28 T. Russell and A.K. Martin 2 . The explicit references to reflection in teacher education programs began after 1983 and follow publication of Donald Schön’s book, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. 3. The subtitle of Schön’s 1983 book, How Professionals Think in Action, is rarely the focus of teacher educators’ use of the concept of reflection or reflective practice. 4 . The subtitle of Schön’s 1987 book, Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions, has not inspired significant new designs in the preservice education of teachers, despite its implications for learning in the practicum. 5. Many of those learning to teach react to any mention of reflection with some frustration because reflection and reflective practice are rarely modeled or taught in ways that give it special meaning in the context of teaching and learning. 6 . Schön (1995) saw reflection-in-action as requiring a new, broader epistemology, yet so many reflective activities in teacher education seem to be inserted into the pervasive and familiar epistemology of technical rationality. With these assumptions as our starting point, we set out to develop and illustrate a perspective on reflective practice that emphasizes the unrealized potential of Schön’s arguments about how professionals think in action and learn from experi- ence. In doing so, we draw on Tremmel’s (1993) analysis of the place of reflective practice in teacher education programs and contexts and on Raelin’s (2007) analysis of an epistemology of practice. 2.2 Outline of the Argument In Sect. 2.3, we set the stage by exploring the complexity of the concept of reflective practice in teacher education and suggest that there are epistemological challenges associated with the concept that require attention if we are to use the concept more productively. Section 2.4 summarizes what we see as the essential ideas in Schön’s perspective on reflective practice, and in Sect. 2.5, we introduce Tremmel’s (1993) analysis of reflective practice as mindfulness. We continue the argument in Sect. 2.6 by analyzing a number of articles about reflective practice to demonstrate their col- lective failure to explore the underlying epistemological challenges. Section 2.7 then introduces Raelin’s (2007) powerful analysis of an epistemology of practice. To bring our argument to a close, the final three sections build on the ideas already introduced. Section 2.8 speaks to the complexity of moving from one epistemology to another, and Sect. 2.9 presents our concluding thoughts.
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 29 2.3 Pervasive and Perennial Issues in Teacher Educators’ Understanding of Reflective Practice: Ignoring the Epistemological Challenges In this section, we argue that reflective practice has not achieved its potential in the education of teachers because teacher educators have not recognized and addressed the underlying epistemological challenges. Richardson (1990) identified this issue as one of two threats to progress. “The first [threat] is a process that seems to take place in education any time a major new idea catches on. This process leads to a “technologizing” of an idea or a program” (p. 13). “Missing from [such] programs are the second two elements of learning to reflect-in-action described by Schön (1987a, p. 39): learning to think like a teacher and ‘making new sense of uncertain, unique, or conflicted situation of practice’” (Richardson 1990, p. 14). The second threat to the development of reflection-in-action programs is the use of a posi- tivist research paradigm with which to conduct research and evaluations around reflective teacher education programs. … What is reflection? How can it be measured? Is a reflective teacher more effective than an unreflective teacher? What is the best way to develop reflec- tive teachers? I am not suggesting that these questions are unimportant. They are, however, embedded within a positivist research approach and imply erroneously that answers to such questions through research will provide the form and substance of reflective teacher educa- tion programs. What is needed, then, is a way of looking at reflection-in-action, at how teachers learn such reflection, and at programs designed to develop such learning that match the paradigm inherent in the concept. (p. 14) Teacher educators have shown no consensus about the meaning of terms such as reflection and reflective practice, and this suggests that the term was imported into the everyday discourse of teacher education without careful analysis or a clear understanding of why it was imported. An analysis of six significant articles about reflective practice led Russell (2014b) to the conclusion that each person who writes about reflection and reflective prac- tice seems to place a personal interpretation on these terms. Valli (1992) assembled seven case studies and six critiques that illustrate clearly the wide range of interpre- tations of these terms; unfortunately, those six critiques made little reference to their significance for professional learning in the practicum. Fendler (2005) quoted incompletely Zeichner’s (1996, p. 207) statement that “there is no such thing as an unreflective teacher” and went on to argue that a reflective teacher does not need the assistance of an expert, a strange claim that again ignores the preservice teacher learning from practicum experiences of teaching. Zeichner (1996) critiques a range of interpretations of reflective practice and concluded that the term “should be sup- ported only … if it is connected to the struggle for greater social justice” (p. 206). Here again, an analysis of reflective practice is shown to have a personal purpose. Russell (2014b) drew the following conclusions: Many perils and pitfalls arise when professionals change their vocabulary but not their actions. Teacher education programs rarely receive rave reviews from those learning to teach. Perhaps because the first years of teaching are so overwhelming and require so much personal learning from experience (Schuck et al. 2012), experienced teachers may conclude
30 T. Russell and A.K. Martin that their preservice program failed to prepare them adequately for the real work of teachers. Like the practices of teaching in general (documented powerfully by Sarason 1971), the practices of teacher education tend to be very stable. Only a paradigmatic change in the fundamental premises and practices of teacher education programs, accompanied at first by a new set of perils and pitfalls, seems likely to achieve meaningful links between what is presented as theory in teacher education classrooms and what is experienced in practicum placements. Schön suggested new perspectives and directions with respect to longstanding challenges of teacher education. We have yet to achieve the promise of the reflective prac- titioner perspective. (p. 176) We continue our argument by considering a number of additional articles on the topic of reflection and reflective practice. The widely cited analysis of reflection by Hatton and Smith (1995) generated four “levels” of reflection without a great deal of evidence to support those levels. They suggested that a would-be teacher must move through the levels and develop metacognitive skills before being ready for reflection-in-action. We view this conclusion as a strong effort to analyze the idea of reflective practice from the familiar perspective of traditional epistemology. Rodgers (2002) attempted to give meaning to the concept of reflection by returning to Dewey but failed to link her discussion of four criteria of reflection drawn from Dewey’s work to the work by Schön that inspired the current use of that term. Rodgers also missed the opportunity to link the concept of reflection to the professional learning that occurs in the preservice teacher education practicum. Larrivee (2000) also adopted the strategy of making no reference whatsoever to the work of Schön while insisting that the relevant term is “critical reflection,” a move welcomed by many who found that “reflection” alone did not accomplish what was hoped for. By assert- ing that the reflective practitioner must demonstrate three essential practices— “making time for solitary reflection,” “becoming a perpetual problem-solver,” and “questioning the status quo” (pp. 296–297)—Larrivee shows clearly that she is not discussing Schön’s interpretation of reflection-in-action as spontaneous, intuitive, and grounded in experience. Again, the opportunity to explore an alternative episte- mology for learning from experience seems not to have been considered. In the early years of teacher education’s attention to reflection and reflective practice in teacher education, Calderhead (1989) set out several challenges that still have not been addressed by teacher educators. It is clear that the processes of learning to teach are complex and, at present, inadequately conceptualised. While several idealised models of reflection are prescribed for teacher edu- cation purposes, the nature, function, and potential of reflection has yet to be fully explored. It is suggested that empirical research on student teachers’ knowledge and thought pro- cesses, and how these are influenced by alternative approaches and designs in teacher edu- cation, might enable us to test out both the realities and possibilities of reflection in teacher education. In order to promote reflective teacher education, a clear conceptual grasp is required of what the processes of reflection involve, what students might usefully reflect about, and how their reflection is going to be influenced by the nature of the tasks they are set and the kind of teacher education context in which they work. (p. 49) Twenty-five years later, we still appear to lack a clear conceptualization of how individuals learn to teach (whether by listening to experts, listening to mentors,
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 31 discussion with others, firsthand experience) and where they learn to teach (whether in lectures, discussions, practicum placements, or other settings), and there is no consensus about what reflection involves, where it should focus, or how it should be developed and supported. While they defy simple resolution, we suggest that these issues should be focal points in ongoing discussions and debates about how indi- viduals learn to teach and how they should be taught. Van Manen’s (1995) discussion of the epistemology of reflective practice seems particularly relevant to this discussion because of its explicit reference to epistemol- ogy. Initially, he appears to share our view that teacher education programs are structured in terms of traditional epistemology. The concept of the teacher as a reflective practitioner is, in part, a response to the sense that a technical theory-into-practice epistemology does not seem sensitive to the realization that teacher knowledge must play an active and dynamic role in the ever-changing challenges of the school and classroom. Yet, much teacher preparation remains stuck in the traditional epistemology of practice and the concept of the teacher as reflective practitioner; and the knowledge-in-action model suffers from practical flaws as far as the interactive reality of the classroom is concerned. (p. 37) Later he reveals that the central focus of his argument involves introducing the idea of “pedagogical tact” as a third epistemological approach to what he prefers to see as “critical reflection-in-action.” Whether one gives priority to theory or to practice, to the psychological or to the ideologi- cal, in either case it seems that one cannot easily shake loose from an epistemology that is already committed to an intellectualized theory-practice distinction in the first place. For this reason I have suggested that the notion of pedagogical tact may allow a third option. (p. 43) As he concludes his argument, van Manen, like many others, abandoned Schön’s notion of reflection-in-action in the “action-present” by first referring to justifying everything a teacher does and then by suggesting that it is not possible to be thought- ful and doubtful at the same time. The aim of critical reflection is to create doubt and critique of ongoing actions. But it is obviously not possible to act thoughtfully and self-confidently while doubting oneself at the same time. If teachers were to try to be constantly critically aware of what they were doing and why they were doing these things, they would inevitably become artificial and flounder. It would disturb the functional epistemology of practice that animates everything that they do. (p. 48) Here van Manen clearly departs from all that Schön has argued when presenting reflection-in-action. While van Manen criticizes the traditional epistemology of teacher education programs and practices, he appears to be trying to set out an epis- temology of his own. Valli’s (1997) account of teacher reflection focuses on setting out five different types of reflection. “I call these five orientations technical reflection, reflection-in and on-action, deliberative reflection, personalistic reflection, and critical reflec- tion” (p. 74).
32 T. Russell and A.K. Martin Strangely, Schön’s work features in only one of these orientations. In concluding her argument, Valli makes a number of useful points but fails to see the challenge as an epistemological one: There are numerous theoretical, developmental, and institutional problems in constructing reflective programs. There is still a limited understanding of the learning-to-teach process, university faculty members have difficulty reaching agreement on program goals, and pro- spective teachers themselves approach their preparation with different expectations and states of readiness. Many confuse defending their actions with thoughtful reflection on them. Nonetheless, reflection has been an important concept in the renewal of teaching and teacher education. But reflective teacher education will be endangered if it becomes merely one of many goals to accomplish. It will also be endangered if undue emphasis is placed on instructional strat- egies to implement reflection apart from broader considerations of reflective content and improving the quality of students’ thinking. (p. 85) Like many others, Jay and Johnson (2002) directed their attention to ways of teaching reflection in a teacher education program and offered three dimensions of reflection—descriptive, comparative, and critical. While our understanding of reflection continues to grow and change, our efforts are power- fully motivated by the potential of reflective practice to create effective teaching. To this end we recommend further study into the practices that are the pedagogy of teaching reflective practice. As we work to understand this habit of mind and how we teach it, we also become acutely aware of the tensions of the use of a typology, and wonder about its usefulness in the evaluation of preservice teachers. (p. 85) As the authors acknowledged a link between reflective practice and effective teaching, they confirmed that they too are working within our traditional epistemol- ogy when they centered their work on a typology and then speculated that it might play a productive role in the evaluation of student teachers’ classroom practice. As editor of the Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry, Lyons (2010) also recognized the epistemological issue associated with Schön’s work and noted the importance of focusing on reflection-in-action: Schon [sic] wrote from a deep uneasiness with the question of the relationship between the kinds of knowledge honored in the academy and the kinds of competence valued in profes- sional practice. To him they were out of sync. Convinced that the “universities are, for the most part, institutions committed to a particular epistemology, a view of knowledge that fosters selective inattention to practical competence and professional artistry,” Schon wanted to engage in a close examination of what practitioners—architects, psychothera- pists, engineers, planners, managers, etc.—actually do in practice (Schön 1983, p. vii). He assumed that competent practitioners usually know more than they can say. They exhibit a kind of knowing in their practice. Practitioners often reveal a capacity for reflection on their intuitive knowing in the midst of action that he believed made that knowing conscious and available for action. Schon’s goal in his book was to explore the distinctive structure of reflection in action. Schon’s work launched unprecedented interest in reflective practice … that continues till today. Schon was concerned with how professionals think on their feet, that is, how they reflect in action. (p. 14)
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 33 While Lyons appropriately focused on reflection-in-action, in this descriptive account, she neglected the opportunity to comment productively on the embedded epistemological issue. We concur with the concerns raised by Edwards and Thomas (2010) about pro- grams grounded in instrumentalist logic and technicism: A belief in reflective practice as a syllabus of “process skills” to be taught to, or developed by, teachers will continue as long as our system remains tethered to instrumentalist logic. Such logic diverts teachers’ reflective efforts away from teaching worthwhile practices and towards the problem of impression management—towards gaining accreditation and pro- viding evidence of compliance with external directives (Sachs 2001). Such technicism may be considered a form of performativity. We have all witnessed this in teachers, pupils and ourselves; rote learning, with an intention to pass examinations or satisfy an impatient observer, is all too prevalent in Western schooling. (p. 412) We also find an important reality check in the position argued by Zeichner and Liu (2010): Despite all of the rhetoric surrounding efforts to prepare teachers who are more reflective and analytic about their work, in reality, reflective teacher education has done very little to foster genuine teacher development and to enhance teachers’ roles in educational reform. (p. 70) In citing so many articles about reflective practice, one of our goals has been to demonstrate the many ways in which teacher education researchers tend to insert personal perspectives and causes into discussions of reflection. Ultimately, we have to ask, “Why does it seem so difficult to attend directly to Schön’s concept of reflection-in-action and the associated epistemological tensions?” 2.4 Schön’s Presentations of Reflective Practice 2.4.1 R eflection-in-Action, Reframing, and the Reflective Turn Here we identify a number of key terms as we work to understand that Schön’s (1983, 1987a, b, 1991, 1995) writings come from the perspective of an epistemol- ogy quite different from the one that resides within the traditions and current prac- tices of most schools and universities. An early clue comes in his statement that “the knowing is in the action” (Schön 1987a, p. 25) when he writes about knowing-in- action. “Knowing suggests the dynamic quality of knowing-in-action, which, when we describe it, we convert to knowledge-in-action” (p. 26). He then characterizes reflection-in-action by emphasizing that it occurs without stopping the action: In an action-present—reflecting without interrupting the action—“thinking serves to reshape what we are doing while we are doing it. I shall say, in cases like this, that we reflect-in-action” (p. 26). Additional quotations from Schön (1987a) continue this account of reflection-in-action:
