sculpture Court. And I think I started to go there when I was eleven, because it was across the street. And not only couldnt I not believe the music, but I wanted to join that world. I liked that community better than my home community, so that was part of it. It was something about music and culture that did not exist in my house.

What connects in my case is literature. Its novels and poetry. Some people are more attracted to music, and we have to allow for that. We have to find out what it is that really turns a kid on, you know. And I think we have to attend to that in children (Lyons, 2009).

Maxine acknowledges that she sustains herself and her work by always reading. When Im reading Im moved into another domain and I find things I never knew before. Maxine

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says too that she finds in Toni Morrison and other writers role models: those who have real projects and have the guts to realize them, to go through the disappointments, the rejections and come back. Those are role model (Cruickshank, 2009, p. 2).

Since 1976 Maxine has served as Philosopher in Residence at the Lincoln Center Institute where each year she lectures and hosts literature-as-art workshops during the summer for teachers from schools all over the New York metropolitan area and meets regularly with teachers at their schools during the school year. Some assert that she has educated ten thousands of teachers in North America (Pinar, 1998, p. 1). Now in her nineties, Maxine recently was preparing a syllabus for one of her classes at Columbia. Maxine holds firmly to her belief, without the ability to think about yourself, to reflect on your life, theres really no awareness, no consciousness. Consciousness does not come automatically; it comes through being alive, awake, curious and often furious (Cruickshank, 2008, p. 1).

Lee Shulman

Lee Shulmans life work as a teacher educator and researcher on teaching had a profound moment of change in 1968. At that time Lee was at Michigan State in the teacher education program nurturing a research agenda, studying how teachers think. Pioneering new research methods by asking teachers to think aloud about how they would go about thinking through a problem of teaching, Lee was concerned to map teacher thinking. Just then Michigan announced its decision to start a Medical School. The new Dean invited Lee to come to study how doctors go about thinking through a problem; an agenda similar to the project he was conducting on how teachers think (Lyons, 2009; Shulman, 1998; 2004.

Lee calls this as a critical juncture for him when he switched over to the Medical Education Program. He brought with him his research methods and his best graduate stu-dents. But what was striking in the switch was that colleagues in Medical School thought about physicians and what they did as professionals in such different ways from the ways we did about teachers (Lyons, 2009).

Doctors were thought of as people who did hard work that could only be done by people who were of superior intelligence. And most of the people in the public agreed with that and never challenged it openly or questioned the kind of compensation they received. And when you did the kind of research that I did about how doctors think, the credibility and legitimacy that they were credited with indicated that they were analytic and self-conscious enough so that if they tell you how they got from what a patient describes and tells you to a diagnosis; they came across as legitimate. Thus they also were legitimate persons to tell you about their reasoning.

And this was during that period in the study of teaching when leaders in that field did not take that seriously, that is, teacher thinking. The dominant research paradigm was the process-product model where you did not have to concern yourself with how teachers thought, what their reasoning was or how they were reflecting on their practice only what results it yielded in behaviors. Yet no one would have thought to do that kind of work with a physician correlating their behaviour only with outcomes not with their thinking. How people think was not taken seriously in teaching.

In medicine it was taken very seriously and welcomed. You are helping us to open the black box of doctors thinking and to medical folks that was opening up mysteries of how physicians thought important things they wanted to know in medicine. But nobody was thinking about that for teachers. So I think it was rather remarkable that while I was at Michigan State they opened up a Medical school that took teaching very seriously. They began with a philosophy that medicine was a field that took seriously that the work of medicine was to solve problems. The Dean of the Medical School said this is what we need to know. It dominated the next 6 years of my career (Lyons, 2009).

But, Lee was very committed to his research agenda and while at Stanford on a Guggenheim in 1974, he was invited to put together a panel for the national planning

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conference on research on teaching at a National Institute of Education conference. The panel was the only one [of ten] that concentrated on teacher thinking. The success of that panel led to the national competition for an Institute for Research on Teaching which was eventually established at Michigan State University. Lee and his colleagues were looking at a variety of ways to understand teachers thought, how they made sense, how they decided what to teach, or began to develop theories about how kids learn.

And this is where a paradigm change came to me. This was the chance to take work I was doing in Medicine and shift to teaching. The Institute for Research on Teaching (IRT) pulled me back from medical problem-solving to teaching. I might not have gone back to teaching (Lyons, 2009).

In 1982, Lee moved to Stanford University and spent 15 years there. During that time, importantly he came to reframe his research question from asking, How do teachers think about? To the subject matter of teaching. How does somebody who knows something about something teach that to someone else who doesnt know it? At Stanford, Lee felt he was freed from running an institute the IRT now to focus again on his research now on the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching. He used the same methodology he had been using with the Physicans Studies. He also taught students in the Teacher Education Program who were learning to teach.

It was at this time too that Lee and Gary Sykes were invited to write a policy paper on the potential for a National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and how it might do its work. In 1985, they were asked to develop and field test the first prototypes for a National Board assessment. Lee and some colleagues came up with the first protocol for the National Board for the Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). Then Lee was immediately asked to create it. Joined by his graduate students, Lee began using some variations of his research methods as methods for assessing teachers for example simula-tions. Then came the portfolio idea which quickly became widely accepted. The assess-ment of the portfolio begins with the quality of the teaching, learning, planning, evaluation, etc. that is documented in the portfolio and also the quality of the analysis, reflection, and critique of the work the teacher presents. But, reflection is not a replacement for action and performance in teaching, it is its complement. But, Lee avers, without an understanding and demonstration of teaching as action and performance, reflection alone is nearly worth-less. In 1990, Lee and his colleagues handed over everything to the new National Board and they ran with it. Today, there are 75,000 certified Board teachers in the United States, certified as exemplary teachers.

At this time, Lee began to experiment with the use of teaching cases as a way to teach teachers. He experimented with cases as the core of the curriculum for the Teacher Education Program. At that time he began having conversations with people in higher education. They would ask Lee, could the work he was doing with K-12 teachers apply to higher education. For example, would portfolios then being used with K-12 teachers, with such satisfaction for the deep sense of a persons teaching they revealed, also be appropri-ate for higher education people? Thus, Lee came to work for the next 11 years on the scholarship of teaching at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. While President of the Carnegie Foundation, he and his colleagues also conducted sys-tematic comparative studies of how students were prepared for the professions of law, engineering, the clergy, nursing, and medicine.

Coda on Two Life Projects

Here, two master teachers and proponents of reflection and reflective inquiry have shared life projects. Lee Shulman has been investigating how professional people think, how they come to know something, and what it takes to teach that to someone else. He

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has translated this kind of careful thought and teaching through his work in assessment and in new ways to understand teaching competence. He has opened new forms of assessment not only to K-12 teaching but to inquiries into teaching in Higher Education, where he has fostered a new scholarship of teaching. Maxine Greene has similarly worked with teachers across all levels. Her project takes its form through the arts, the-atre, dance, painting and literature. Her concern has been with how to promote greater consciousness and caring in living and learning. Her association with the Lincoln Center Institute with its brilliant summer programs with artists in performance and Maxine teaching has created a legendary approach to professional teaching and learning. Through the Lincoln Center project the arts and artists come into schools to work directly with students and teachers. These are not presentations. Rather, the artists work with students engaging them in dance, painting, drama, etc. The burning concern of both Maxine and Lee, these master teachers, is to foster being aware, conscious, and reflec-tive of ones own and others ways of thinking and being.

I must acknowledge here that I personally have benefitted from the life projects of these two exceptional people, Maxine Greene, and Lee Shulman. Both have been men-tors to me. I met Maxine through the Lincoln Center project which I had sponsored for the Scarsdale Public Schools through my role as its Director of Curriculum and Staff Development. In the summer of 1978, just in my first year as a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, I attended a week of the Lincoln Center program to encourage the Scarsdale participation. It was at lunch toward the end of that week that I enlisted Maxines advice in helping me think through my doctoral work. I wondered if I should focus that work on reflective development. Needless to say Maxines warm support and enthusiastic encouragement sent me on my way. She would be one of the readers of my thesis.

Following my doctorate, and while teaching in the Teacher Education Program at Harvard, I undertook to study a group of teachers asking about the conflicts they encoun-tered in their professional lives. I also asked if these had any moral or ethical components. I discovered that most teachers found ethical dimensions in their professional conflicts, but what was most surprising to me was the nature of their conflicts. Many involved situations of knowing, of their work as teachers: For example: When should they enter their opinions into a class discussion, if that might encourage students to think there was one right answer? Or, how to encourage students to ask their own questions? Or when to not allow a student to voice an opinion? These epistemological dimensions of teachers decision making became aspects of a Spencer Foundation grant I submitted to create a set of cases for teacher education purposes. It was at a Spencer Fellows meeting in 1987 that I met Lee Shulman, at one of the incredible sessions Spencer sponsored in which new researchers met to make presentations and to talk with experienced, seasoned ones.

Lees interest in my work and encouragement were profound in my life. Always so encouraging, asking good questions, making good suggestions, Lee was remarkably a mentor. And I found as I continued in teacher education that I followed his work, espe-cially his work with assessment for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the development of the portfolio idea. I began encouraging portfolios in teacher education for beginning teachers, and almost from the start I began to do inter-views with students to uncover just how and what they were learning from the process. In addition, with Lees encouragement I started a Special Interest Group on Portfolios and Reflection for AERA, and completed a book on the subject, With Portfolio in Hand: Validating the New Teacher Professionalism(1998.I also sponsored a yearly Portfolio Conference. Lees support helped in each of these projects.

Through these effort, I met a young woman, Anne Rath, a Harvard grad, just about to start a Portfolio Program at University College Cork (UCC) Ireland. And we thought of doing some research across institutions. She invited me to Ireland and I went there for a

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year. While I was there, the new president initiated a new award for faculty for Excellence in Teaching at UCC. Faculty would submit a portfolio of their teaching. The vice President, Aine Hyland, asked if I would introduce the portfolio idea to the larger faculty. Thus, began a 10 year collaboration with UCC. It was my privilege to encourage faculty from across disciplines to share their potential portfolio entries with each other in a seminar. So successful were these seminars, so interested were faculty to learn of each others teaching that a new program of faculty education began.

This was my introduction to working across disciplines and I must acknowledge that this work led to the idea for this Handbook. I began to wonder what was the state of the art of reflective practice across disciplines? What could we learn from examining that? I invite your participation in the project.

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This Handbook is the work and achievement of many people. First, it claims my apprecia-tion for the results of the efforts of the individuals who authored and created its chapters, who did careful digging, inquiring on their own into reflection and reflective practice in diverse professions and pedagogical practices. They document change and development in the ways of conceptualizing, interpreting and understanding reflection and reflective inquiry, and its usefulness within several professions, including teacher education, the law, medicine, nursing, social work, teaching K-12, adult education, occupational therapy, and probation services. With the results of those authors who examined the many varied teach-ing practices, it is possible to trace the evolving and vibrant teaching ways to foster a reflective practice. The goal for these writers of pedagogies is challenging: to present the practices with enough detail so that others, if they chose to do so, might be able to try out and pursue a practice in their own classrooms.

I especially want to thank all of the reviewers of these chapters, a splendid array of world-wide talent. Their careful work, chosen observations and studied recommenda-tions make this Handbook a document of worth in settings local and global. The Handbook is a testimony especially to those who gave advice and counseled me on how to proceed. I count among them these advisers: Jean Clandinin, University of Alberta, Blythe Clinchy, Emerita, Wellesley College, Cheryl Craig, University of Houston, Pamela Moss, University of Michigan, and Nel Noddings, Emerita, Stanford University. Others offered advice in special circumstances, including Maxine Greene, Lee Shulman, Vicki LaBoskey, Mills College, Tom Russell, Queens University, David Boud, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, and Kay Johnston, Colgate College. I cannot omit two stalwart colleagues, Joan Moon, formerly of the Writing Program of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who served as chief editorial advisor and indefatigable reader to me; and Carla Lillvik, of Gutman Library of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who offered me invaluable guidance and steadfast assistance in researching this work. I thank, too, Marie Sheldon, of Springer Publishers for her wise guidance.

I want to give a special word of thanks to all of the students represented here in these reports and studies, whose voices and minds are in our heads as we try to understand the intricacies of reflection and reflective practice. I thank my American students and my

Acknowledgments

xiv Acknowledgments

colleagues at University College Cork, Ireland, especially Marian Murphy, Maria Dempsey and Carmel Halton of the Applied Social Studies Department, where I have worked for the last 10 years with them and their students, and those faculty and students as well at St.Angleas College, Sligo and Trinity College Dublin as we struggle still to make sense of the things students tell us and grow in understanding of reflection and reflective inquiry.

Cork, Ireland Nona Lyons

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Jean ClandininDirector of the Centre for Research for Teacher Education, University of Alberta, Canada

Cheryl J.CraigDepartment of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Houston, USA

Carla LillvikResearch and Distance Services Librarian, Monroe C. Gutman Library, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Vicki LaBoskeyMills College, Oakland, CA, USA

Pamela MossSchool of Education, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Joan MoonProfessor of Writing and Critical Thinking, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA

Nel NoddingsLee L. Jacks Professor of Child Education, Emerita, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Tom RussellQueens University, Kingston, ON, Canada

Advisors

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Donna Schwartz-Barcott, PhD, RNProfessor, College of Nursing, University of Rhode Island

Denis BrackenRector, St. Pauls College & Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Work, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

David BoudUniversity of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Colin Bradley, MD, MICGP, FRCGPDept of General Practice, University College Cork, Ireland

Helen BurchellUniversity of Hertfordshire, England

Tina BlytheAdjunct Lecturer, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, USA

Peter CantillonProfessor of Medical Education, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland.