34 T. Russell and A.K. Martin • “Reflection gives rise to on-the-spot experiment. We think up and try out new actions intended to explore the newly observed phenomena, test out tentative understandings of them, or affirm the moves we have invented to change things for the better.” (p. 28) • “What distinguishes reflection-in-action from other kinds of reflection is its immediate significance for action.” (p. 29) • “In reflection-in-action, the rethinking of some part of our knowing-in-action leads to on-the-spot experiment and further thinking that affects what we do.” (p. 29) • “Like knowing-in-action, reflection-in-action is a process we can deliver without being able to say what we are doing.” (p. 31) • “It is one thing to be able to reflect-in-action and quite another to be able to reflect on our reflection-in-action so as to produce a good verbal description of it; and it is still another thing to be able to reflect on the resulting description.” (p. 31) The last quotation makes a distinction between reflection-in-action and either creating or analyzing a verbal account of reflection-in-action. Given the heavy reli- ance on written and spoken accounts of phenomena in schools, here we see another indication that Schön is directing us to a broader epistemology that, unlike the one so familiar to us, includes the significance of learning to learn from experience. 2.4.2 A New Epistemology for Professional Practice Generally and Teaching and Teacher Education Specifically Another effort by Schön (1987b) to explain what he meant by reflection-in-action comes from his lecture to the John Dewey Society. Here Schön focused quite clearly on a link between listening to students to understand how they are thinking and allowing oneself to be surprised by what students say (of course, students can be primary or secondary students but also university students and teacher education students). He presented reflection-in-action as an in-the-moment process that involves seeing the teaching situation in a new way, identifying a new action, and trying it. This capacity to respond to surprise through improvisation on the spot is what I mean by reflection-in-action. When a teacher turns her attention to giving kids reason, to listening to what they say, then teaching itself becomes a form of reflection-in action, and I think this formulation helps to describe what it is that constitutes teaching artistry. It involves getting in touch with what kids are actually saying and doing; it involves allowing yourself to be surprised by that, and allowing yourself to be surprised, I think, is appropriate, because you must permit yourself to be surprised, being puzzled by what you get and responding to the puzzle through an on-the-spot experiment that you make, that responds to what the kid says or does. It involves meeting the kid in the sense of meeting his or her understanding of what’s going on, and helping the kid co-ordinate the everyday knowing-in-action that he brings to the school with the privileged knowledge that he finds in the school. … Teaching in the form of reflection-in-action … involves a surprise, a response to surprise by thought turning back on itself, thinking what we’re doing as we do it, setting the problem of the situation anew, conducting an action experiment on the spot by which we seek to solve the new problems we’ve set, an experiment in which we test both our new way of seeing the situation, and also try to change that situation for the better. (para. 10–11)
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 35 The signal that he is speaking of a new epistemology appears when he contrasts school knowledge with reflection-in-action in terms of the chasm that often appears between school and the real world. Now, if we ask the question, “What hangs on this difference between school knowledge and reflection-in-action?”, I think it is in fact a revolutionary difference, and it has to do with healing certain splits that deaden the experience of school. They are splits between school and life which make many kids, perhaps most kids, believe that school has nothing to do with life. They are splits between teaching and doing which makes it true for most of us who are teachers that what we teach is not what we do, and what we do is not what we teach. They are splits between research and practice, which means that the thing we call research is divorced from, and even divergent from, the actual practice in which we engage. Now all of these things are associated with the argument I made in The Reflective Practitioner [1983], not about teacher education specifically but about all professional edu- cation in the modern research university. (Schön 1987b, para. 13) Those who are learning to teach seem to be particularly familiar with the gap between what professors teach (content) and what professors do (how they teach). In teacher education programs, “splits between school and life” can be likened to splits between education classes and in-school practicum experiences. Reflection-in-action is a reflective conversation with the materials of a situation. Each per- son carries out his own evolving role … ‘listens’ to the surprises (‘back talk’) that result from earlier moves, and responds through online production of new moves that give new meanings and directions to the development of the artifact. (Schön 1987a, p. 31) By 1995, Schön was speaking more explicitly about the epistemology of a new scholarship as an epistemology of reflective practice. The epistemology appropriate to the new scholarship must make room for the practitioner’s reflection in and on action. It must account for and legitimize not only the use of knowledge produced in the academy, but the practitioner’s generation of actionable knowledge in the form of models or prototypes that can be carried over, by reflective transfer, to new practice situations. The new scholarship calls for an epistemology of reflective practice, which includes what Kurt Lewin described as action research. But in the modern research univer- sity and other institutions of higher education influenced by it, reflective practice in general, and action research in particular, are bound to be caught up in a battle with the prevailing epistemology of technical rationality. (Schön 1995, p. 34) In order to legitimize the new scholarship, higher education institutions will have to learn organizationally to open up the prevailing epistemology so as to foster new forms of reflec- tive action research. This, in turn, requires building up communities of inquiry capable of criticizing such research and fostering its development. (Schön 1995, p. 34) Despite recent concepts such as that of a professional learning community, teacher education has never addressed the gap between theory and practice as a gap that requires a new way of thinking and knowing.
36 T. Russell and A.K. Martin 2.5 R eflective Practice as Mindfulness Tremmel (1993) speaks of our existing epistemological tradition as “a circle of our own minds’ making”: Everything that we know of reflection and technical rationality—our very awareness of them—is embedded in the same epistemological traditions that gave rise to them and that continue to shape our understanding. We are caught in a circle of our own mind’s making. One important step toward a more complete understanding of the promise reflective teach- ing might hold is to try to gain a perspective from outside the diameter of that circle—a perspective born entirely of a different epistemological tradition. (p. 441) This suggests to us that making progress with the concept of reflection-in-action within teacher education programs requires us to break out of traditional habits of thinking. The challenge to break out of “a circle of our own mind’s making” fits well with our sense of the power of traditional teacher education practices. Countless calls for reform appear to have had little effect. In the following excerpt from his argument, Tremmel (1993) links the epistemological challenge to the concept of mindfulness: The fact that Zen comes at the problem of knowing and reflecting from an entirely different perspective than those that currently inform discussions of reflection in education is what makes its potential contribution to our understanding unique. As Schön points out, we are not lacking for traditional academic, technically rational views. What we do lack is the power to move outside the limits of such views, and Zen, which is not totally dissimilar to Schön’s approach to reflection-in-action, helps us transcend to that wider range of practice. The specific Zen practice that best illuminates Schön’s idea of reflection is that of mindful- ness. A basic metaphor for mindfulness is “to return.” When the Zen practitioner sits in meditation or engages in the everyday activities of living, thoughts will naturally arise and the mind will have a tendency to wander. When this happens, the practitioner needs to “return” to mindful awareness of the present moment … Whatever the specific action, though, mindfulness in simplest terms means to pay attention to “right here, right now” and to invest the present moment with full awareness and concentration. (p. 442, emphasis added) In part we are drawn to Tremmel’s argument because he has emphasized the importance of attending to “right here, right now” in a mindful way, “with full awareness and concentration.” This fits well with Schön’s various accounts of reflection-in-action (which is quite different from everyday senses of reflection) and with Schön’s (1995) argument that his interpretation of professional learning from experience calls for an epistemology different to the one that dominates our universities. Tremmel’s discussion of reflective practice stands out as rather unique within the extensive literature on the topic since 1983. In our efforts to understand what teacher education has and has not done with Schön’s work, we find engaging and productive the parallels he draws between Schön’s (1983) central concept of reflection-in- action and the Zen Buddhist concept of mindfulness. I remember reading somewhere that to study Zen is to study the self. In education, self as an area of study and study of the self as a way of knowing have often been misplaced in the
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 37 rush forward to new theories and techniques. Yet, they have not been lost, as evidenced in the increased interest in research techniques like ethnography and teacher research, which encourage paying attention to and recognizing the influence of self. Another piece of evi- dence is the work of educators who seem willing to take a step back from theoretical entan- glements and ask fundamental questions about what and how teachers are thinking and why they are doing what they are doing. (Tremmel 1993, p. 454) While Tremmel may be overly optimistic when suggesting that the self is not lost, this is one of many questions that teacher educators could put to those whom they would help learn to teach. Action research and ethnography are research approaches that create space for the self. The year that Tremmel’s (1993) article was published also saw the creation of a new group of teacher educators interested in the self-study of teacher education practices (S-STEP). This group established itself as a significant group within teacher education with publication of a number of books, a two-volume handbook (Loughran et al. 2004) and (since 2005) a journal (Studying Teacher Education) devoted to teachers and teacher educators studying their own teaching practices. While some (such as Zeichner 2007) have urged self-study researchers to connect their research to the larger body of teacher education research, connecting two disparate bodies of research may not be as simple as it sounds. Doing so seems to require crossing an epistemological divide for which many of us are still needing a bridge. 2.6 The Epistemological Challenge of Reflective Practice We learn in several different ways; three distinctly different ways of learning include learning by being told, learning by observing someone else, and learning from first- hand experience. Learning by being told can include a range of activities—being told by reading a book, being told in a classroom, or being told by someone with more experience. Learning from personal experience is common in everyday life, yet teacher education may not attend to the need of those learning to teach to learn how to learn from personal experiences of teaching in school classrooms. Shulman expressed the challenge but did not frame the challenge as an epistemological one: Another reason learning to teach is difficult is that much of learning to teach depends on learning from experience, and if there is something we have learned from psychologists it is how very difficult learning from experience is. The whole idea of learning from experience is: I do something, it doesn’t work, so I try something else until I finally find something that does work. It’s a kind of thoughtful trial and error, but it’s predicated on two assumptions: one, we have reasonably accurate access to what we do, and two, we are reasonably accurate in identifying the consequences of what we do. But it is very difficult to establish those two assumptions. (Shulman 2004, p. 119) While Shulman does identify the two challenges of accurately describing one’s actions and also accurately identifying the impact of those actions, he suggests that learning from experience is “a kind of thoughtful trial and error.” This
38 T. Russell and A.K. Martin r eflection-on-action perspective misses what Schön meant by reflection-in-action because it gives no consideration to the idea of reframing or coming to see the action situation in a new way. In this chapter, we are attentive to the notion that Schön’s work was not recog- nized as requiring an epistemological shift—a change in our understanding of how one comes to know as a teacher. While not arguing that we reject traditional episte- mology, which characterizes virtually all formal schooling, we argue that there is a cataclysmic challenge involved if we are to include learning from experience as an essential element of a teacher’s professional knowledge. By analyzing the different responses of students in a physics methods course, Munby and Russell (1994) ultimately explained the range of responses to the same teaching experiences in terms of a new concept: the authority of experience. School makes us all familiar with the authority of reason and the authority of position. A teacher is an authority (based on reason) in authority (based on position), and we only confer the authority of position on individuals who have shown that they pos- sess the authority of reason and possess the knowledge they are expected to teach. In the real world of teaching in a school classroom, learning from experience gradu- ally develops one’s authority of experience but how that authority of experience develops is only poorly understood until one recognizes it as involving a new epis- temology that depends on a professional learning process such as reflection-in-action. We use the term authority of experience because of our concern that students never master learning from experience during preservice programs in a way that gives them direct access to the nature of the authority of experience. If Schön is correct that there is a knowledge-in- action that cannot be fully expressed in propositions and that learning from experience has its own epistemology, then our concern is that learning from experience is never clearly contrasted with learning that can be expressed and conveyed in propositions. (Munby and Russell 1994, p. 92) As those learning to teach move from university to practicum and back to univer- sity, they alternate between two very different epistemological worlds calling for quite different types of authority. We see the tensions between different epistemolo- gies as fundamental features of learning to teach. We submit that Schön’s concept of reflection-in-action is one productive way to begin to understand and work to resolve these fundamental epistemological tensions. 2.7 T oward an Epistemology of Practice Learning from experience is, in our view, at the heart of learning to teach. Defining the term learning is itself a complex task; for purposes of this argument, we use the following statements by Barnes and Hattie: Learning can be a passive acceptance of the beliefs and practices of the people about us; in our culture however we have learnt to value reflexive thought, the knowledge which we ourselves can shape and reapply. Reflexive learning seems to occur when a learner, acting
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 39 upon purposes which are significant in his life world, is faced with disjunction between his implicit beliefs and those of the persons he is interacting with. (Barnes 1976, p. 106) The process of learning is a journey from ideas to understanding to constructing and onwards. It is a journey of learning, unlearning, and overlearning. When students can move from idea to ideas and then relate and elaborate on them we have learning—and when they can regulate or monitor this journey then they are teachers of their own learning. (Hattie 2009, p. 29) We find these accounts of learning appropriate to our argument because they call attention to the essential features of reflexivity and self-monitoring. These accounts also emphasize the active nature of learning and the importance of personal engage- ment. With these definitions as background, we draw heavily from Raelin’s (2007) efforts to outline features of an epistemology of practice. Raelin begins by describ- ing features of the traditional epistemology that is most widely accepted in aca- demic contexts: The dominant empiricist epistemology governing our educational enterprises in higher edu- cation as well as in corporate training and development leads us to separate theory and practice in an aspiration to define the best conceptual models to map external reality. But this brand of, call it “academic” epistemology, often cannot prepare us for engagement any better than classic trial-and-error. (p. 496) Raelin (2007) then reminds us that practical knowledge has features that are distinctively different from propositional knowledge. These features include its social nature, its open-endedness, and its usefulness: Not concerned so much with generalized applications, practical knowledge applies to the specific situation and to the subjective experience of the actor. It is frequently through con- versations with other local practitioners, using detailed language specific to a trade or func- tion, that practitioners develop their understanding of how to engage with the task. Their knowledge is thus inherently social as well as transactional, open-ended, and, of course, prospectively useful (Schön 1983; Aram and Salipante 2003; Van de Ven and Johnson 2006). (p. 498) Taking us beyond the everyday assumptions about how theory and practice dif- fer, Raelin proposes that integrating the two can only occur after each has been deconstructed. He suggests three “building blocks” that will contribute to the pro- cess of reconstruction. Practice’s contribution to theory has been downplayed. I contend that one reason for its underemphasis stems from our not recognizing and deploying the available tools. Thus, to assist in the process of deconstructing the breakdown separating theory and practice and then reconstructing their integration, I begin by citing three building blocks that can con- tribute to an epistemology of practice, namely: tacit knowledge, critical reflection, and mas- tery. (p. 499) Raelin (2007) moves on to one of his central points about an epistemology of practice. In those moments when our habits and expertise fail us and we are search- ing for a “way to learn ourselves out” of a practical problem, we at times experience … a momentary insight that helps us make connections between our tacit and explicit knowing in such a way that we entertain new possibilities. From this point,