Philip ChambersUniversity of Worcester, UK

D. Jean ClandininProfessor and Director of the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, USA

Blythe McVicker ClinchyProfessor, emerita, Department of Psychology, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, USA

Cheryl J. CraigProfessor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Patrick Croskerry MD, PhDDalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada

Reviewers

xviii Reviewers

Janet DeLanyTowson University, Towson, MD, USA

Mark DoelCentre for Health and Social Care Research, Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

Zongyi Deng, Zongyi DENG, PhDAssociate Professor, Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Nancy Dluhy, PhD, RNChancellor Professor, College of Nursing, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, North Dartmouth, MA, USA

Helen FeatherstoneAssociate Professor Emerita of Teacher Education, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

Anne Reilley FreeseUniversity of Hawaii, USA

James GarrisonVirginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Robert G. GoodmanPrincipal, R. Goodman Associates, Watertown, MA, USA

S. GopinathanAssociate Dean, Office of Education Research and Professor, Leadership and Policy Studies Academic Group National Institute of Education, Nanayang Technological University, Singapore

Carmel HaltonLecturer and Director of Practice in the Department of Applied Social Studies at University College, Cork, Ireland

Deborah HelsindeGraduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USAIngrid Hillinger, Boston College Law School, Newton, MA, USA

Barb HooperUniversity of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

Kay JohnstonColgate University, Syracuse, NY, USA

Vicki Kubler LaBoskeyProfessor of Education, Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA

Sandra M. LawrenceMt. Holyoke College, MA, USA

Catherine C. LewisMills College, Oakland, CA, USA

Amia LieblichThe Hebrew University, Israel

Sue LillymanUniversity of Central England, UK

xixReviewers

John LoughranFoundation Chair in Curriculum & Pedagogy in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia

Maria Ines MarcondesProfessor and Researcher in Education at the Graduate Program in Education at Pontifcia Universidade Catlica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Joan MoonRetired Professor of Writing and Critical Thinking, University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA

Pamela A. MossProfessor of Education, University of Michigan School of Education, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Laurie A. MorinProfessor at University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law. Washington, DC, USA

Nel NoddingsLee L. Jacks Professor of Child Education Emerita at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Margaret OlsonSt. Francis Xavier University. Antigonish, NS, Canada

Bairbre RedmondUniversity College Dublin, Ireland

Carol RodgersAssociate professor of education in the department of Educational Theory and Practice at University of Albany, State University of New York, Albany, NY, USA

Anthony RyanDepartment of Paediatrics and Child Health, University College Cork, Ireland

Seok Hoon SengPsychological Studies Academic Group, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Dr. Donna Schwartz-BarcottUniversity of Rhode Island College of Nursing, USA

Daniel SchwartzProfessor in the Learning Sciences, Technology and Design program at Stanford University in the School of Education, Stanford, CA, USA

Dr. Silvia Mamede Studart SoaresMedical School-Federal University of Cear, Cear State, Brazil

James W. StiglerProfessor of Psychology at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Tad WatanabeKennesaw State University, Carrollton, GA, USA

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George WilsonCollege Lecturer, School of Sociology, Social Policy and Social Work, Queens University, Northern Ireland

Kenneth M. ZeichnerBoeing Professor of Teacher Education, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

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Part I Reflection and Reflective Inquiry

1 Reflection and Reflective Inquiry: Critical Issues, Evolving Conceptualizations, Contemporary Claims and Future Possibilities ............. 3Nona Lyons

Part II Foundational Issues: Needed Conceptual Frameworks

2 Reflective Inquiry: Foundational Issues A Deepening of Conscious Life ................................................................................................ 25Nona Lyons

3 The Role of Descriptive Inquiry in Building Presence and Civic Capacity ............................................................................................... 45Carol Rodgers

Part III Reflective Inquiry in the Professions

4 A Critical Analysis of Reflection as a Goal for Teacher Education ................. 67Ken Zeichner and Katrina Yan Liu

5 Education for the Law: Reflective Education for the Law ............................... 85Filippa Marullo Anzalone

6 Reflective Inquiry in the Medical Profession ..................................................... 101C. Anthony Ryan

7 Occupational Therapy as a Reflective Practice ................................................. 131Ellen S. Cohn, Barbara A. Boyt Schell, and Elizabeth Blesedell Crepaeu

8 Application of Critical Reflective Inquiry in Nursing Education .................... 159Hesook Suzie Kim, Laurie M. Lauzon Clabo, Patricia Burbank, and Mary Leveillee Diane Martins

Contents

xxii Contents

9 Reflective Inquiry in Social Work Education .................................................. 173Marian Murphy, Maria Dempsey, and Carmel Halton

10 Reflective Practice in the Professions: Teaching ............................................. 189Cheryl J. Craig

11 Critical Reflection as an Adult Learning Process ........................................... 215Stephen Brookfield

12 Fostering Reflective Practice in the Public Service: A Study of the Probation Service in the Republic of Ireland........................................ 237Carmel Halton

Part IV Facilitating and Scaffolding Reflective Engagement: Considering Institutional Contexts

13 A Child Study/Lesson Study: Developing Minds to Understand and Teach Children ............................................................................................ 257Joan V. Mast and Herbert P. Ginsburg

14 Within K-12 Schools for School Reform: What Does it Take? ...................... 273Michaelann Kelley, Paul D. Gray, Jr., Donna J. Reid, and Cheryl J. Craig

15 Reflective Inquiry in the Round ........................................................................ 299Steve Seidel

Part V Professional Pedagogies and Research Practices: Teaching and Researching Reflective Inquiry

16 Inquiry for Equity: Supporting Teacher Research ......................................... 319Anna E. Richert and Claire Bove

17 Doing as I Do: The Role of Teacher Educator Self-Study in Educating for Reflective Inquiry .................................................................. 333Vicki Kubler LaBoskey and Mary Lynn Hamilton

18 Professional Pedagogies and Research Practices: Teaching and Researching Reflective Inquiry Through a Medical Portfolio Process ................................................................................................. 351Martina Kelly

19 Narrative Inquiry as Reflective Practice: Tensions and Possibilities ............ 385Charles Aiden Downey and D. Jean Clandinin

20 Reflection Through Collaborative Action Research and Inquiry .................. 401J. Loughran

21 Developing Transformative Curriculum Leaders Through Reflective Inquiry ............................................................................................... 417Chen Ai Yen and David Ng

xxiiiContents

22 From Subject to Object: A Constructive-Developmental Approach to Reflective Practice ........................................................................ 435Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

Part VI Approaches to Assessing Reflective Practice and to the Ethical Dimensions of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry

23 Beginnings: Inquiry Practices: How Can They Be Taught Well? ................. 455Herbert P. Ginsburg, Ann E. Cami, and Michael D. Preston

24 Approaches to Portfolio Assessment of Complex Evidence of Reflection and Reflective Practice....................................................................................... 475Nona Lyons

25 Reflective Practice as Conscious Geometry: Portfolios as a Tool for Sponsoring, Scaffolding and Assessing Reflective Inquiry in Learning to Teach .......................................................................................... 491Anne Rath

26 The Ethical Dimensions of Reflective Practice ................................................ 519Nona Lyons

Part VII Reflective Inquiry: What Future?

27 Going to the Core: Deepening Reflection by Connecting the Person to the Profession .............................................................................. 531Fred A.J. Korthagen and Angelo Vasalos

28 A Reflective Inquiry as Participatory and Appreciative Action and Reflection ......................................................................................... 555Tony Ghaye

29 Reflection and Reflective Inquiry: What Future? ........................................... 573Nona Lyons

Author Index............................................................................................................... 581

Subject Index .............................................................................................................. 593

xxv

To introduce the Handbook itself, here I present its objectives. Following that the compo-nents of its parts and chapters are described. The Handbook will:

Examine how reflection and reflective inquiry have been conceptualized and re-concep-tualized over time with certain elements emphasized. The review begins with the work of John Dewey, and includes Donald Schon and theorists Paulo Freire, Jack Mezirow , and contemporary teacher educators who are promoting a critical inquiry for teachers and their students. Such developments, it is argued, looked at together can provide a new interpretive framework useful for understanding reflective practice and its many entry points. It is the argument of this work that people enter reflective practice from many valid platforms, now more visible through the new interpretive framework.Look at why today we are witnessing an international re-awakening of interest in and commitment to reflection and reflective inquiry, especially for the education of professionals.Examine the role reflective practice has played in the education of professionals both in the past and present, in such fields as the law, medicine, education, etc.Consider why it is a necessity to teach reflection. Acknowledging that reflection and reflective inquiry are complex, it has not always been the practice to teach reflection. Today it needs to be introduced, scaffolded, and explicitly taught. A range of tested pedagogies with explicit discussion of how they are and can be implemented will be presented.Evaluate increased efforts to promote professionals to take an inquiry stance in their work lives today;Review the ethical dimensions that can emerge in engaging in reflection and reflective inquiry; and what needs to be considered in approaching the assessment of reflective practice; and,Project with seasoned researchers and practitioners the possible future of reflection and reflective practice.