40 T. Russell and A.K. Martin we can invoke our prior schemas and lessons and, using recursive processes of trial-and- error combined with our emergent learning or what Langer (1997) calls “soft vigilance,” formulate new responses. Intuition can also come to our aid in the form of patterned activa- tion, resulting in hunches that can be consciously tested (Bowers et al. 1990). Readers familiar with Schön’s (1983) account of reflection-in-action will recog- nize the parallels between that account and Raelin’s continuing discussion: In unpacking Schön’s notion of “surprise” (Schön 1983), Yanow and Tsoukas (2007) dem- onstrate phenomenologically that practitioners actually display a range of responses when they encounter disturbances at work, from absorbed coping to analytic reflection (in the instance of a sheer breakdown). The critical issue for an epistemology of practice seems to be not whether but when to introduce explicit instructions and reflection into the field to yield optimal performance (Howard and Ballas 1980; Lewicki 1986). The construction of theory in this setting might be more apt during or after rather than before the experience. Hence, theory is not preordained but constituted as a living construction to capture the use- ful ingredients of the performance. In this sense, knowledge claims are often reserved to the context from which they spring. (Fish 1989) (p. 500, emphasis added) Raelin (2007) next introduces the important idea of a “real-time learning envi- ronment” in which mental models are seen as a distinctive feature of an epistemol- ogy of practice: Practitioners thus need to develop their cognitive ability to help make sense of their own practice (Kuhn et al. 1988). Donald Schön (1983) coined the term, “reflection-in-action,” to characterize the rethinking process that attempts to discover how what one did contributed to an unexpected or expected outcome, taking into account factors unique to the interplay between the individual practitioner and his or her local operating context as well as the interplay between theory and practice. In this way a real-time learning environment would be created, which permits and encourages practitioners to test their mental models. Mental models constitute the images, assumptions, and stories that we carry in our minds of our- selves and of others. An epistemology of practice would bring these mental models, which are often untested and unexamined and, consequently, often erroneous, into consciousness in such a way that new models would be formed to serve us better. (Burgoyne 1994; Senge et al. 1994) (p. 501, emphasis added) In a statement that reminds us of double-loop learning (Argyris and Schön 1974), Raelin (2007) sees an epistemology of practice as one that “requires a critical self- reflection of our taken-for-granted assumptions and feelings” (p. 501). This is a powerful message for teacher educators, many of whom have taken “critical reflec- tion” to mean careful thinking about any topic at all. An epistemology of practice compels us to identify and explore our assumptions and feelings about our teaching actions and their consequences for student learning. Later in his argument, Raelin contrasts academic epistemology and an episte- mology of practice, indicating that connecting experience to theory begins with experience and often has a social dimension: Academic epistemology, interpreted as knowing in advance of practice, can lead to “haste in wanting to know.” An epistemology of practice espouses as much intellectual quietness as the staccato of questions and answers. Practitioners take in experience and reflect on the lessons available in front of their eyes. They compare their experience to existing theory and determine its applicability. If experience is not conjunctive with theory, ongoing reflec- tion with others can produce new theory. (p. 506)
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 41 A final excerpt from Raelin’s (2007) argument stresses the importance of “learn- ing in the midst of action” as an element of an epistemology of practice and an argument against complacency. What is being called for is an epistemology that transforms learning from the acquisition of the objective rules of wisdom to one that appreciates the wisdom of learning in the midst of action itself. We need to move beyond the acquisition of formal logic to reasoning and sensemaking that is concurrent with ongoing practice. In this way the conventional task of teaching as that of imparting knowledge can make room for the more dynamic process of facilitating learning. Imbued with learning, practitioners need not rely on old formulas as much as invent new tools with the help of their peers and teachers to find and work with current problems. (p. 513) This account of an epistemology of practice included three “building blocks”— tacit knowledge, critical reflection, and mastery (Raelin 2007, p. 499). Tacit or non- propositional knowledge challenges us to identify those skills that are not easily framed with words (Munby et al. 2001). Critical reflection is a central focus of this chapter. In Raelin’s (2007) words, “for the master, the consideration of the rules of inquiry itself becomes sufficiently tacit so as to allow improvisation and in so doing build heuristic knowledge” (p. 502). Each of these building blocks represents an epistemological anchor as we work to develop a deeper understanding of the com- plexities of learning to teach. 2.8 Can We Break the Epistemological “Circle of Our Own Minds’ Making”? 2.8.1 Recognizing Impediments to Reflection: The Potential of Listening in Moments of Uncertainty and Surprise It is our perception that reflection as a term is used pervasively yet unproductively in many teacher education programs. Schön’s 1983 book launched the idea that reflection-in-action is a major source of professional learning, yet he applied it to contexts of active professional practice without need for qualifiers such as critical. While Schön’s ideas have been criticized extensively, there has been little discus- sion of what his perspective can bring to the education of teachers. There has been little or no attention to what and how those learning to teach learn from their per- sonal experiences of professional learning in practicum placements. Our students consistently tell us that their most important learning occurs in their practicum experiences and that course activities and written work need to be more clearly con- nected to those important practicum experiences. Thus, there remains the issue of deliberately and carefully forging connections between learning as a student in the teacher education classroom and learning as a novice teacher in the school classroom.
42 T. Russell and A.K. Martin Russell’s initial interest in Schön’s concept of reflection-in-action was driven by the gaps his students reported between what they were being taught in teacher edu- cation classrooms and what they were doing in their practicum experiences in schools. This surprised him and left him uncertain about a way forward, until he realized that Schön’s account of reflection-in-action is an important element of learning from experience. Readers may be interested in his account of his career- long development of a pedagogy of reflection (Russell 2014a). Listening to students is an essential ingredient of Schön’s important idea of “giv- ing students reason.” Such listening may be one of the most challenging new habits of mind required of those learning to teach as well as those who teach them; neither group has had much experience of being listened to by their former teachers, and so they have no personal experiences on which to model their listening. The authorizing of student perspectives for which I am arguing here is not simply about including students as a gesture. It is about including students to change the terms and the outcomes of the conversations about educational policy and practice. Such a reform cannot take place within the dominant and persistent ways of thinking or the old structures for participation. (Cook-Sather 2002, p. 12) Cook-Sather (2002) has set out an eloquent argument for the importance of lis- tening to students. We link this to reflective practice by noting that teacher educators wishing to foster reflective practice in those learning to teach will need to listen to their students’ accounts of learning from experience. The work of authorizing student perspectives is essential because of the various ways that it can improve current educational practice, re-inform existing conversations about educa- tional reform, and point to the discussions and reform efforts yet to be undertaken. Authorizing student perspectives can directly improve educational practice because when teachers listen to and learn from students, they can begin to see the world from those stu- dents’ perspectives. (p. 3) By authorizing and validating experiences, teacher educators can assist those learning to teach in the process of linking tacit knowledge gained in practicum expe- riences to the explicit, propositional knowledge offered in their education classes. 2.8.2 M aking a Reflective Epistemological Turn to Move Beyond Technical Rationality The promise of reflective practice is as much with us in 2015 as it was in 1983 when Schön’s first book on reflective practice led to a change in the vocabulary of teacher education. We contend that that promise has not been realized because it has been attempted within an epistemological world that Schön characterized as technical rationality. While a new epistemology for both teacher education in universities and teaching in schools is a tall order not soon to be achieved, we could begin by creat- ing alternative spaces within teacher education programs, spaces in which the
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 43 epistemology of action research and reflective practice could be attempted, explored, and experienced. Teacher education has yet to make a reflective turn. One challenge is to recognize that we are dealing with both cognition and emotion. In Canada and the USA, teacher education programs began long ago as 1-year normal school programs to prepare secondary school graduates to teach in primary schools. As stand-alone normal schools became teachers colleges and then moved into the university itself, teacher education programs were required to adopt the epistemological assumptions of the university, grounded in theory and propositional knowledge, with minimal attention to practice. Individual courses are structured just like courses throughout the university, and they are identified with the same familiar labels. The university format, of 3-credit semester-long courses, encourages us to parse our knowl- edge into discrete bundles, to parse practice into visible actions, and to engage in didactic pedagogies that do not help students learn to weigh alternative actions in relation to their ultimate goals. This is no simple task in a university setting, where expertise is valued and we are all rewarded for articulating solutions rather than articulating problems. (Kennedy 2015, p. 11) Similarly, Schön (1995) stressed the traditional and implicit assumptions embed- ded in university structures and practices: All of us who live in research universities are bound up in technical rationality, regardless of our personal attitudes toward it, because it is built into the institutional arrangements— the formal and informal rules and norms—that govern such processes as the screening of candidates for tenure and promotion. Even liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and other institutions of higher education appear to be subject to the influence of technical rationality by a kind of echo effect or by imitation. Hence, introducing the new scholarship into institutions of higher education means becoming involved in an epistemological battle. It is a battle of snails, proceeding so slowly that you have to look very carefully in order to see it going on. But it is happening nonetheless. (Schön 1995, p. 32) Schön (1991) gave this account of the idea of a reflective turn: I have argued that to take the reflective turn is not only to “give practitioners reason” but to recognize that any particular account of their reasoning is an observer’s construction that may be mistaken or radically incomplete. The researcher who would “give reason” has an obligation to turn his thought back on itself, to become aware of his own underlying stories, to search out possible sources of blindness and bias in his own ways of making sense of the reality he has observed. And he cannot do this unless he is prepared to entertain and test other ways of seeing his material. (p. 357) Thus, the challenge we pose to teacher educators who would teach reflective practice (and engage in it themselves) involves recognizing that there is an episte- mological alternative to the world of schools and teaching that has become so famil- iar as to be invisible. That epistemological alternative is the one proposed by Schön (1983, 1987a, 1991, 1995) and interpreted by Tremmel (1993). Schön (1983) spoke of reflection-in-action triggered by puzzling, surprising, and unexpected moments of practice. These emotional moments call for a cognitive stepping back to “give practitioners reason,” to construct new ways of interpreting events that may inspire new approaches to the puzzling situation. This mindfulness is not an extra demand
44 T. Russell and A.K. Martin on the practitioner’s time because it happens within the moment of practice, and therein lies the challenge: What happens within that moment when the practitioner either attends to the puzzling situation or ignores it? Reflection-in-action by teach- ers and teacher educators exhibits the mindfulness that demands a reflective turn to see the situation of practice in a new way. 2.9 Conclusion If we are to have reflective teachers, we need reflective schools and reflective teacher educators working within an epistemology appropriate to professional practice: In the process of developing reflective teaching as a goal of preservice education, there is a need to develop our own knowledge about reflective teaching and how it is facilitated… Before we can have reflective teachers, we need reflective schools and reflective teacher educators. (Calderhead 1992, p. 146) We see the following three questions as significant challenges for the reflective teacher educator: • As a novice gains experience, how does learning from experience evolve and when can attention to the action-present commence in a significant way? • Can Schön’s conception of “teaching artistry through reflection-in action” (Schön 1987a, pp. 22–40) provide a way forward or a stepping-stone to under- standing and attempting an epistemology of practice? • How can teacher educators’ apparent reluctance to adopt an alternative, more complex epistemology of theory and practice be addressed? Our position is that the essential concept in Schön’s work is reflection-in-action that must be interpreted within an appropriate epistemology of practice. When many teacher educators and teacher education programs quickly took up reflection and reflective practice after the publication of Schön’s (1983) first book on the topic, the concept of reflection-in-action tended to be reduced to everyday meanings of reflec- tion—looking back at events and thinking how they might be reinterpreted or improved. Missed, by and large, was the special meaning of reflection-in-action as a process occurring in the action-present of personal practice. This special meaning may have been missed because it does not fall within the traditional epistemology of technical rationality, positivism, and the tradition of learning theory first and then putting that theory into practice. Schön himself suggested a way forward: For these reasons, the study of reflection-in-action is critically important. The dilemma of rigor or relevance may be dissolved if we can develop an epistemology of practice which places technical problem solving within a broader context of reflective inquiry, shows how reflection-in-action may be rigorous in its own right, and links the art of practice in uncer- tainty and uniqueness to the scientist’s art of research. We may thereby increase the legiti- macy of reflection-in-action and encourage its broader, deeper, and more rigorous use. (Schön 1983, p. 69)
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 45 Teacher educators who are still looking for a powerful concept of reflection that engages those learning to teach may find it helpful to explore mindfulness and the epistemological issues associated with reflection-in-action. Reflection-in-action appears to be much more relevant to experienced practitioners than to those who are entering a profession. The traditional epistemology of practice that dominates many educational practices is probably invisible to those who are just beginning to teach. It can be far too easy for the beginning teacher to see the work of a teacher in terms of covering the curriculum and “keeping one’s head down” to avoid criticism. Raelin (2007) presented an epistemological challenge that teacher educators might well consider: “What is being called for is an epistemology that transforms learning from the acquisition of the objective rules of wisdom to one that appreci- ates the wisdom of learning in the midst of action itself” (p. 513). This challenge is complex but there are many points of entry. Recall the terms discussed in previous sections—mindfulness, habits of mind, teaching artistry, explicit instruction, listen- ing, authorizing voice, and reflective teaching—and the building blocks of an epis- temology of practice: tacit knowledge, critical reflection, and mastery. The burden of responsibility rests with teacher educators who must introduce future teachers to an epistemology of practice. Drawing on their experience that new teachers lack, teacher educators can model their own critical reflection, explain the development of their tacit knowledge, and demonstrate the ongoing quest for mastery. Acknowledgment The preparation of this chapter has been assisted by data collected and ana- lyzed under grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. References Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Barnes, D. (1976). From communication to curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bowers, K. S., Regehr, G., Balthazard, C., & Parker, K. (1990). Intuition in the context of discov- ery. Cognitive Psychology, 22(1), 72–110. Calderhead, J. (1989). Reflective teaching and teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 5(1), 43–51. Calderhead, J. (1992). The role of reflection in learning to teach. In L. Valli (Ed.), Reflective teacher education: Cases and critiques (pp. 139–146). Albany: State University of New York Press. Cook-Sather, A. (2002). Authorizing students’ perspectives: Toward trust, dialogue, and change in education. Educational Researcher, 31(4), 3–14. Edwards, G., & Thomas, G. (2010). Can reflective practice be taught? Educational Studies, 36(4), 403–414. Fendler, L. (2005). Teacher reflection in a hall of mirrors: Historical influences and political rever- berations. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 16–25. Hattie, J. A. C. (2009). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achieve- ment. London: Routledge. Hatton, N., & Smith, D. (1995). Reflection in teacher education: Towards definition and imple- mentation. Teaching and Teacher Education, 11, 33–49.