Introduction

xxvi Introduction

Organization of the Handbook

The Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry is comprised of seven major sec-tions with 29 chapters.

Part I, Reflection and Reflective Inquiry, opens with a discussion of definitional issues and how the field has been conceptualized and re-conceptualized over time and how that re-conceptualization can provide a key to the interpretation of certain issues in the history of reflection.

Part II, Foundational Issues: Needed Conceptual Frameworks addresses several foun-dational issues in conceptualizing and practicing reflection. The first is the necessity for a meta-cognitive perspective when dealing with reflection. One chapter, Foundational Issues, examines the perspectives toward knowing and their role in engaging in reflec-tion or reflective inquiry. Chapter 3, The Role of Descriptive Inquiry in Reflection and in Building Presence and Civic Capacity, examines the foundational issues in engaging in a pedagogy of reflection and reflective inquiry, that is, attending to how we perceive and see our students.

Part III, Reflective Inquiry in Professional Education, takes up one major agenda of the Handbook, that is, to present an overview of reflection in the education of todays profes-sionals. Nine professions are included ones chosen because they have a fairly robust if sometimes recent history of engaging in reflection: teacher education, the law, medical education, occupational therapy, nursing education, social work education, education K-12, adult education and probation services. These disciplines are also ones that have experienced recent renewed interest in reflective practice. Some have had a long and continuous relationship with reflection, such as Occupational Therapy. The authors of the chapters are all practitioners in their fields, actively involved in promoting reflection. They are also researchers who have been investigating the aspects of reflection in their fields. Included in these chapters are brief histories of reflection in the particular disci-pline. A concluding act could look across these presentations to examine commonalities. What can we learn by examining the reflective engagement in different professions?

Part IV, Facilitating and Scaffolding Reflective Engagement: Considering Institutional Contexts, observes that contexts matter and addresses some special cases. Three chap-ters comprise this section: one, Child Study/Lesson Study: Developing Minds to Understand and Teach Children, addresses a new approach to the study of young chil-dren. Another chapter, Reflection in the Round offers an introduction to Educational Rounds, an educational version suggested by medical rounds. The chapter describes the practice and its history and why it is attracting teachers and students of schools and universities. School reform is the topic of the third chapter of this section and it takes up work in secondary schools addressing school reform.

Part V, Professional Pedagogies and Research Practices; Teaching and Researching Reflective Inquiry. This section, the second largest in the Handbook, addresses teaching and researching reflection and reflective inquiry. Seven pedagogical approaches are presented: as inquiry, as self-study, through a portfolio process, as narrative inquiry, as collaborative action co-inquiry; through curriculum design, and by a constructivist developmental approach. Each is described so that one interested in implementing the pedagogy might do so.

Part VI, Approaches to Assessing Reflection and Reflective Inquiry and to Identifying the Ethical Dimensions of Reflective Inquiry. This section of the Handbook addresses two critical issues: how to approach the assessment of reflection and reflective inquiry; and, the task of considering the potential ethical dimensions of reflection and reflective inquiry. In addition, two chapters address the critical question of how to teach reflective inquiry, in this case through a portfolio process. The approaches here focus on the issues that are necessary to be addressed.

xxviiIntroduction

Part VII, Reflection and Reflective Inquiry: What Future? The Handbook concludes with a look at the future, to consider how practitioners of reflective inquiry today think about and are approaching the future of this phenomenon.

References

Cruikshank, D. (2008). Maxine Greene: The Importance of Personal Reflection. Retrieved March 29, 2009 from http://www.edutopia.org/maxine-greene.

Dewey, J. (1902). The Child and the Curriculum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Dewey, J. (1960). Philosophies of freedom. In R. Bernstein (ed.), On Experience, Nature

and Freedom. New York: Liberal Arts.Greene, M. (1977). Towards Wide-Awakeness: An argument for the arts and humanities in

education. Teachers College Record, 79(1), 119124.Greene, M. (1988). The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press.Lyons, N. (2009). Interview Project, Maxine Greene, Lee Shulman, conducted by N.

Lyons, Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry Project.Pinar, W. (1998). The passionate Mind of Maxine Greene : I am not yet. London:

Routledge, UKSchutz, A. (1967). Collected Papers, (Ed.), Maurice Natanson, Viol. 1, p. 213. The Hague:

Mailman Nijhoff.Shulman, L. S. (1998). Teaching portfolios: A theoretical activity. In: N. Lyons (ed.), With

Portfolio in Hand: Validating the New Teacher Professionalism. New York: Teachers College Press.

Shulman, L. S. (2004). The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Thoreau, H. D. (1963). The Variorum Walden. New York: Washington Square Press, pp. 166167.

Woolf, V. (1976/1939). Moments of Being. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, p. 70.

xxix

Filippa Marullo Anzalone is professor and associate dean for library and computing services Boston College Law School. E-mail: filippa.anzalone@bc.edu.

Claire G. Bove is a Middle School Science teacher and is affiliated with Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA.

Stephen Brookfield is Distinguished University Professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. For 10 years he had been a Professor of Higher and Adult Education at Columbia University in New York. Since beginning his teaching career in 1970, he had worked in England, Canada, Australia, and the United States, teaching in a variety of college settings. He has written twelve books on adult learning, teaching, criti-cal thinking, discussion methods, and critical theory, four of which have won the Cyril O. Houle World Award for Literature in Adult Education (in 1986, 1989, 1996 and 2005). E-mail: sdbrookfield@stthomas.edu.

Patricia Burbank, D.N.Sc., RN. directs the Gerontological Clinical Nurse Specialist concentration at the University of Rhode Island College of Nursing and teaches in the MS and PhD programs. She is also a faculty member in the interdisciplinary RI Geriatric Education Center. Dr. Burbank is the author/editor of numerous articles and three books: Drug Therapy and the Elderly (with A. Swonger), Promoting Exercise among Older Adults: Interventions with the Transtheoretical Model (with D. Riebe), and Vulnerable Older Adults: Health Care Needs and Interventions. E-mail: pburbank@verizon.net.

Ann Cami is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, NY, USA.

Ai-Yen Chen is associate professor at the School of Education, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. E-mail: aychen@nie.edu.sg.

Laurie M. Lauzon Clabo, PhD, RN, is the Associate Dean in the College of Nursing at the University of Rhode Island. Before joining the faculty, Dr. Lauzon Clabo held a num-ber of positions in nursing leadership. Her program of research builds on a long-standing interest in how nurses make decisions in practice, and in particular, how the socio-cultural context of the nursing unit impacts the practice of the individual nurse. E-mail: llauzon-clabo@uri.edu.