46 T. Russell and A.K. Martin Jay, J. K., & Johnson, K. L. (2002). Capturing complexity: A typology of reflective practice for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 18(1), 73–85. doi:10.1016/ S0742-051X(01)00051-8. Kennedy, M. (2015). Parsing the practice of teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, online, 1–12. doi:10.1177/0022487115614617. Langer, E. J. (1997). The power of mindful learning. Reading: Addison-Wesley. Larrivee, B. (2000). Transforming teaching practice: Becoming the critically reflective teacher. Reflective Practice, 1, 293–307. Loughran, J. J., Hamilton, M. L., LaBoskey, V. K., & Russell, T. (Eds.). (2004). International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Lyons, N. (2010). Reflection and reflective inquiry: Critical issues, evolving conceptualizations, contemporary claims and future possibilities. In N. Lyons (Ed.), Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry (pp. 3–22). Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-0-387-85744-2_4. Munby, H., & Russell, T. (1994). The authority of experience in learning to teach: Messages from a physics methods class. Journal of Teacher Education, 45, 86–95. Munby, H., Russell, T., & Martin, A. K. (2001). Teachers’ knowledge and how it develops. In V. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (4th ed., pp. 877–904). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Raelin, J. A. (2007). Toward an epistemology of practice. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 6(4), 495–519. Richardson, V. (1990). The evolution of reflective teaching and teacher education. In R. T. Clift, W. R. Houston, & M. C. Pugach (Eds.), Encouraging reflection practice in education: An analysis of issues and programs (pp. 3–19). New York: Teachers College Press. Rodgers, C. (2002). Defining reflection: Another look at John Dewey and reflective thinking. Teachers College Record, 104, 842–866. Russell, T. (2014a). One teacher educator’s career-long development of a pedagogy of reflection. In C. J. Craig & L. Orland-Barak (Eds.), International teacher education: Promising pedago- gies (Part A) (pp. 55–72). Bingley: Emerald. Russell, T. (2014b). Paradigmatic changes in teacher education: The perils, pitfalls and unrealized promise of the reflective practitioner. In R. Bruno-Jofré & J. S. Johnston (Eds.), Teacher educa- tion in a transnational world (pp. 158–176). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Schön, D. A. (1987a). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Schön, D. A. (1987b, April). Educating the reflective practitioner. Transcription of presentation to the John Dewey Society at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://resources.educ.queensu.ca/ar/schon87.htm Schön, D. A. (Ed.). (1991). The reflective turn: Case studies in and on educational practice. New York: Teachers College Press. Schön, D. A. (1995). The new scholarship requires a new epistemology. Change, 27(6), 26–34. Shulman, L. (2004). Teaching as community property: Essays on higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Tremmel, R. (1993). Zen and the art of reflective practice in teacher education. Harvard Educational Review, 63(4), 434–458. Valli, L. (Ed.). (1992). Reflective teacher education: Cases and critiques. Albany: State University of New York Press. Valli, L. (1997). Listening to other voices: A description of teacher reflection in the United States. Peabody Journal of Education, 72(1), 67–88. van Manen, M. (1995). On the epistemology of reflective practice. Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice, 1(1), 33–50. doi:10.1080/1354060950010104.
2 Reflective Practice: Epistemological Perspectives on Learning from Experience… 47 Zeichner, K. (1996). Teachers as reflective practitioners and the democratization of schools reform. In K. Zeichner, S. Melnick, & M. L. Gomez (Eds.), Currents of reform in preservice teacher education (pp. 199–214). New York: Teachers College Press. Zeichner, K. (2007). Accumulating knowledge across self-studies in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(1), 36–46. Zeichner, K., & Liu, K. Y. (2010). A critical analysis of reflection as a goal for teacher education. In N. Lyons (Ed.), Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry (pp. 67–84). Dordrecht: Springer.
Chapter 3 Let’s Stay in the Swamp: Poststructural Feminist Reflective Practice Lesley Coia and Monica Taylor Abstract In this chapter, a reimagined conception of reflective practice is used to think about and improve our practice as teachers committed to addressing issues of social justice. Co-/autoethnography is described as an approach that utilizes insights from Schön through a poststructural feminist lens. This perspective invites a notion of reflective practice that returns us to Schön’s swamplands where reflection is at its most generative and effective. 3.1 Introduction In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, manageable problems lend themselves to solution through the use of research based theory and technique. In the swampy lowlands, problems are messy and confusing and incapable of technical solution. (Schön 1995, p. 28) The everyday routines traced by women are never unimportant, because the seemingly banal and trivial events of the everyday are bound into power structures which limit and confine women. (Rose 1993, p. 17) Reflective practice has, as Loughran (2002) points out, considerable allure; an allure that “is caught up in the seductive nature of a notion that rings true for most people” (p. 33). It is an idea that is immediately attractive, but this is hardly surpris- ing. After all, as Gore (1993) writes, “it would be virtually inconceivable to find a teacher educator who would advocate unreflective teaching” (p. 149) especially in the context of social justice practices. Yet, despite its wide acceptance in teacher education, the idea of reflective practice continues to face serious challenges that undermine its ability to act as a driving force in our efforts to improve our practice and prepare teachers to address issues of power and disrupt school structures that perpetuate inequities in society. In this chapter, we show how some of these L. Coia 49 Agnes Scott College, Decatur, GA, USA M. Taylor (*) Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 R. Brandenburg et al. (eds.), Reflective Theory and Practice in Teacher Education, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 17, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3431-2_3
50 L. Coia and M. Taylor challenges can be addressed using insights from poststructural feminism alongside Schön’s original conception. This perspective invites a notion of reflective practice that returns us to what Schön (1995) calls the swamplands where reflection is at its most generative and effective. We illustrate how this retheorized and reimagined conception of reflective prac- tice might be used in thinking about and improving our practice as teachers by describing how co-/autoethnography, a method of self-reflection we have developed and used over the past 15 years, can provide an approach that is woven through with insights gained from Schön and poststructural feminism. In providing this example, our aim is to show just one means by which reflective practice might address the authentic needs of practitioners committed to the goals of social justice and how reflective practice might become more meaningful for us as teachers and teacher educators. We start by outlining some of the challenges faced by what has become the com- mon sense view of reflective practice. 3.2 S lipping from Our Moorings By systematizing reflective practice, by trying to make it more accessible and opera- tional to more educators, there is a danger of reducing it to a series of steps, focusing on techniques rather than its deeper purpose and potential. This approach ignores the salient feature of practice: practitioners make decisions in conditions where “blueprints” will not work. They operate as Batsleer and Humphries (1999) say in “unique situations that require a mixture of complex judgments, decision-making and action” (p. 119). In such situations a rationalist approach seems inviting, as we know from the push back we often receive from students when we encourage a more open and perhaps authentic approach to practice. Under various pressures, our students frequently seek a right answer and the straightest route to it. The result is that under the strictures of increasingly short and prescriptive programs, reflective practice has become a matter of another requirement to be met: a detached, if repeti- tive assignment on a teacher’s “to do” list. It is precisely this approach that leads to partial solutions or unintentionally excluding wider aspects of the problem. It begins to feel generic and occludes the context, situation, and lived experiences of the reflector. Reflective practice, if focused on techniques, loses its richness: by vacating the complexity of practice, it becomes vacuous. As reflective practice swept through teacher education and other fields such as social work, it shed some of the most distinctive characteristics upon which Schön (1995) had built his conception. Lacking conceptual clarity (Richardson 1992) for some, reflective practice has become almost synonymous with thinking and thus without structure and a well-defined purpose. Bleakley (1999), for exam- ple, notes that reflective practice is in danger of becoming a catch-all term for an ill-defined process. It is precisely because the aim of reflective practice is not in play, and is not addressed, that the idea of reflective practice has been emptied of
3 Let’s Stay in the Swamp: Poststructural Feminist Reflective Practice 51 content. Improving practice is almost mindless without a wider educational aim. If the purpose of reflecting in and on practice is left unexamined, then it becomes an almost vacuous concept, or at worst a pernicious one (Fendler 2003). Our reflective practice, specifically in the United States (US) in the early twenty first century, is circumscribed by instrumentalism. There is a narrow focus with more value placed on finding immediate solutions than allowing time to explore the ambiguous and complex swampland of our practice. While there are many problems with an instrumental view, one of the most alarming is the devaluing or even removal of the interpersonal from consideration. The relationships we have with our students and ourselves recede into the background as we privilege and abstract individual problems from their context. When we see practice as a series of discrete problems that need to be solved, we are in danger of not acknowledging the dynamic role played by self and other in constructing our practice. The hegemonic view of what constitutes a problem is just one example. What constitutes something worth think- ing about is often implicitly prescribed. Even the idea that reflective practice is solving a problem is part of this point of view. So, for example, a teacher is allowed to reflect on why she did not achieve an instructional objective. She might think about whether her objective was actually measurable in practice, whether there needed to be more time on task, or whether asking a better question might have led to the objective being achieved. What is not allowed is to question the very idea of measurable objectives achievable within limited instructional time. We have in many of our teacher education programs tamed reflective practice so it fits neatly into our rubrics and can be standardized and measured accurately. There are no messy swamplands. It is hard to stay in the swamp when the focus on reflective practice is to identify arrowed straight lines of causation and accountability. This normalized concept clashes with Schön’s (1995) idea of reflective practice as “problem setting and intui- tive artistry” in the face of “situations of uncertainty, complexity, uniqueness, and conflict” (p. 29). They do not mesh, and so it is not surprising that ideas on how to improve practice might be at odds under these different conceptions. Despite the richness of Schön’s notion of reflective practice, it has been and continues to be fashioned for the world of accountability with its insistence on instrumental ratio- nality. This has distorted reflective practice, tending toward the superficial, with the idea that problems can be, as Schön (1995) says, solved. By abstracting from the wider context, reflective practice is then firmly and only situated in the classroom. It cannot address the complex power dynamics within teaching contexts and recognize the unknowability present in these spaces. This raises the question, yet again, of the purpose of reflective practice. Too often, within the context of accountability, standards, and testing, the impetus for reflection cen- ters on these external methods of evaluation. We are pushed to be reflective in order to improve our students’ performance on questionable assessments that reduce important aspects of teaching to the use of rubrics and checklists. This stance of instrumental rationality that looks to solve problems neatly is particularly problematic when teaching for social justice as such a stance necessi- tates a focus on contradictions rather than coherence and on nuances instead of
52 L. Coia and M. Taylor linear connections. When rigid issues of accountability are looming, where do we discover the murkiness of teaching—the acknowledgment of “a multiplicity of knowledges” that exist in our classrooms and the awareness that “these knowledges are contradictory, partial, and irreducible” (Ellsworth 1994, p. 320)? We move out of the complexity and into a more sterile manageable sphere as we start searching for certainties. In this slippage from the swamp onto the concrete of technical rationality, there is value in turning again to Schön (1995) to unearth, or maybe just remind ourselves of why reflective practice is necessary and important. His focus on intuitive, artistic “reflection-in-action” equips us with another set of strategies to read the terrain of the swamp and understand how to reflect effectively without drowning or losing our way. But is this enough? To Schön’s conception of the complexity and messiness of practice, we need a specific understanding of what reflective practice might look like for teacher educators and teachers committed to addressing issues of social justice. A return to the complexities, which Schön (1995) insisted, would provide a corrective. While there are these serious challenges to how reflective practice is operational- ized, a far deeper issue also needs to be addressed. Reflection on practice directly addresses the presumed nature of the teacher self. If reflective practice is reduced to a form of instrumental rationality, as discussed above, what does this say about the teacher self? The motivating questions of why we are reflecting and for whom, along with the importance of the autobiographical form of the reflection itself, are often implicit and left so in the instrumental view of reflective practice we often see in teacher education programs that focus on the external and on pure performance. We shall return to this after examining another challenge to reflective practice. Too often the dilemma is that reflection is narrowly focused on the self and one’s experience in the classroom. As we have previously argued (Coia and Taylor 2007), there is often an incipient and perhaps dangerous individualism underlying this sort of reflection. We see this, for example, in the use of individual journal writing. With attention ostensibly on the self, the world can be seen as secondary, and the role of a pure or essential self is magnified. This illusion is an effect of unacknowledged or unexplored theories of the self, leaving the self at the center of the reflection (as both subject and object) as essentially atemporal, apolitical, and self-constructed. When this self is the focus of the analysis of the reflection, improvements in practice will likely be narrow and continue the journey out of the swamp. The problem arises because understanding the autobiographical self as situated in practice, as used in order to better understand practice, is not examined. How many programs that encourage reflective practice interrogate the autobiographical form itself? What stu- dent understanding is there of what they are doing, and how they are participating in a social and linguistic practice? Is the language of autobiography, the history of its use as a form of self-knowledge, or the use of autobiographical forms in the construction of self examined sufficiently by us as reflective practitioners? What role do these questions have in our teacher education programs? We suspect that rather than discussing these issues, many programs fall back on common sense views of the form and its value for the author.
3 Let’s Stay in the Swamp: Poststructural Feminist Reflective Practice 53 To be more specific, a focus on my understanding of my experience as a primary means of understanding what is happening in the classroom can reduce the journal to an apolitical, atheoretical tract of confession. This unintended consequence is a result of leaving the autobiographical form unexamined, and so familiar cultural autobiographical tropes manifest themselves without being questioned. The experi- ence of the self is always constructed by and situated within a cultural context. If this is not examined, the effect of the form on how we understand our practice will remain unacknowledged. For example, there is the real possibility that social identi- ties such as gender suffer narrative ellipsis from the very structure of a journal or other artifact of reflective practice and therefore are not available for reflection. Together, the unexamined form and the unexamined self can lead to reflective practice that implicitly draws or relies on a simplistic understanding and can con- tribute to a unidimensional view of the self undertaking the work. It adds to a certain conception of the self: that there is one way to be. This militates against education for social justice where the nature of the interrelationship of self and other, how these are constructed and maintained, dismantled, and rebuilt, should underpin our work as educators committed to working with our students for a more equitable world. This leads us to consider how poststructural feminist reflective practice might address these challenges. 3.3 O utfitting for the Swamplands Women’s situation requires new ways of thinking, not just thinking new things. (MacKinnon 2005, p. 25) We all have, in greater or lesser degree, the capability of reflecting on what we know as revealed by what we do. And we also have the ability to reflect-in-action to generate new knowing, as when a jazz band improvises within a framework of meter, melody, and har- mony: the pianist laying down “Sweet Sue” in a particular way, and the clarinetist listening to it and picking it up differently because of what the pianist is doing – and nobody using words. (Schön 1995, p. 30) To take a feminist perspective is deceptively simple. As bell hooks (2000) fre- quently points out and most famously says in Feminism is for Everybody, “femi- nism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” (p. 1). To take a feminist perspective on reflective practice is to note ways in which sexism works within and around our practice and then do something about it. Since reflec- tive practice focuses so much on the self’s understanding of experience, we also suggest that by adopting a poststructural feminist perspective, there is potential to destabilize some of the comfortable categories of identity, problematize the notion of power and authority in the classroom, and talk about the multiple possibilities of what we could be doing.