Contributors

xxx Contributors

D. Jean Clandinin is Professor and Director of the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development at the University of Alberta. A former teacher, counsellor, and psychologist, she is author or co-author of eight books and numerous chapters and articles. She edited the Handbook of Narrative Inquiry: Mapping a methodology (Sage, 2007). Within the field of education, Dr. Clandinins research has had a profound impact upon the related areas of teacher knowledge, teacher education, and narrative inquiry Her research on teach-ers personal practical knowledge has altered our understanding of the role that teachers play in curriculum making in their classrooms and of the need for incorporating this knowledge into teacher education programs. She has been instrumental in the development of narrative inquiry as an alternative methodology for conducting research in the social sciences.

Ellen S. Cohn, ScD, OTR/L, FAOTA is Clinical Associate Professor, Occupational Therapy Department, Boston University, College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Boston, MA, USA, E-mail: ecohn@bu.edu.

Cheryl Craig is a Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Houston where she is the Coordinator of the Teaching and Teacher Education Program Area and Director of Elementary Education. She is a Past-President of the American Association of Teaching and Curriculum (AATC) and a Past-Chair of the Portfolio and Reflection in Teaching and Teacher Education Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). Currently, she is Co-Chair of AERAs Narrative and Research SIG. E-mail: ccraig@uh.edu.

Elizabeth Blesedell Crepaeu, PhD, OTR, FAOTA, England, Professor of Occupational Therapy, Occupational Therapy Department, University of New Hampshire, College of Health and Human Services, Durham, NH, USA, E-mail: ecrepeau@cisunix.unh.edu.

Maria Dempsey is a counselling psychologist, lecturer, and Director of the Masters Degree in Counselling Psychology in the Department of Applied Psychology, University College, Cork, Ireland. She has published in international peer reviewed journals on reflec-tive teaching and learning in professional education. Other areas of research interest include teenage pregnancy and adolescent sexuality. E-mail: m.dempsey@ucc.ie.

C. Aiden Downey is currently spending his time as National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow writing about inner-city teachers. Before this he was the Myer Horowitz Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development at the University of Alberta. A former teacher, pharmacist, and Marine, he is currently working to start a charter school that seeks to realize demo-cratic education.

Tony Ghaye is the Director of Reflective Learning-UK, a not-for-profit organisation dedi-cated to working to improve lives and livelihoods through appreciative action and reflec-tion. Tony is a social entrepreneur, an organisational strategist, and developer of the PAAR methodology (Participatory and Appreciative Action and Reflection). His current PAAR projects place learning through reflection at the heart of developing employee well-being, sustaining innovation, and building workplace cultures of appreciation. E-mail: tony.ghaye@btinternet.com.

Herbert P. Ginsburg, Ph.D., Jacob H. Schiff Foundation Professor of Psychology and Education Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA. Dr. Ginsburgs research interests include the development of mathematical thinking (with particular attention to young children and disadvantaged populations) and the assessment of cognitive function. He has developed mathematics curricula for young children, tests of mathematical thinking, and video workshops to enhance teachers under-standing of student understanding of mathematics. E-mail: ginsburg@tc.columbia.edu.

xxxiContributors

Paul Gray, Ed.D. with over 14 years in education, currently serves as the Director of Mathematics and Science for the Pearland Independent School District in Pearland, TX, USA. Having served as a mathematics and science teacher and a secondary mathematics curriculum specialist, Pauls practical and research interests include how mathematics and science teachers construct their personal practical knowledge through collaboration and reflection. Paul is also the President of the Texas Council of Teachers of Mathematics and serves the mathematics education community at the local, state, and national levels. E-mail: pgray73@sbcglobal.net.

Carmel Halton is a lecturer and Director of Practice in the Department of Applied Social Studies at University College, Cork, Ireland. She has published in international peer reviewed journals on reflective teaching and learning in social work and on the Irish Probation Service. One of her primary concerns is to improve teaching, research, and practice links between the university and practitioners. E-mail: CHalton@AppSocStud.ucc.ie.

Mary Lynn Hamilton, Professor in Curriculum & Teaching, University of Kansas is a co-editor of The International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (2004). Her research interests combine teachers professional knowledge, issues of social justice, and the self-study of teaching practices. E-mail: Hamilton@ku.edu.

Heesook Suzie Kim, PhD, RN, taught at the University of Rhode Island College of Nursing from 1973 until she retired in 2004 and was dean of the college from 1983 to 1988. She coordinated the adult nursing program at the undergraduate level, and taught mostly in the masters and doctoral programs. She has published extensively in the area of nursing episte-mology, theory development in nursing, the nature of nursing practice, and in collaborative decision-making in nursing as well as in various areas of clinical nursing research. She has been an international researcher and leader in nursing theory development with an emphasis on the nature of nursing practice. E-mail: hsuziekim@comcast.net.

Robert Kegan is Co-Director of the Change Leadership Group, is the Meehan Professor of Adult Learning and Professional Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research and writing looks at the possibility of continued psychological development in adulthood; and its necessity if professionals are to deliver on the complex challenges inherent in twenty-first century work. E-mail: robert_kegan@harvard.edu.

Michaelann Kelley, M.Ed. and doctoral candidate at the University of Houston, is a teacher at Eisenhower High School, in the Aldine Independent School District, where she teaches art, ceramics, and higher-level studio art in the International Baccalaureate Programme. She works with teachers in developing their knowledge of their practice through collaboration and reflection. As a National School Reform Faculty National Facilitator, she has personally trained more than three hundred teachers to be critical friends coaches in the regional area. E-mail: kelley34@yahoo.com.

Martina Kelly teaches at the Department of General Practice, University College Cork, Brookfield Health Sciences Complex, Cork, Ireland. E-mail: m.kelly@ucc.ie.

Fred Korthagen is at VU University, Amsterdam, Institute for Multi-level learning (IML), Amsterdam a professor of education in the Netherlands, specializing in the profes-sional development of teachers and teacher educators, especially the promotion of reflec-tion. In 2000 and 2006, he received the Exemplary Research in Teaching and Teacher Education Award from AERA. E-mail: F.Korthagen@uu.nl.

Vicki Kubler LaBoskey, Professor of Education, Mills College, Oakland, CA is a co-editor of The International Handbook of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (2004). Her research and professional activity is focused on educational transfor-mation in support of greater equity and social justice, via reflective inquiry, particularly the

xxxii Contributors

self-study of teaching practices. E-mail: vickikl@mills.edu, Vicki Kubler LaBoskey, Professor of Education, Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA.

Lisa Lahey is Associate Director of the Change Leadership Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. E-mail: lisa_lahey@harvard.edu.

Mary Leveillee, M.S., RN. C.S. is a psychiatric mental health clinical nurse specialist with an extensive clinical experience who teaches in the undergraduate psychiatric/mental health nursing program at the College. Her areas of research interests are womens issues, eating disorders, and client-nurse relationships. She is completing her doctorate at the University of Rhode Island. E-mail: Mleveillee@uri.edu.

Katrina Yan Liu is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. E-mail: yliu29@wisc.edu.

John Loughran is the Foundation Chair in Curriculum & Pedagogy in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. John has been a science teacher for 10 years before moving into teacher education. His research has spanned both science education and the related fields of professional knowledge, reflective practice, and teacher research. John is the co-editor of Studying Teacher Education and is on the Editorial Board for Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice. E-mail: john.loughran@education.monash.edu.au.

Nona Lyons, who holds a doctorate in psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is a Visiting Research Scholar at University College Cork (UCC), Ireland where, for the last 10 years, she has been coaching faculty and students in creating reflec-tive teaching portfolios. Her current research is directed towards documenting the results of these efforts and what portfolio-makers claim they are learning from the process, espe-cially their awareness of themselves and their students as knowers, of what they know and how they know it. Lyons works closely with members of the Education Department and the Department of Applied Social Studies at UCC, and with faculty at St. Angelas College, Sligo. Among her publications are: Narrative Inquiry in Practice: Advancing the Knowledge of Teaching, edited with Vicki Kubler Laboskey for Teachers College Press; and, With Portfolio in Hand: Validating the New Teacher Professionalism, edited by Nona Lyons, Teachers College Press. E-mail: nonalyons@hotmail.com.

Diane Martins, PhD., RN, Dr. Martins teaches in undergraduate and graduate courses in community health nursing and practice theory, and lectures on vulnerable older adults and on quantitative methods. Her research and scholarly work is with vulnerable populations in the community and includes a descriptive phenomenological study of the homeless persons health care experiences, analysis of food insufficiency, and hunger with homeless families, strategies used to survive in the lives of woman facing adversity, and methods to increase nursing students knowledge and appreciation with older adults in the community. She is also a faculty member in the HRSA funded interdisciplinary RI Geriatric Education Center where she coordinates the Vulnerable Older Adult group. E-mail: dcmartins@uri.edu.

Joan V. Mast, Ed. D., District Mathematics Supervisor (K-12), Scotch Plains Fanwood Public Schools, Scotch Plains, NJ 07076, USA. Dr. Mast holds a doctorate from Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focus includes creating environments in schools where teachers individual classrooms are both laboratories for professional learn-ing and the data source for continuous feedback, reflection, and improvement. E-mail: jmast@spfk12.org.

Marian Murphy is a senior lecturer in Applied Social Studies at University College Cork, Ireland, where she has been Director of the Masters in Social Work programme. She has published extensively, with her colleagues, on reflective teaching, and learning in social

xxxiiiContributors

work. She has recently published a book on critical hermeneutics in preventative child welfare. E-mail: marmurphy@ucc.ie.

David Ng teaches at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Michael Preston teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, NY, USA. He has over 35 years experience working closely with and advising corporate execu-tives of middle market companies, including family-owned businesses and non-profit organizations. His areas of expertise include leadership, management, strategic planning, organizational structure, and change management. E-mail: mp449@columbia.edu.

Anne Rath is a teacher educator at University College Cork, Ireland. Her current interests include developmental and transformative models of teaching and learning including criti-cal reflective learning, portfolio development, social and community activism, practitioner and autobiographical inquiry; Feminist teaching; Teaching for Social Justice and Inclusion; Multiple Intelligences Theory and Teaching for Understanding; Multicultural education and educational disadvantage; Professional development and Adult Development; Action Research. E-mail: arath@education.ucc.ie.

Donna Reid is affiliated with the University of Houston and a member of the Houston Portfolio Group since 2000. She has over 18 years experience in the education community as a middle-school teacher, Critical Friends Group coach, and teacher leader. She is a National Facilitator for the National School Reform Faculty and a regular contributor to the NSRF journal, Connections. Mrs. Reid is currently a consultant and doctoral student with a passion for creating and sustaining collaborative, reflective communities of teachers and learners. donna@robreid.com.

Anna Richert is Professor of Education at Mills College, Oakland, CA, USA. E-mail: anna@mills.edu.

Carol Rodgers is associate professor of education in the department of Educational Theory and Practice at University of Albany, State University of New York. Before coming to SUNY Albany in 2000, she has taught for 20 years in the Masters of Arts in Teaching Program at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT, USA. E-mail: rodgerca@sover.net.

Tony Ryan is an Associate Professor in Paediatrics and Child Health, and Consultant Neonatologist at Cork University Maternity Hospital, Cork, Ireland; and Cork University Maternity Hospital and Department of Paediatrics and Child Health, University College Cork, Ireland. E-mail: tonyryan007@mail.com.

Barbara A. Boyt Schell, PhD, OTR, FAOTA is Professor and Graduate Coordinator, Occupational Therapy Department, Brenau University, Gainesville, GA, USA. E-mail: bschell@brenau.edu.

Steve Seidel is Director of Harvard Project Zero & The Arts In Education Program, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, USA. E-mail: steve_seidel@pz.harvard.edu.

Angelo Vasalos is at VUniversity, Amsterday, The Netherlands, Institute for Multi-level learning (IML), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Kenneth M. Zeichner is Boeing Professor of Teacher Education, Director of Teacher Education, University of Washington. E-mail: kenzeich@u.washington.edu.

Chapter 1 opens Part I of the Handbook with a look at reflection and reflective practice in professional life from several perspectives: in the context of the paradoxical contempo-rary interest in and animated criticism of reflection; through the historical lens of the emergence of professions and professional life in the United States and the rest of the world; and finally, through the works of the three major theorists in the field, John Dewey, Donald Schon, and Paulo Freire, with particular emphasis on their unique contributions to the domain and their own connections with one another in the development of the field.

The history of the emergence and growth of the professions seems an especially appro-priate opening given our current calamitous times, when the professions are clearly the targets of fierce scorn. As chief executives and major companies with their very existence on the line seek massive aid through government bailouts, the threat of disaster haunts many people worldwide. Never have the professions fallen so low in public regard. But they are still seen as necessities in public life. This paradox is explored in this section and provides an introduction, too, to Part III of the Handbook, a major section for the examina-tion of reflection and reflective practice across several professions, including law, medi-cine, teacher education, nursing education, social work education, education K-12, adult education, probation services and occupational therapy.

An important discussion within the chapter is a review of the life work of John Dewey, Donald Schon, and Paulo Freire who, it is argued, have framed the development of the field. Each is considered in light of a key text, Deweys How We Think, Schons The Reflective Practitioner, and Freires The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And in an innovative move, the three are looked at in the light of their collective contribution to the field, brought together to offer through their major ideas a more cumulative, interpretive frame-work. Thus, it is possible to examine reflective practice simultaneously as a mode of thinking (Dewey), a way of knowing (Schon), and as critical reflection (Freire).

One of the interesting developments that is uncovered here is the discovery of the con-nections between the theorists, first identified by Schon himself. In a 1992 article in Curriculum Inquiry, Schon acknowledged his connection to Deweys work. Schon first encountered Dewey while doing his doctorate at Harvard University when a friend urged him to read Dewey. Schon says he did not find Dewey interesting, but he did find him unintelligible and so put the book down. But later Schon had a different take and wound up using Deweys book, Logic, the Theory of Inquiry as the basis of his own doctoral the-sis. He acknowledges that, some 30 years later, as he was working on The Reflective Practitioner, I realized I was reworking his (Deweys ) thesis, his theory of inquiry.

This discovery of an interconnection between Dewey and Schon was repeated by the discovery that several Freire scholars have made in the connection between the ideas of Dewey and Freire. Scholars especially cite both authors interest in education and the con-nection they find between education and the viability of democracyan interest of increasingly intense concern today.