54 L. Coia and M. Taylor How does feminism influence the ways in which we engage in reflective prac- tice? What does reflection look like from such a perspective, when it is undertaken to address issues of social justice in our teacher education courses and beyond, and in the classrooms and schools where our students eventually teach? Too often reflective practice is used to reinforce beliefs rather than challenge assumptions (Fendler 2003). The process becomes one of “reconfirming, justifying or rationalizing preconceived notions” (p. 16) or as Loughran (2002) writes “ratio- nalization masquerading as reflection” (p. 35). How does the criticality encouraged by poststructural feminism promote “reflection to go beyond the confines of the individual’s work, to interrogate the dynamic existing between the subjective expe- rience of practice and the professional and political contexts in which the practice takes place” (Batsleer and Humphries 1999, pp. 121–122)? First and foremost, by adopting an explicitly poststructural feminist stance, questions about the construc- tion of experience and forms of oppression and resistance are ever-present. They are available for reflection. Shifting its purpose, as an antireductionist process, a poststructural feminist approach acknowledges the teacher’s subjectivity, of being both the subject and object of the reflection, as the one who both practices and also can improve that practice. Through this lens, practice is not reduced to a formula or list of discrete steps to be mastered. Rather it complicates the endeavor by examining the people and context where it is employed. But this does not mean that reflection only focuses on a particular teaching context. Instead it expands the critical stance from the class- room to the larger world (Ecclestone 1996). It is important to pause for a moment since, as Fendler (2003) cautions, we do not simply want our reflective thinking to take on a feminist focus on power and inequities in place of technical rationality. If these stances are merely presented as in opposition to one another, the teacher is forced to pledge ideological fidelity to one lens. Favoring one stance over another is not enough and, moreover, is counter- productive. It does not work to disrupt—it is simply a substitution. Rather than an improvement, it is just a political move: we are not really being reflective at all but are actually putting a feminist face on instrumental rationality. This may be more palatable, but is essentially the same fodder. In order to respond to this objection, we need to draw on a familiar poststructural feminist insight: the ubiquity of power and its operation. From this perspective, the overall purpose of reflection is moved to, at the very least, naming and describing inequities, and hopefully, eventually, it involves analysis and movement to action. We emphasize action here because this is a distinguishing feature that feminism brings to poststructuralism. It is not enough to simply analyze power. Feminists use reflection as a means of initiating actions to promote social justice (Ropers-Huilman 2001). Adopting a poststructural feminist perspective does not leave everything as it was. It forces new perspectives by repositioning the self and enables educators to examine “classroom actions on the basis of their abilities to contribute toward greater equity and social justice, and more humane conditions in schooling and society” (Gore 1993, p. 149). In short, poststructural feminism provides a larger purpose for reflecting on practice beyond the immediacy of improving current
3 Let’s Stay in the Swamp: Poststructural Feminist Reflective Practice 55 teaching. The purpose of education and the role of the teacher in this age of stan- dards, accountability, and testing become central to the investigation. We ask our- selves: For what are we improving our practices? By adopting this stance our reflection focuses on the purpose, constraints, and messiness of our teaching. It invites a move away from dichotomies of right and wrong into the messy swamplands where power can be disassembled and reassem- bled. Rather than simply solving a problem or improving a technique, poststructural feminism encourages a way to recognize, reassemble, and disrupt or rupture power inequities and the construction of the gendered subject, with attention to how power and authority affect thinking and action. We become equipped to “confront the tech- nologies through which we make ourselves into subjects, through which we partici- pate in our own subjectification” (Gore 1993, p. 155). This involves acknowledging the ways in which we have internalized what it means, in society, to be a “teacher” and what “being a student” means. As Gore writes, “The more aware we are of the practices of self, the greater the space for altering those practices” (p. 155). We are in no way suggesting that this lens is a “panacea” or “magical charm” (Bové 1990, p. 64) because it is an ongoing process that relies on doubt, worry, and ambiguity. Instead we see this as a means to work against oneself, to work with the nuanced ways in which a person sees the world, and reveal what Lather (2013) calls “layers of contradiction and complication both personally and professionally” (p. 122). As we engage in reflecting on reflective practice, we often wonder how we strayed so far from Schön’s (1995) original conception of “reflection-in-action,” to improve practice during a “spontaneous performance” like teaching. For, as Schön reminds us, teaching can be as spontaneous as “riding a bicycle, playing a piece of music, [or] interviewing a patient” (p. 30). He explains that reflection occurs when an action is “interrupted by a surprise” (p. 30). The reflector is suddenly forced to ask herself “What is this?” and at the same time “What understandings and strate- gies of mine have led me to produce this?” (p. 30). And then something new is constructed—a solution, a perspective, a strategy, or an insight. The surprise trig- gers us to reexamine taken for granted assumptions, rather than reinforce estab- lished beliefs. It pushes us into the muddiness of uncertainty. Connecting it to teaching, Schön (1995) writes, “It is what a good teacher does as she tries to make sense of a pupil’s puzzling question, seeking to discover, in the midst of classroom discussion, just how the pupil understands the problem at hand” (p. 30). In some ways, this is reflection at its purest and most authentic. It is the thinking that occurs when you are enacting practice amid uncertainty and complexity. As we read Schön, we have to wonder whether he could have been influenced by poststructural feminism, or been in agreement with some of our arguments. His construct of reflection-in-action, for example, relies on an understanding of identity as dynamic and unstable, of experiences as socially constructed, and of knowledge built on “uncertainties, misrecognitions, ignorances, and silences” (Britzman 1993, p. 22). It is a way of thinking that acknowledges the unknowable and unpredictable in teaching (Coia and Taylor 2013) and requires us to give up looking for the right answer. Instead we are invited to shake things up (Lather 2006; St. Pierre 2000; Weedon 1987), destablilize meaning, and disrupt our beliefs and judgments. For
56 L. Coia and M. Taylor teaching is much like the way Lucas, the actress in Fun Home, describes performing the same play night after night. She reflects: “One tip that my great acting teacher gave me was ‘if it’s the exact same show every day, then you’re not actually listen- ing to the other person.’ Because you don’t say a line the exact same every day, and if you do, that means you’re not actually listening to the person” (Garcia 2015, para. 10). So with teaching, each act of teaching is new as you listen afresh. If we are working in what Schön (1995) calls the swamplands of teaching, spaces that are ambiguous, uncertain, and complex, technical solutions will never address our teaching challenges and dilemmas. We need to listen afresh to ourselves and others. We need an intuitive means to “reflect-in-action,” to navigate the middle ground between theory and practice, and this may require adopting a new way of thinking, namely, poststructural feminism. 3.4 Wading In: Adopting a Poststructural Feminist Reflective Stance If you can talk to me in ways that show you understand that your knowledge of me, the world, and “the Right thing to do” will always be partial, interested, and potentially oppres- sive to others, and if I can do the same, then we can work together on shaping and reshaping alliances for constructing circumstances in which students of difference can thrive. (Ellsworth 1994, p. 322) The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large, however great their technical interest may be, while in the swamp lie the problems of greatest human concern. The practitioner is con- fronted with a choice. Shall he remain on the high ground where he can solve relatively unimportant problems according to his standard of rigor, or shall he descend to the swamp of important problems where he cannot be rigorous in any way he knows how to describe. (Schön 1995, p. 28) What does reframing our reflective practice through a poststructural feminist lens mean for our teaching, for our students? In the spirit of what we have already suggested, what it means in and for our practice can be traced and a landscape sug- gested, but the particulars will always remain particular. In other words, we cannot prescribe a recipe for poststructural feminist reflective practice or a list of instruc- tions. All we can do is provide some guidelines to consider, but they will need to be appropriately sized to fit within a particular teaching context. We encourage others to examine what Foucault calls “the acts, gestures, discourses that up until then had seemed to go without saying” (quoted in Miller 1993, p. 235) and problematize and challenge them. We have suggested that for reflective practice to be meaningful for those commit- ted to social justice, several issues need to be considered. First, the reflection has to be aimed at improving practice, but the purpose of that improvement must be clear. It is possible, for example, to aim for better scores on a test, or obedient students who do not question your teaching. If the purpose of reflecting on practice is a vital
3 Let’s Stay in the Swamp: Poststructural Feminist Reflective Practice 57 part of our work to make our teaching more just and equitable, both locally and in the broader context of teaching, then the form of reflection must mirror these goals. At the very least, this means that reflection extends beyond the classroom walls to the world outside and that we must recognize the world in our classroom. How we reflect will also be influenced by how we conceptualize teaching for social justice. Poststructural feminism has the potential to transform reflective prac- tice by focusing not just on the self but how the self is constructed through language in social and political contexts. How we reflect, which form we use, and what our process is, all need to be open to examination. This continuous awareness of the self in motion cannot be limited to the period of reflection: It cannot pretend to be merely synchronic. Thus, perhaps most importantly how we reflect should be situated in a theory of the self that recognizes the construction of self over time, by and with oth- ers. This is ongoing: We are never “finished.” We are always in the process of becoming. In any reflective exercise, it is also important to recognize explicitly the role language and narrative play in understanding and exhibiting the self in temporal, social, and historical contexts. This means looking beyond the immediate situation, drawing on our pasts, our wider social context, and our understandings of the world as we work in the present to create a more meaningful and just future. It is useful to see what poststructural feminist reflective practice might look like in action. Co-/autoethnography, a methodology we developed and have employed over the past 15 years (Coia and Taylor 2007; Taylor and Coia 2009), can be used to explore the swampland. This methodology has many of the features we now see as necessary for the robust theory of reflective practice we are developing here. Our ongoing use of co-/autoethnography has equipped us with the tools to keep us mind- ful as we wade carefully into the deep swamplands of uncertainty and unknowabil- ity. Our process echoes Schön’s encouragement to create and construct meaning in the muddiness, where answers are not being sought but rather possible interpreta- tions emerge. While not addressing all the challenges of reflective practice, this methodology provides a way forward. What does co-/autoethnography involve? It integrates the autobiographical char- acteristics of self-narrative within a dialogic context of collaborative researchers working together to extend and deepen reflection. As co-/autoethnographers, we compose stories that are drawn from our own past and present lived experiences as teacher educators. We then investigate these narratives collaboratively through a cyclical process of literacy practices that include writing, rewriting, and sharing stories, discussion of pre- and post-writing, reflective writing and response, analysis of theory and research, and the collaborative generation of new texts. It is a messy endeavor that can be fluid at times and other times quite labored, but, as we write, “Our conversations often help us to get through the tensions” (Coia and Taylor 2009, p. 12). Composing these co-/autoethnographies together frequently leads us to new understandings about our roles as teacher educators. We use co-/autoethnography to explore specific issues that arise in our teaching, such as negotiating authority in graduate classes or how, as feminist teachers, we work with the contradictions of the first day of class where there is pressure to tell
58 L. Coia and M. Taylor and say or even “sell” our courses. Here, however, to illustrate the process, it is instructive to revisit our co-/autoethnography that explored the roots and conse- quences of our individual and collective commitment to education in areas of high poverty and where students experience multiple forms of oppression (Taylor and Coia 2006). In this case, we began with fragmentary stories of our beginnings as teachers in London and New York, quickly fanning out across relationships that influenced us at the time. These included short pieces on relatives, Monica’s grand- mother, for example, and our work with political movements, such as the antiracist movement in East London in the late 1970s. The artifacts we produced included reworked memory pieces, actual notes and mementos from the period, and current audio files of conversations between us where we tell stories of our past. In between our meetings, we also wrote formal “letters” that seek to explain or describe at greater length an incident or event. We worked in quotes from papers and recom- mendations for readings as we were reminded or came across others who illumi- nated or provided a different perspective on our experience. As we were doing this work, there came a writing together, as all the postings on the walls, the handwritten notes, playful plays on connections, and semi-fictional interviews slowly morphed into one piece: a co-/autoethnography that helped us see how and why we separately and together came to live in professional spaces with similar commitments. For us, the value of co-/autoethnography is its acknowledgment of “the personal while recognizing the social construction of our identity and practices” (Coia and Taylor 2009, p. 15). This methodology places as central the relationships through which meaning is negotiated collaboratively. We “write into each other’s lives blending our own stories in the telling, retelling, interpretation and reinterpretation of our experience” (Taylor and Coia 2006, p. 61). Drawing from our personal and professional identities, we recognize and also construct aspects of ourselves. How does co-/autoethnography do this? For one thing, it eschews the idea of sole authorship of the reflection. We understand that engaging in reflection together pro- vides another dimension to our work, enabling us to delve into the space between ourselves and others. In our writing, thinking, and talking about ourselves as the particular people we are, we give importance to ourselves: Who is thinking is impor- tant, but it is always considered in the context of how we have been constructed and construct ourselves. Thus, our gender, social class, and other social identities are integral to how we position ourselves and are positioned in relation to our practice. By always including the world, issues of power are at the forefront, and through the focus on language and its role in constructing the self, we invite our many selves to complicate the reflection, without the need for them to compete or be elided. Said differently, co-/autoethnography honors all of the complex characteristics of the self that interplay in practice. It recognizes the multiple, fluid, and dynamic nature of the self while also acknowledging its individuality and uniqueness, alongside the ways in which it is constructed with and by others and the context in which we work and live. This methodology “mirrors how we engage with one another as teachers and people” (Taylor and Coia 2009, p. 176). Importantly for us as poststructural feminists, this reflective practice creates a fluidity: between our teaching and our lived lives, between all the selves with which
3 Let’s Stay in the Swamp: Poststructural Feminist Reflective Practice 59 we are in relation, between our spoken communication and our intuitive communi- cation, and, perhaps just as interestingly, between teacher education and other cre- ative fields. Teacher education as a practice becomes, from this view, more creative: an artistic endeavor. Our process is nomadic, inviting a mixture of improvisation as well as knowl- edge from experiences in our past, present, and future. Co-/autoethnography allows us to “move about” (Minha-ha, 1986/1987) because the swamplands of practice have no clear or set bounds, and if we stay in one place, thought, or framework for too long, we could become stuck. We cannot predict the challenges we will face; there is a riskiness to recognizing we are in the swampland and insisting on staying there. But the swampland is not a desert. When we look around, we are not alone. Co-/autoethnography insists on the role of others in the construction of our knowledge of our practice and our ability to improve it. This methodology allows us to make our assumptions problematic while at the same time incites us to take a stand: to place as central our convictions around issues of feminism and more generally social justice. It invites us to reflect-in-action, rec- ognizing that to be feminist teachers means to be engaged in action on an ongoing basis. It also honors the everyday as sites for reflection on issues of power and authority. Beyond this, however, it is important in closing to say something of the condi- tions that need to exist for poststructural feminist reflective practice to be effective. In any of these reflective practices, relationships play a central role. By engaging in reflection collaboratively, there is opportunity to examine the self in relation to oth- ers and also in relation to the sociohistorical world at large. And if relationships become one of the catalysts for criticality and change, then they need to be cared for and tended to. This means that when we work alongside others and write into their narratives, we have to welcome them as whole people who bring their personal and professional selves as well as their past, present, and future. These sorts of relation- ships, like the one we have nurtured over the past 15 years through our co-/autoeth- nographic research, are authentic and therefore at times fragile and precious. They require consistent time spent together, whether in person or through other means such as electronic media and a shared commitment to social justice teaching. Additionally, trust and a clarity that the relationship takes precedence enable us to take risks, navigate uncertainty together, and actively listen to one another. This is ultimately a feminist notion, of focusing on creating a safe space and community to explore and reflect on our lived experiences as teachers and women. Co-/autoethnography is just one way of enacting poststructural feminist reflec- tive practice. There are others. It could, for example, inform the use of journals, case studies, collaborative autobiographical work, fictional ethnographies, and other forms of autoethnography. But whatever approach is taken, it is crucial that reflection is always seen as ongoing and always multidirectional, lighting some parts of the swamp as others recede for a moment, to be illuminated by ourselves or others, in the next.