Part IReflection and Reflective Inquiry

2

Finally, this chapter presents what is called an interpretive framework, a linking of the major concepts of each theorist on reflection and reflective practice to form a new inter-connected whole. A continuum is revealed with subtle similarities yet different emphases. This, in brief, is what is presented:

Theorist An interpretive framework: reflection and reflective inquiry

Dewey 1910, 1933 Reflection as inquiry/thinking Mode of thinking/inquiry aware of actions that need to follow

Schon 1983 Reflection on action as knowing Mode of knowingReflection in action as knowing

Freire 1970, 1990 Reflection as interrogation of the political, social, cultural contexts of learning & living

Mode of critical consciousness/inquiry aware of need to investigate, interrogate

The framework can easily include other theorists. It does offer a way of charting the growth of the field, its major contributors, and hints at the different emphases each might give to its implementation. That is, if the practice of reflection or reflective inquiry should be implemented using one of these frameworks, it will have a special cast of the conceptualization.

Reflection and Reflective Inquiry

3N. Lyons (ed.), Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry: Mapping a Way of Knowing for Professional Reflective Inquiry, DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-85744-2_1, Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2010

This project has its roots in a paradox. At a time of renewed concern about professional education, when reflective practice is being increasingly endorsed and adopted interna-tionally by a growing number of professions, there is, simultaneously, a persistent ques-tioning of it (Horton 2007; Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 2009). Professionals decry the lack of an agreed-upon definition, wince at how reflective prac-tice has been made mechanically instrumental, its original intentions diluted and acknowledge the difficulty of operationalizing reflection in order to study it. Yet others insistently proclaim reflective practice as transformative, a necessity of professional life and learning, for developing a knowledge of practice, and for educating wide-awake citi-zens of a democracy, the outcome of which John Dewey saw as a human being willing and able to engage intelligently and ethically with a changing world, to be a learner from all contacts of life, to the end of a widening and deepening of conscious life a more intense, disciplined, and expanding realization of meanings (Hansen 2006, p. 178; Dewey 1933; see also Boud 2006; Boud et al. 1996; Brookfield 2005; Hatton and Smith 1994; Mezirow 1990; also Atkins and Murphy 1993; Kim 1999; LaBoskey 1994, 1997; Loughran 2006; Rodgers 2002).

As a practitioner and teacher educator of reflective practice inquiry for some 20 years, I take up these contested, sometimes contentious, issues with a decided interest, knowing how my own understanding of reflective inquiry, as well as that of my students, has evolved over time, considerably influenced by international as well as national efforts to study reflection (see Boud et al. 1996; Calderhead & Gates 1993; Clandinin, 2007; Clift et al., 1990; Cruickshank 1985; Freire 1977; Grimmet, 1997; Habermas 1973; Hatton and Smith 1994; LaBoskey 1994; Loughran 2006; Schon 1983; Valli 1992; Van Manen 1977; Zeichner 1990; Zeichner and Wray 2001). This chapter of the Handbook has as its objec-tive to bring together a body of scholarship and data on reflection and reflective inquiry for three purposes:

1. To interrogate these renewed contemporary efforts to include reflective inquiry as a critical element in the education of professionals and to ask the reason for this refocus: that is, to examine the claims and criticisms of reflective thinking for professional edu-cation and learning today and in the past. This presentation foreshadows, in brief, the more detailed discussions of professions today at the core of this book, for example, of the law, medicine, teacher education, etc.

Chapter 1Reflection and Reflective Inquiry: Critical Issues, Evolving Conceptualizations, Contemporary Claims and Future Possibilities

Nona Lyons

N. Lyons (*) University College Cork (UCC), Cork, Ireland

4 N. Lyons

2. To situate contemporary claims and criticisms of reflective inquiry within a historical and theoretical context that can reveal in broad strokes just how reflective inquiry/think-ing has been defined, elaborated and practiced over time, and, as it is argued here, subtly reconceptualized, shifting emphases from reflective inquiry as a kind of thinking, to a kind of knowing in action, to critical reflection for the conscious interrogation of the social, cultural and political contexts of learning. These ideas as a conceptual template are revealed especially within three major historical strands: one following John Dewey (1933; one, Donald Schon (1983); and a third, that takes up the contempo-rary work of adult educators in advancing the conception of critical reflection, first advocated by Paulo Freire (1970), and currently called for as an imperative by Jack Mezirow (1991), Stephen Brookfield (2005) and educators especially seeking to pro-mote social justice (Oakes and Lipman 2003; Cochran-Smith 2004; Darling-Hammond et al. 2002). The conceptual template outlined here, through an examination of the developments of the three theoretical strands, offers a new interpretive framework for understanding reflective inquiry in professional practice and for the construction of a knowledge of practice; and

3. To examine the range of implications for contemporary professional education of incor-porating reflective inquiry in order to suggest possibilities that may portend the future of reflection and reflective inquiry for future theorizing, for conducting research, for practice, and for evolving new meanings and interpretations.

I begin with a brief review of the historical roots of professionalism and its connection to reflective inquiry.

Reflective Inquiry for Professional Learning: Introduction

The Emergence of the Professional and Professional Education

Early in the twentieth century, with the establishment of universities in the United States modeled on European, mostly German research designs, newly organized professional schools began to seek a place within the prestigious research institutions. Following the nineteenth century development in Europe of access to the professions not by family, history or patronage but by education and testing, the professions began to gain control of access to training. A similar pattern emerged in the United States as well. The uni-versity was then considered the place to do research that would contribute to new, fun-damental knowledge, especially through science. Abraham Flexners searing 1910 expose of medical education in the United States and Canada, for example, led to the development of a new model of medical education with an emphasis on the scientific basis of medical practice. To Flexner, the educational program at Johns Hopkins University, then acknowledged as the most pre-eminent American research institution, exemplified the ideal of professional, scientific medical education (Schon 1995, p. 28). Its goals were to transmit knowledge, to impart skills, and to inculcate the right view of the profession. At the core of Flexners concern was the notion that formal analytic rea-soning should hold pride of place in the intellectual training of physicians (Flexner 1910; Cooke et al. 2006, p. 1339).

By the 1960s, a high point in professionalism was reached when about 13% of the work force was designated as professional. A booming post-war economy had created an enor-mous demand for professionals. Professional schools were seen as the repositories of a special body of knowledge, along with a system for certifying that individuals had achieved that knowledge, promoting a commitment to the public good and to a professed code of ethics (Bennis and OToole 2005, p. 6). A 1963 issue of the journal Daedalus,

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devoted entirely to the professions, declared: Everywhere in American life, the profes-sions are triumphant. But a scant 20 years later, by the 1980s, following several profes-sional scandals and the grave miscalculations of the war in Vietnam, Donald Schon detected signs of crisis. The professions are in the midst of a crisis of confidence and legitimacy.the long-standing professional claim to a monopoly of knowledge and social control is challenged first, because they do not live up to the values and norms which they espouse, and, second, because they are ineffective (Schon 1983, p. 11). Professional knowledge and ethical integrity were seriously questioned.

A Deepening Skepticism

Today, I believe, a similar but more profound skepticism pervades the value of the profes-sional organization of work. The volatile disasters of the 1990s, especially the world-wide collapse of financial markets in Europe, America, and Asia along with their supposed guardian accountants, left somber questions about the professional claims that the public interest was being served. The eruption of the banking and the home mortgage crisis of the early 2000s only reinforced that questioning. Not only was there a failure to think but a failure in fairness. The only moral obligation of any enterprise seemed to be to maximize its economic well-being, claims Andrew Sullivan. Writing about Markets vs. Professions, Sullivan sees that the effect of this premise works to strip away any moral understanding of the relationship between profession and society, or between professional and client (Sullivan 2005, p. 20). Yet, Sullivan asserts, while revealing a perennial, and now pro-found, fragility, this simultaneously shows just how important authentic professional acumen and integrity are to the viability of the marketplace. Professionalism, it turns out, provides a public value essential to modern societies (Sullivan 2005, p. 19).