60 L. Coia and M. Taylor 3.5 C onclusion This is how I live, I am thinking. (Smith 2015, p. 73) The insistence that the oppressed engage in reflection on their concrete situation is not a call to armchair revolution. On the contrary, reflection – true reflection – leads to action. (Freire 2000, p. 66) Feminism insists we always take into account who is thinking and what they are thinking about. Poststructural feminism forces us not only to always look at how power operates in our daily lives in different ways but also to avoid binary and over- simplistic ways of understanding our experience. Recognizing that knowledge is co-constructed under conditions of uncertainty and ultimately unknowability, post- structural feminism encourages us to “play” with discourse as a way of being more honest about our experience. We do this within a sociopolitical and historical con- text that continues to reproduce inequities, consistently reminding us of the need to take action against injustice. Although Schön recognizes the sociocultural context of reflective practice, too frequently this dimension has been downplayed, and the enactment of reflection becomes apolitical. Thus, the common understanding of reflective practice tends to abstract the individual from her wider sociocultural and political context. This is particularly troubling in the arenas of both teacher education and K–12 public edu- cation, where policy decisions on issues such as curriculum standards and student assessments are made without input from educators or where their input is severely circumscribed. In this restrictive environment, a feminist perspective on reflective practice can open the door of the classroom to the world and invite political actions that expand her sphere of influence locally, regionally, or even nationally. Our post- structural feminist lens transforms or reimagines reflective practice as a political endeavor with an explicit focus on recognizing power both when it is unequal and needs to be challenged and when it can be used for action to promote social justice practices. Making this shift is possible because of a shared commitment against reductionist positivist epistemologies with their emphasis on measurable performa- tive outcomes. If reflective practice is to become a means of empowerment, then it requires a continuous focus on criticality and most importantly action. Poststructural feminist reflective practice has the possibility of being an anti-oppressive vehicle that uses a teacher’s power to address various levels of injustice, both ideological and operational. This complex process reveals the multiple dimensions of power and resistance and the importance of navigating the in-betweens. When poststruc- tural feminist reflective practice is enacted, there is a potential for the world to change. Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. (Thoreau 1862, p. 666)
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Chapter 4 Reflective Practice: Ancient Wisdom and Practice—Australian Indigenous Reflections in Teacher Education Through Shared Storying Nerida Blair and Brooke Collins-Gearing Abstract The one thing that all Australians, or people living in Australia, have in common is that they walk in Aboriginal Countrys every day. Countrys that, when respected, seen and read appropriately, when listened to and heard, when felt, teach us about our interconnectedness to everything around us. In this chapter, where we craft and use a notation that is reflective of Australian Indigenous Knowings, we Story the power of reflective practice when engaging with how we live in Country. Reflection is an ancient wisdom inherent in Indigenous Knowings. Our reflective practice embraces our connections with the world, our ability to live as part of the world, rather than distinct from it. Our world and our world view privileges Indigenous Knowings showcased here through the construct of Lilyology. In this chapter we Story our shared experiences as Aboriginal practitioners, as Aboriginal academics engaging with pre-service teachers in Australia, in the hope that we can respond to the question “How can we speak to those non-Indigenous people who are only beginning to understand Australian Indigenous concepts of Country? 4.1 I ntroduction See the land...the beauty. Hear the land...the story. Feel the land … the spirit. (Harrison 2013) N. Blair (*) 63 Australian Catholic University, North Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected] B. Collins-Gearing University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2017 R. Brandenburg et al. (eds.), Reflective Theory and Practice in Teacher Education, Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices 17, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-3431-2_4
64 N. Blair and B. Collins-Gearing The one thing that all Australians, or people living in Australia, have in common is that they walk in Aboriginal Countrys1 every day, Countrys that, when respected, seen and read appropriately, listened to and heard and felt, teach us about our inter- connectedness to everything around us. In this chapter, we Story2 the power of reflective practice when engaging with how we live in Country. We do this by Storying3 our shared experiences as Aboriginal practitioners and as Aboriginal aca- demics engaging with preservice teachers in Australia, in the hope that we can respond to the question “How can we speak to those non-Indigenous people who are only beginning to understand Australian Indigenous concepts of Country?” Reflection is an ancient wisdom inherent in Indigenous Knowings4, it garnishes connectedness and relatedness, to our new old knowledge, to each other, to our Elders and to Country (Blair 2015a). New old knowledge we see as the slowly emerging awareness in Western scientific and philosophical notions of time and space of the ancient understandings of Aboriginal Ways of Knowing. There is rec- ognition that this knowledge is still relevant and applicable in a contemporary, glo- balised and digital world. Kovach (2009), Wilson (2008) and Arbon (2008), in articulating Indigenous research methodologies, see the practice of reflection as relational and in writing this chapter we aim to demonstrate this. We situate our- selves and our teaching and research within an unstable, constantly shifting nexus between western scientific educational demands while engaging with and listening to Storys that come from Country and Aboriginal ways of Knowing. An intimate and dialogical ontological pedagogy is emerging for us from our teaching experi- ences, our research journeys and our personal self-reflexive practices, all the while being manifested in the physical environment of the Country on which we walk, engage with and facilitate connection and relatedness with. We Story this to shed light on reflective practice from a different cultural perspective: two Australian Aboriginal women’s perspectives within a framework known as Lilyology. Our reflective practice embraces our connections with the world, our ability to live as part of the world, rather than distinct from it. Our world and our world view privilege Indigenous Knowings showcased here through the construct of Lilyology. 1 “Country refers to lands, and waters, ecosystems of both and the world of the skies above us. Country/Countrys is the term we have chosen to use to describe Aboriginal Countrys, spaces and places. It is capitalised and pluralised to give respect to our diversity. The term Country embodies ecological systems that are so much a part of Indigenous Knowings; it is not just limited to geo- graphical space and place. We have chosen to spell the plural differently to embrace distinctness of concept” (Blair 2015a, p. xv). 2 “We have chosen to use the term Story/Storys to reflect and show respect for Indigenous diversity and Knowing of the concept of Story. The spelling of the plural—Storys—reflects cultural distinct- ness of the concept” (Blair 2015a p. xv). 3 Storying is used here as a verb and embodies Indigenous Story telling from an Indigenous context and centre. 4 We have used the term Indigenous Knowings throughout this text to identify Indigenous knowl- edge as something different and distinct to Western Knowledge. “The word Knowing is capitalised and pluralised to reflect and respect diversity across Indigenous Countrys” (Blair 2015a, p. xv).
4 Reflective Practice: Ancient Wisdom and Practice—Australian Indigenous… 65 We5 invite you to participate in a walk through Country, up a mountain and through bush, a trek that requires, as we were taught, deep listening, the ability to attend deeply and to see and feel intuitively, skills our concept of reflective practice demands of us. We are mindful of Lillian Holt’s words about teachers not fearing the hard work and being able “to explore one’s own discomfort” (Lampert as cited in Phillips and Lampert 2012, p. 93). As we delve into our own discomfort, we invite you to walk with us knowing every reader will respond to our reflections using their own lenses. 4.2 Walking in Country: An Ontology of Co-becoming6 The land gives off different energies in different places. At least, that is the experi- ence we have had of it and a layer of our understanding of Aboriginal ways of being, doing and knowing in the world. Our experiences of different places have revealed hot, powerful westerly winds in the dry seasons, the humidity and pressure of wet ones, infinitesimal blue land and seascapes and a Milky Way arch of sparkling stars. For this chapter, we return to the clarity and crispness of the mountain Country in the morning. We, as a Murri woman from Kamilaroi, and a Wakka Wakka/Kulin and quite possibly Darkinjung woman, walk and write this chapter on the lands of the Darkinjung peoples, and we sincerely acknowledge and pay our respects to the Country, Custodians and Ancestors. We walk Darkinjung Country with a non- Aboriginal woman who is not writing this chapter with us but was a part of our relatedness and connectedness to Country. We decided to experience the mountain together because two of us had never been there before and the other had recently learned that it was protected by a Possum Woman. This had resounded significantly with us—Storys of women con- nected with Country that revealed female ways of Knowing. Female energy had always been our bond and has bonded the two authors over many years—through journeys of learning, loss, love, births and deaths. These Storys connect us. They are delicately spun from intricate strands of moments that have become woven together into a strong string that links us to our understanding of Aboriginal ways of reading Country. So we are walking the mountain, known to be a woman’s mountain, for insight, strength and a solid foundation beneath our sometimes-barefoot feet. Our main reason for taking this journey together, and with one other woman, who ema- nates a strength, confidence and awareness that reveals synchronicities between female energies from diverse cultures, is to clear our heads of “white noise” (Carnes 2011, p. 2), the traffic, the industrial drones, the buzz of appliances and engines and the constant low purring of dominant discourses that shape and mould our lives. 5 We have chosen to write in first person as this showcases our subjectivity an essential element of Indigenous research methodologies. 6 “Co-becoming” is a term used by Bawaka Country et al. (2015).