Philosopher Michael Sandel, discussing a new course he is co-teaching on ethics, eco-nomics and the market, argues that market reasoning has a tendency to invade spheres of life that should be governed by nonmarket values and ideals (Simon 2008, p. 13). Others, among them his co-teachers, disagree. Some argue that the problem lies in the split between research knowledge and practice, not just in the split between knowledge and values (Schon 1995, p. 28).

For example, Warren Bennis and James OToole, writing How Business Schools Lost Their Way (2005), argue that business schools have adopted an inappropriate model of academic excellence, measuring themselves almost solely by the rigor of their scientific research. But because so little of it is grounded in actual business practices, the focushas become increasingly circumscribed and less and less relevant to practitioners (Bennis and OToole 2005, p. 1). They go on to comment on what is needed:

Traditionally, business schools have lacked offerings in the humanities. That is a serious shortcoming. As teachers of leadership, we doubt that our topic can be understood properly without solid grounding in the humanities. When the hard-nosed behavioral scientist, James March, taught his famous course at Stanford using War and Peace and other novels as texts, he was emphatically not teaching a literature course. He was drawing on works of imaginative literature to exemplify and explain the behavior of people in business organizations in a way that was richer and more realistic than claimed by any article or textbook.

But these authors believe that reforming business education needs more than humanities courses. The entire MBA program must be infused with multidisciplinary, practical, and ethical questions and analyses reflecting the complex challenges business leaders face They should encourage and reward research that illuminates the mysteries and ambiguities of todays business practices (Bennis and OToole 2005, p. 8).

Donald Schons concern about professional practice lives on. In this discussion of professional life today, how and why does reflective thinking matter?

6 N. Lyons

Contemporary Claimants and Critics of Reflective Practice

Interrogating contemporary critical claims and the criticisms of reflective inquiry can reveal just what may be involved and at stake today for reflective inquiry in professional education. No doubt, today professional knowledge is acclaimed as highly valued and professionals are considered as desirous knowledge workers (Riehl 2006, p. 26). But, consider anew, for example, contemporary medical education. Recently, Jerome Groopman, author and professor at Harvard Medical School, in his 2007 book How Doctors Think, sought to unravel a medical mystery how doctors figure out the best treatments or fail to do so. Studying misdiagnoses, Groopman believes that many misdiagnoses are the result of readily identifiable and often preventable errors in thinking (Groopman 2007, p. 2). Whereas once, doctors would take part in challenging and detailed debates about the patient they met and examined on rounds, now they too often failed to question cogently or listen carefully or observe keenly.... Something was profoundly wrong.... with the way they were learning to solve clinical puzzles and care for people (Quoted in Horton 2007, p. 16).

Research shows that within minutes of meeting a patient most physicians have two or three possible diagnoses in mind. They tend to develop their diagnoses with relatively incomplete information, relying on short cuts and rules of thumb known in psychology as heuristics (Groopman 2007, p. 2). But although these can sometimes help doctors, they often lead to grave errors. Doctors make errors when they are overly influenced by what is typically true; they fail to consider possibilities that contradict their mental templates of a disease. Doctors can also be influenced by symptoms and illnesses of patients they have just seen. When doctors are confronted with uncertainty which they are when diagnosing symptoms they are more likely to make errors. Groopman argues, What is needed is incorporating into medical education an awareness of these heuristics, and recognizing that the way doctors think can affect their success as much as what they know (Groopman 2007, p. 6). Some call for implementing even simple reflective techniques. Dr. Antul Gawande suggests ask an unscripted question (Quoted in Horton 2007, p. 16). Gawande also identifies three core requirements for success in medicine: diligence, the necessity of giving sufficient attention to detail; the challenge to do it right; and, ingenuity, thinking anew, a matter of character that arises from deliberative, even obsessive reflection (Gawande 2007, p. 9). But such education needs to be wide-spread (Groopman 2007). Recently, the general Medical Council in England underscored the importance of nurturing clinical judgment, critical thinking and reflective practice in medical education for Tomorrows Doctors (Maudsley and Strivens 2000, p. 1).

A theme emerges: The ideal of professional education subtly shifts focus from knowledge alone to the way one thinks and acts, including engaging in reflective thinking processes for professional practice, and learning and developing necessary character traits.

Interestingly, similar arguments have been made for college teachers. Derek Bok (2006), former president of Harvard University, writing in Our Underachieving Colleges, suggests the need to teach undergraduates how to think. He finds that many college students lack critical thinking skills and many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, nontechnical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education (Bok 2006, p. 8).

Recently, this situation has resulted in unprecedented, to some extent alarming, calls for the assessment of what college students actually learn over their 4 years of study. Leading this accountability movement is former United States Education Chief, Secretary Margaret Spellings, who wanted to promote a standardized testing program to determine what college students know similar to the testing connected with the No Child Left Behind Law program (Brint 2008, p. 21). Alternatively, others take a different tack, looking to advance what is called the greater professionalization of college teaching.

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Some suggest today, for example, that as part of a tenure file, college professors would be asked to reflect on their teaching practice and to describe the relationship between their practice and their aims for student learning (Brint 2008, p. 24). Bok declares that critical inquiry and reflective thinking need to be incorporated into undergraduate educa-tion (Bok 2006, p. 9). Why, then, are professionals insisting on reflective inquiry as a valued norm?

Reflective Thinking: A Valued Norm?

Recent reform movements in several professions shed light on why they increasingly iden-tify the need for greater emphasis on reflective inquiry in professional education. For example, the current assessment of Educating Lawyers, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, highlights the benefits and the unintended consequences of one standard of legal education, that is, the emphasis on the case study method of legal analysis. The Carnegie Report argues against the iron-clad hold of the case method on legal education, that is, that the method drills students in abstracting from natural contexts the facts that can then be subjected to scrutiny of specific rules and procedures. This has the effect of suggesting that to think like a lawyer means redefining messy situations of actual or potential conflicts as opportunities for advancing a clients cause through legal argument .... By contrast, the task of connecting these conclusions with the rich complexity of actual situations, let alone the job of thinking through the social consequences or ethical aspects of the conclusions remain outside the casedialogue method. As one report avers, an instructor turned aside a student question about whether something was fair in a legal decision under discussion. The instructor informed the student that the student was there to learn the law, and not to learn what was fair. The Carnegie report concludes, Students need opportunities to learn about, reflect on and practice the responsibilities of legal pro-fessionals (Sullivan et al. 2007, p. 6). The education of lawyers is missing a valued per-spective, in this case, the way of framing what it is to think like a lawyer, a perspective which is necessary to the reform and continued ethical vitality of the profession, and per-ceived through reflecting on and engaging in responsibilities of professionals. As one critic has argued that, instead of being introduced to the law as a deeply human activity that itself involves a search for meaning and values, law students actually experience law school as an alienating trade school.

The law and medicine are not alone in making this argument. In a parallel study of doctoral education, The Formation of Scholars, the Carnegie Foundation draws attention to the broader concerns in the education of many professionals. The profession of the scholar requires specialized, even esoteric knowledge. But it also entails a larger s