66 N. Blair and B. Collins-Gearing Our shared lens of the world has been increasingly guided, through different stages of our different lives, by listening to Storys of, about and from Country. We have found that Storys such as these provide practical, physical and metaphysical knowledge about how to read the world around us. Max Dulumunmun Harrison has referred to this as learning by the three principles of watching, seeing and listening. In his sharing of knowledge in My People’s Dreaming, Harrison explains that the land is full of stories and energy: “There is plenty in that library up there, it is the text of the land. The library is open, it has its own dictionary to explain the lan- guages spoken there” (Harrison 2013, p. 39). Rocks, trees and waterholes have Storys and, with Storys, knowledge. Rocks can tell the Storys of Mothering, or Birthing, of creating, nourishing and respecting all of life’s energies. Nestled near such female rocks can be Storys that reveal insights about plants that offer support to such female business. We see real-life, beneficial, practical and spiritual strengths in these interwoven, interconnected, Storys of patterns, rhythms and movements. So much strength that such Storys are significantly shaping the way we understand our own subjectivity and positionality in all areas of our lives—as women, mothers, aunts, daughters, sisters and teachers. We start our walk at the edge of a barrier entrance to the mountain. We silently and individually acknowledge Country, seeking permission to walk and enter. One of us is possibly from this Country and two are guests on Darkinjung Country; two of us live in Darkinjung Country and the other lives in neighbouring Awabakal Country. Our rituals of introduction are different but similar. We have a plan, an intended destination. Direction is a powerful means for reading the world, knowing the direction one is facing, the direction from which something comes and the direc- tion you intend to go. How we learn this and experience this can significantly impact on our ability to use it. There are many Storys we have heard about how the direc- tion of a wind can reveal information about what is to come or why it has occurred. Our trip to the mountain was relying on a vague sense of direction and one largely guided by Western signifiers, for example, the signpost at the gate entrance to the mountain walk. This sign revealed certain information from a certain angle of vision on the world and we knew that other directional codes were all around us—the sun, our shadows, for instance, but many more we don’t have the ability to read. So we read what we could to orient ourselves and headed up the mountain. We would like to mention here that we are intentionally using a variety of tenses and indications of time in the writing of this chapter. We obviously are not walking the mountain together at the specific time that we write that we are. We did walk it together and learn from it and then spent/spend much reflective time re-talking it. We would like to narrate the story of our lived walk as a way of also trying to express our understanding of critical and reflective practices. We decided to write this chapter this way because it suggests the way we tend to reflect on what happens both inside and outside of the classroom. Whereas in written cultures, the “relation- ship between the reader and the storyteller is conceptual, not tangible, in an oral culture, story lives, develops and is imbued with the energy of the dynamic relation- ship between teller and listener” (Kovach 2009, p. 101). This dynamic relationship is dependent on you being willing to walk with us. Walk with us through different
4 Reflective Practice: Ancient Wisdom and Practice—Australian Indigenous… 67 tenses and timings through voices in differing spheres of time and tense. We are inviting you to experience our Story from our perspective; like our walk, it does not begin at Point A and end at Point B following a linear trail; it is “iterative rather than linear often told in a circular or spiral theme, with each thematic repetition or spiral adding a little more”. This contrasts “with the step-by-step, linear progression of an Aristotelian argument” (Youngblood Henderson 2000, p. 266). In our realities, a “focal point is more important than a starting point; where there exists only a web of connections, there is no beginning as such” (Hokari 2000, p. 8). This walk began with a linear progression in mind, but as we tuned our eyes, ears and senses in to the Country, we became more discursively connected to it, that is, we felt it (beneath our feet and around us; we heard it—the songs and languages of flora and fauna; we breathed it in). The way in which we situate ourselves in the university academy and in our physical classrooms is constantly being shaped and renegotiated by our own ongoing learning journeys, by the retuning of our senses. We are playing with the tense because our understanding at the time of walking and our understanding now has moved and shifted. The shifts that happened, thinking it while we walked it, as well as further movement after we spent time reflecting on it, are what we consider to be parts of our embodied learning from it. The writing of it was/is requiring patience and time to reflect. It involves reflection that is constant; that exists in spiral and circular form—it is not linear. So we walk in the direction we think is the one we want, our senses trying to tune in through the surrounding “white noise” (Carnes 2011, p. 2). Roslyn Carnes, a non- Aboriginal woman, has written about pervasive whiteness that remains around us from a colonial past and is perpetuated by the power and privilege of dominant discourses. She believes academic intentions need to correspond with being “allied listeners” (Carnes 2011, p. 6) if the academy is to ever relearn and rethink its dia- logue with Aboriginal peoples, knowledges and ways of knowing, which are all manifested through the physical landscape. Our desire to experience the mountain together was largely due to our continued efforts to negotiate working within domi- nant institutional notions of education and, therefore, knowledge that is considered legitimate. There are times we see powerful tensions between Western constructs of the world built on Aboriginal lands. This can be frustrating when it is acknowledged that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest living cultures on earth (Sveiby and Skuthorpe 2006), yet a more recent arrival supplants, denies and even silences them. There seem to be direct correlations between governmental policies through the two centuries of colonisation and an inability to listen to knowledge that sustained life and land for over 100,000 years (according to Western measurements of time) (Battiste and Youngblood Henderson 2000; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; Youngblood Henderson 2000). The dominant perception of what is seen as valid knowledge in the education system in Australia privileges the words and voices of non-Aboriginal peoples (an institutional organisation built from a Social Darwinist and Cartesian lens of the world). We believe in the knowledges of Aboriginal Australia because such knowledge systems sustained, nourished and cared for the land and its peoples long before Western civilisation awoke. Carnes defines “white noise” as referring to “the interference created by dominant colonial-centric world views and practices
68 N. Blair and B. Collins-Gearing that leads to fuzzy, indistinct reception of Indigenous voices by non-Indigenous researchers” (Carnes 2011, p. 23). We are not non-Indigenous researchers, but we are positioned predominantly in a non-Indigenous system, and we have to be cogni- sant of what we do and don’t know, so we return to walking the land. As we walk beneath the often overarching canopy of trees around us, eucalyptus, tree ferns, wattles, are only a few we can easily acknowledge; we focus on our breathing, our senses and our movements. We know that beneath the beautiful scen- ery are interconnected, interrelated life systems and Storys that, if you know how to read them, share deeper layers of information that are of both physical and meta- physical dimensions. The blossoming of certain plants, the calls of certain birds and the appearance of certain insects all whisper Storys about the season, about the right time to perform certain actions and about the sentience of all Country. Trekking onwards, we sometimes talk and mostly try to pay attention to a slight breeze brush- ing against our skins, the smells of the earth, the lights and the sounds of this place that look towards the rising sun. When we stand in our classrooms, within the con- fines of Western institutes, we carry with us a cognisance of the land beneath the concrete and colonial structures. We are trying to pay attention to how knowledge that comes from Aboriginal ways of knowing can become apparent in the four- walled environment. Story, being one of the ways we are most drawn to. Now, walk- ing the mountain, we need to try to leave behind our Western lens and pay attention to the natural rhythms around us. The idea is that we walk with an awareness of a knowledge system, largely unknown to us, but apparent in the landscape, known to those who cared for it for generations. We were not raised and trained in the Country we now walk. We were not raised and trained in the knowledge of Country from our Aboriginal heritages. We were raised and trained in Western paradigms of education—institutional and formal ones that contributed to policies of separation, assimilation and denial. That is, we constantly need to untrain our thinking to dig through the white noise and align it alongside our awareness that an older knowledge exists beneath. To do this, we reflect on our place against a framework of Lilyology (Blair 2015a). Lilyology being the space in between Indigenous Knowings and Western knowledges, the space in which we as Indigenous women privilege our Indigeneity and privilege our ontology and the space where Indigenous and non-Indigenous Knowings and prac- tices coexist. Nakata (2007) refers to similar conceptual space as the cultural inter- face where people can play with different concepts and ideas, learning to value and pay respect to each other knowing that different ontologies are at work, a place from which we all nourish and enrich our lives. 4.3 Lilyology: Exploring Cultural Identity and Positioning Prior to the colonial world Aboriginal Australians had complex, spiritual systems of Knowings. At this time there were over 500 different Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations. Each nation had its own system of Knowing. Each nation had its
4 Reflective Practice: Ancient Wisdom and Practice—Australian Indigenous… 69 own language. Each nation had its own ontologies, rich, spiritual and complex. Ontologies comfortably localised and embedded within changing ecosystems. Since the invasion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Countrys, the Knowings and the ontologies have changed as all do—changed in response to the landscapes we now find ourselves in. As the authors of this chapter, we Know our sense of place, we know our Country, but we don’t know our language. This does not make our cultural connections, our relatedness and our identities any less connected and related to our Countrys. It does mean we have had to find an alternative language to share our Storys. Lilyology was crafted by Blair as a means to do this (Blair 2015a). Whilst Lilyology has been defined now in numerous places and on a number of dif- ferent occasions, it is important to remain close to the original concept. Lilyology Storys images, images of water lilies, sweet potatoes, spiders and brick walls, eso- teric perhaps, but a means to engage with age-old teachings in a contemporary way. The water lily metaphor encapsulates all that Indigenous Knowings are for us as Indigenous women exploring and experiencing Indigenous Knowings: [The waterlily] is grounded in Country; water Country, through rhizomes which explore, delving deep in a subterranean world further exploring where the light transits from dark to bright along the surface of the water. The rhizomes are nourishing rich sources of carbohy- drates providing and storing energy for future growth. New roots cascade from the rhi- zomes in weblike arrangements and complexities. Rhizomes metaphorically represent Spirit Knowings embedded in different Countrys; the different waterways that waterlilys exist within. The rhizomes hold the Spirit Knowings, the nutrients. The waterlily has a strong slender stem which in this Story is Indigenous Knowings emanating from Spirit Knowings. It has wide, flat leaves that float on top of the water, here representing the many voices that are Indigenous Knowings; human, animal and spirit. As we move up the stem and beyond the leaves we find a fruit pod which houses the seeds that can be eaten raw or cooked; providing nourishment. The seed becomes the flower which represents the ‘Storying’ through many different genres. The flower has petals which are not homogenous and which overlap each other like the many Storys our Knowing presents. The petals are what is visible, the different expressions of Indigenous Knowings; the inspirational and environmental literacies so well presented by Hanlen (2007). (Blair 2015b, p. 194) Inspirational literacies as identified by Hanlen (2007) are those forms of com- munication that become tangible not through the written word but through images and symbols, which may be on different surfaces, for example, trees, in and on people’s bodies. Environmental literacies on the other hand draw on the many ele- ments from the environment to help us interpret and understand the world; for example, the weather, stars and flora can help us to generate an understanding and knowledge of medicines (Hanlen 2007). Going back to the lily, the varied visible elements of the petals are held together by a stamen that becomes visible expressions of our Storys. The stamen in any plant regenerates life. As evidenced in Blair: There are as many different waterlilys, as there are different Indigenous Knowings. Every element of the waterlily is connected and dependent on each other for growth and suste- nance for generations. Every element is connected to Country in its broadest sense, the ecological environment; water, land, soil, air, sun, light, dark, atmosphere. (Blair 2016, p. 105)
70 N. Blair and B. Collins-Gearing The dominant lens that Western education presents and reinforces constructs the world so that humans are separate from all other animate and inanimate species and objects (Arbon 2008; Arrows 2006; Battiste and Youngblood Henderson 2000; Bawaka Country et al. 2015; Cajete 2004; Martin 2008). This anthropocentric lens classifies, separates and compartmentalises humans hierarchically. Notions of “objectivity” have been attached to the wearers of this lens, often supported by a belief in scientific, empirical “facts” and “evidence” (Orr 2004). How we see our- selves is linked to how we see the space around us—what is visible and included in our knowledge horizons. Watson and Huntington (2008) refer to the way we see ourselves as an “epistemic space” and argue that “how knowers conceptualize space help[s] constitute their epistemologies” (p. 260). Epistemic refers to involving knowledge or how knowledge is acquired. So then an epistemic space becomes the way in which this knowledge is carried out, performed, received, understood and used. These writers are arguing that the way we live our normal, everyday life com- prises these epistemic spaces, and they shape how we do or don’t see what is hap- pening around us. So we are trying to change our lens—in the classroom and out on Country. For instance, if you were to dive underwater in the Great Barrier Reef using an ultraviolet lens, as you journey underwater, you would see your surround- ings differently compared to the normal lens you might wear. Many coral reefs and fish are comprised of ultraviolet elements invisible to the human eye. These colour patterns exist in the external physical environment, but our normal refraction of light can’t see them. Switch to UV lenses and the light transmission changes to reveal patterns around you, colours and movements. The water, the coral and the fish are able to be seen in a different light. In Seeing the Light: Aboriginal Law, Learning and Sustainable Living in Country, Kwaymullina (2005) explains this patterning: This pattern is stable, but not fixed. Think of it in as many dimensions as you like – but it has more than three. This pattern has many threads of many colours, and every thread is connected to, and has a relationship with, all of the others. The individual threads are every shape of life. Some – like human, kangaroo, paperbark – are known to western science as ‘alive’; others, like rock, would be called ‘non-living’. But rock is there, just the same. Human is there, too, though it is neither the most nor the least important thread – it is one among many; equal with the others. The pattern made by the whole is in each thread, and all the threads together make the whole. Stand close to the pattern and you can focus on a single thread; stand a little further back and you can see how that thread connects to others; stand further back still and you can see it all – and it is only once you see it all that you can recognise the pattern of the whole in every individual thread. The whole is more than its parts, and the whole is in all its parts. This is the pattern that the Ancestors made. It is life, creation, spirit, and it exists in country. (para 10) Colonisation in Australia brought with it the concept of terra nullius, an under- standing and law/lore that Aboriginal peoples did not exist because we did not erect fences, brick walls. We metaphorically see the lens of the land that came with the colonisers as bricks. The associated patterns of time and space are linear, straight and reinforce compartmentalisation as part of its foundation and stability. The wall
4 Reflective Practice: Ancient Wisdom and Practice—Australian Indigenous… 71 that these bricks build has established the academy we now work in. We often feel like we are banging our heads against this wall. Lilyology further images Kwaymullina’s Story with other characters playing their parts and highlights the engagements of multiple senses, spiders and sweet potatoes: Spiders weave fine, strong transparent webs connecting across colliding trajectories, or the spaces in-between where vibrations are felt from one end to the other. Webs that pattern and connect. A spider Knows when an insect, an intruder is hitting it and whether it is safe to approach. The spider also Knows, by the vibrations, if there is something out there that is caught which is dangerous. So it knows not to go near it, but circle around it and hope it breaks free. In this way the spider isn’t killed by the rough actions of whatever it is that he has caught in his web. It is the same with us. We have to learn to feel the vibrations. (Blair 2015a, p. 39) This is something we can feel with each other. We should “tune ourselves to that” (Randall 2003, p. 20). We, therefore, learn from this and become to know that we should tune ourselves to Country and everything this embodies. Sweet potatoes are the next image metaphored in Lilyology, these being rhi- zomes that we see: patterning and connecting Spirit Knowings which are grounded in Country; above and below the earth in water. Sweet potatoes radiate from a central nourishing core; one that sustains, energises and provides the nourishment necessary for growth. (Blair 2015a, p. 39) Lilyology is not only the elements of the water lily, the sweet potato, spiders and rhizomes. Lilyology can’t exist without an understanding of how it exists in relation to a Western context and Western knowledge. Western knowledge through Lilyology is metaphored and Storyed as a Brick Wall, the Academy (Fig. 4.1). It is in the in- between space evidenced in Lilyology that we continue our reflections on reflective practice. Beneath our feet, the earth is starting to slope downwards again; one of us knows that continuing to walk in this direction would bring us back to where we start, walking away from the mountain. So we stop. We become aware that we don’t seem to be going in the direction we had assumed; we aren’t heading towards the spot we had intended to reach. We try to listen. In order to Know than we need to “be still and pay attention” (Hokari 2000, p. 2). In being still and paying attention, we are totally reliant on the interplay of each and of all of our senses. We notice we have stopped at a spot where the track diverges three ways, with each of us three standing at the beginning of these separate paths. Our friend says “look” and bending down picks something up. Holding out her hand towards us, she reveals a clump of possum fur. Our hearts briefly stop and then pound harder. We look at each other, grinning but silenced. We engage with dadirri, inner, deep listen- ing and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us (Ungunmerr-Baumann in Atkinson 2002). We all take a moment to stop and think about this—where we are, where we have come, the Storys we have heard and the things we know. The knowledge we don’t know but
72 N. Blair and B. Collins-Gearing Fig. 4.1 Lilyology know is there. The possum fur, for us, is a signifier of the energy of the mountain. It is a physical, tangible sign to us that everything around us conveys deeper mean- ings, important Storys and valuable knowledge. We take our shoes off, and we stand on ancient land, knowing that the energy around us surpasses and transcends our everyday notions of time and space. Marcia Langton (1993) talks about the “temporal rhythms … of the sun and the moon; the tides; the monsoon and the … Aboriginal seasons” (p. 158) and the importance of having an awareness of this. She argues that our relation with the rhythms of country is also ontological: Relating to how the world is known and understood – and spiritual relations. In order to understand local cultural perceptions of place and environment … it is necessary to under- stand the local traditions of performative engagement with … places and local accounts of those engagements. (Langton 1993, p. 144) Knowing that we have walked in a direction not the one we thought, we decide to retrace our steps and watch anew. In some ways we are walking in circles, where there is now no focus, but we begin to see the webs of connections identified earlier.
4 Reflective Practice: Ancient Wisdom and Practice—Australian Indigenous… 73 We often feel a similar sense of confused direction in our roles as teachers in tertiary institutes. We are aware that most of our students, colleagues and supervisors relate to the world through a different lens. So we build our pedagogies from our understanding of the layered knowledge of Country best understood through Aboriginal ways of knowing, watching, seeing and listening. Heading back up the track, we come across another divergent path we did not notice the first time. It is signposted with a wooden engraved sign. Veering off to follow it, we arrive at a little lookout where we can see across Darkinjung lands. One of us notices another set of eyes, eagle eyes. Imagine what those eyes can see, what they know and what ancient paths they have flown. It is a majestic sea eagle, the totem of one of the authors.7 We know that the sea eagle travels the winds and thermals of the east coast, retracing ancient lines along estuaries and waterways. We know that one of the Storys the sea eagle shares is of when the mullet are running. We know that there are deeper Storys too. These Storys can benefit all of us—all aspects of living an educated, sustainable, nourishing and respectful life on this land. We decide that the nexus of the Western wooden signpost and the sign of the sea eagle reflect our own positioning in academia. We have been trained to read and follow certain signs yet we know that beneath those man-made ones are other ones. The Western world is, at varying speeds, coming to grips with the awareness that certain scientific paradigms need to be revisited: “Physicists like Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and David Bohm stressed the non-separable wholeness of the uni- verse of physical phenomena” (Shiva 2013, pp. 11–12). The ultimate irony of this hegemonic triumph is that in the twenty-first century the West is increasingly attempting to re-think and re-capture practices generated through the very respect for animals and nature that the early settlers so righteously scorned. (Tiffin and Huggan 2009, p. 1) There’s so much hope and knowledge embedded in the Storys that are shared by Aboriginal ways of Knowing. The potential to transform one’s worldview to encom- pass a responsibility to and respect for Country is created through such dialogues. These dialogues are where we create spaces for such ways of Knowing in the classroom. We accept that we have entered the mountain from a different place to the one we thought and let go of the intention to visit a certain site. The walk, the land, the pos- sum hair and the sea eagle will be our destined journey today instead. Heading back to the spot we entered from, just before we reach the man-made fence barrier, we look up. Three pelicans are circling overhead. Pelicans have come to mean to one of us a sign of the need to move on, pass into another realm. Seeing and hearing the pelicans, one for each of us, remind us we are being looked after and we are safe, and even though our walk was the “wrong” one, it was also the “right” walk for us 7 A totem is a part of very complex Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kinship systems which acknowledge “every part of Country is alive”, being a form of ordering the world (Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina 2010). In this instance, We are referring to the personal totem of one of the authors. For further information, go to http://sydney.edu.au/kinship-module/learning/4-totems. shtml a Kinship Module developed by Lynn Riley 2016.
74 N. Blair and B. Collins-Gearing at this time. We ready ourselves to move into another realm with strength gleaned from the walk we undertook, the walk that enabled our co-becoming with Country. Co-becoming with Country through a walk such as the one undertaken con- stantly evolves. It evolves as we reflect on our mountain walk. This is where we became mindful of what our reflective practice actually is. We revisit Mt. Kincumba in our minds with deep attention being paid to how we engage all of our senses. This reflective practice is a part of our ontological underpinning. We acknowledge “Country and everything in it encompasses an active participant in the world, shap- ing and creating it. It is far from a passive backdrop to human experience” (Bawaka Country et al. 2015, p. 270). Mt. Kincumba has been and remains more than a passive backdrop to our human experience. We began our walk with intent to go from Point A to Point B. We “lost our way” as we realised on the descent that we were not “paying attention” (Hokari 2000, p. 2) to the signs Country was showing us until we acknowledged we were lost—lost in our thoughts and lost in our focus and direction. When we stopped, tuned ourselves in and “co-became” with Country, we were able to “attend deeply” to Country—taking more from it and giving back more than we imagined. Country was patient with us. We were reminded of Hokari’s words about the Gurindji art of knowing “the (Gurindji) art of knowing is not always the way of searching, but often the way of paying attention” (Hokari 2000, p. 2). Here the Gurindji search for history involves paying attention, where you “can see, listen and feel the history around yourself if you are sensitive to know it” (Hokari 2000, p. 3). Research and education per se within a Eurocentric domain is essentially about “searching” for an answer to a question not “paying attention” to what is around you. 4.4 Space in Between: Showcasing Through Country, Story and Reflective Practice We have Storyed Country through our walk up Mt. Kincumba, but if this Story is listened to through the incorrect drum, is read and is seen using the incorrect lens, it will remain a miscommunication, a missed opportunity. Engaging with the in- between space is both challenging and exciting. It is a reminder that though Indigenous Knowings are different to Western knowledge, the differences don’t showcase one as superior or one as inferior; rather, both exist in their own right— they coexist and in so doing can create powerful and dynamic dialogue and dis- course leading to transformational learnings, teachings and Knowings. Let us now engage with the space in between as we Story a little more fully the two concepts, that of Country and Story. Understanding these will give all of us engaging with this chapter the scaffold necessary to embrace the dialogue from a non-judgemental space. We will then be able to better theoretically understand and experience reflec- tive practice from an Indigenous perspective, from the space in between. We can all
4 Reflective Practice: Ancient Wisdom and Practice—Australian Indigenous… 75 engage with the other chapters in this book to grow our own understanding of the conceptual and practice-focused differences. 4.4.1 C ountry We and the land are one. When you take it from us you kill the spirit that gives us life. We end up as shells of human beings, living in other people's countries. (Patten as cited in Watson 1998, p. 33) For Aboriginal Australians, “Country” was more than territory we fenced, fought over and lived on (Blair 2016, p. 107). As Patten clearly images, “we and the land are one” (as cited in Watson 1998, p. 33). Bird Rose (1996) explores the concept of Country as a nourishing terrain one that gives and receives life: Country is a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow which knows, hears, smells, takes notice, takes care, is sorry or happy. People talk to Country like a person; they speak to Country, sing to Country, worry about country, feel sorry for Country. (p. 7) Langton (2000) speaks about the concept of “place” clearly significant in any discussion of Country from within an Australian context. Places like that of Mt. Kincumba where we have embarked on our walk are “marked through kin and dreaming ties, not, physical inscriptions” (Langton 2000, p. 263). Places are identi- fied and experienced through “metaphysical relationships” (Langton 2000, p. 263). During our walk in the first instance, we were so intent on looking for the physical inscriptions that we missed the metaphysical relationships. We missed layers, depths of meaning and knowing. Until we saw and connected with the possum fur, we missed the sense of place and rights to place that were marked by ancestral connec- tions, which were passed down through Indigenous law, not simply through “humanly created signposts” (Langton 2000, p. 263). Elders are the custodians of law, and it is through their authority that our cultural memories become “inscribed in the places of tradition and such places become ‘site-markers’ of the remembering process and of identity itself” (Langton 2000, p. 263). Our site markers were the possum fur, the eagle and the pelicans. In Australia preinvasion, Country could not be bought and sold. There were no disputes over Country. “The land created the boundaries, not us” (McConchie 2003, p. 58). As stated by Blair (2016), people “moved across Country respectfully” (Blair 2016, p. 107) and across boundaries respectfully—different boundaries to Western knowledge, not less or more, just different. No brick walls but landforms and ecosystems. Aboriginal Australians have deep love and enormous feeling for Country. Our connection to Country cannot be overstated. Blair (2016) states: Indigenous Knowings are rooted in Country, like the waterlily. It is the source of our growth as individuals, as peoples, the source of our Storys with life, relatedness, spirit and timeless- ness. We acknowledge Country before speaking so as to connect to the hundreds of thou-
76 N. Blair and B. Collins-Gearing sands of years of Storys gone before us. We acknowledge Country to guide and nourish the journey of the moment. As Patten stated above “you take it from us you kill the spirit that gives us life” (as cited in Watson 1998 p. 33). Country is the essence of Indigenous Knowings. Storys are the expressions of our Knowings. “The Land must have people through whom it can talk”. (Arrente elder Margaret Kemarre Turner, in Kwaymullina 2014 in Blair 2016, pp. 107–108) As authors of this chapter, we Story through and with Darkinjung Country. 4.4.2 S tory The truth about storys is that that’s all we are. (King 2003, p. 2) Storys focus on the process of Knowledge (Youngblood Henderson 2000, p. 266). Here we Story an element of process, our reflective practice through our walk with Mt. Kincumba. In understanding this, Storys are therefore not just about content, nor are they accounts told for our entertainment (Fixico 2003, p. 37). Storys, as King states are, “all that we are” (King 2003, p. 2). Storys are “the vehi- cles that transmit Indigenous Knowings: the flower of the waterlilys. Storys have many dimensions and perspectives; the petals on the different lilys” (Blair 2016, p. 109). Kwaymullina (2014) crystallises these aspects of story beautifully: I come from generations of storytellers who told tales in words, painted them in art, and sung and danced them in rhythm with the seasons and the sun and the stars. The people were one with the storys and the storys one with the people, and every tale both embodied and sustained the whole. The Indigenous peoples of the globe have always understood the universe to be a continually enfolding and unfolding place where everything holds every- thing else. We had no fractured storys, until the colonisers arrived, bringing with them tales that divided people from people and people from the earth. Indigenous peoples learned to navigate these storys too; we had to if we wanted to survive. (Kwaymullina 2014, Para 1) We ask you to consider what you understand Story to be. We ask you to reflect on your own practice of storytelling, story-use. As you do this let us share a little more about Storys; Storys centred from and privileged through Lilyology. Storys are gifted through and as part of ceremony. Story can be sung, drawn, danced, per- formed, spoken and is multidimensional involving all body/mind senses whilst being shared on many canvases. The canvas can be the human body through painting and/or on rock, sand, bark whatever the terrain asserts is the appropriate medium. Each of these mediums have different space and are dynamic, transitory and fluid. Where to every action there is a story. (King 2003, p. 29) Hokari identifies that in Gurindji storying is “not for finding a right story it is for exploring several possibilities” (pp. 8–9): Maintaining the knowledge did not mean finding a ‘right’ story but widening the possibili- ties of storys. Information of different variations is preferred, pooled and maintained as a bundle of possibilities without judgement. Different storys which contradict each other, do not conflict, but simply coexist. (Hokari 2000, pp. 8–9)
4 Reflective Practice: Ancient Wisdom and Practice—Australian Indigenous… 77 When engaging with Indigenous Story, it is clear that “it takes a thousand voices to tell a story” (Wilshire 2006, p. 160). Remembering here signifies that there is no right story and that people individually contribute their voices and their perspec- tives, ideas and experiences as a part of this process. Storys are not simplistic. They have structure in which these arrays of voices harmonise through different move- ments. “Storys have layers; layers that a few people may Know and more layers that everyone Knows” (Blair 2016, p. 109). The role of the storyteller may also be dif- ferent to that in Western knowledge and Western understanding of story. “In Australian Aboriginal contexts the storyteller is often the listener at the same time as being the story teller. The story teller is often the one being spoken to” (Armstrong as cited in King 2003, p. 2). We are now the storytellers having experienced, lis- tened and paid attention to Mt. Kincumba who actively spoke to us. People not in tune with Lilyology often associate their own concept and elements of stories and storytelling with Indigenous Story/Storying. They understand story through this different lens and, for example, refer to Indigenous stories as “dream- time stories” which are fable-like, myths associated with a moral and which are purely oral; therefore reliant on people’s memory. They are considered “nice stories but stories that have been fabricated for one’s entertainment. In Indigenous com- munities around the world, memory is the repository of our Knowings” (Blair 2016, p. 109). Uncle Rueben Kelly once said, “when we started to write things down we forgot how to use our minds” (R. Kelly, personal communication with Blair, 2006). As Indigenous academics engaging with knowledge so text-centric, his words haunt us. Uncle Rueben’s words remind us of the power of Indigenous Knowings, the power of the mind. Engaging memory is fundamental when understanding Indigenous Knowings, Indigenous Knowings that privilege, in this case, Lilyology. Trudgen (2000) identi- fies that “from a very early age Yolgnu children from the Northern Territory are taught to carry and repeat messages accurately. In this instance understanding the information shared is not the main goal” (p. 104). Here it “does not matter that they may not understand; and they in fact are taught not to ask for meaning because it might be something they should not know about” (Trudgen 2000, p. 104). What is important is the use of the memory, the training of the memory, the mind. A different skill set is required when engaging with oral cultures, oral Knowings, than those required for engaging with written text. Learning the existing oral legacy involves intimate and endless listening to storys and dia- logue with elders and parents. This process takes time and patience. It is iterative rather than linear. The storys are told in a circular or spiral theme, with each thematic repetition or spiral adding a little. This can be contrasted with the step-by-step, linear progression of an Aristotelian argument. (Youngblood Henderson 2000, p. 266) Earlier in this chapter, we asked you to consider how you engage with story and what lens you use. Whilst reflecting on this, there is one final element of Story to share. This deals with how we listen to Story. Let us ask what is our strategy for listening. Benterrak (1996) suggests that “we only ‘hear’ what we want to hear about what shapes our disciplines” (p. 62), thereby illustrating a focus on Western
78 N. Blair and B. Collins-Gearing knowledges and Western concepts of story. Indigenous Storying requires different listening skills as evidenced by Youngblood Henderson; it requires an “iterative process, an endless need for listening, a repetition and spiralling of story” (Youngblood Henderson 2000, p. 266). David Unaipon asserted that story telling is “more like a dramatic performance and it contains the truths of his people” (Bell 1998, p. 394). To understand these truths, we must first understand, appreciate, and then respect the different Knowings. An understanding of the different elements of Story/Storying is challenging; it is a part of the “space in between” immanent in an understanding of Lilyology. It is this space that requires revising if we are to truly engage, to truly be reflective practitio- ners. We must therefore let go of the recipe we have for hearing Indigenous Storys and craft a new set of skills to listen respectfully in ways that engage all of our senses, those senses that we may need to truly appreciate the full affect of the dra- matic performance identified above by Unaipon. In order to Know then we need to “be still and pay attention” (Hokari 2000, p. 2). Reiterating Gurindji the art of Knowing is not always the way of searching, but often the way of paying attention. 4.5 Reflective Practice from the “Space in Between” If, as the Gurindji state, knowing is about paying attention and not searching for an answer to a question, then it is clear that reflective practice from an Indigenous per- spective, like the concept and knowing of Country and Story, is different; one is not better or worse, just different. The simplest “strategy” we have for embodying a reflective practice in any pro- fession is to listen. Beneath the bricks, the Western lens, the dominant notions of time and space that the colonial experience has built, is the oldest living culture on earth—sustainability, astronomy, literature, marine biology and theology are mani- fested in Country. If you were to listen to the aunts and uncles and the senior law- men and senior lawwoman, wherever they are from, they will tell you a similar story. To listen: This ‘outside’ story. Anyone can listen, kid, no-matter who but that ‘inside’ story you can’t say. If you go in Ring-place, middle of a Ring-place, you not supposed to tell im anybody … but oh, e’s nice! This story you follow. All bin dead long time ago, old man. One thousand, might be forty-two thousand year … Same story this. E made this story so we following. I following now. (Neidjie 1989, p. 101)
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