Developing and Sustaining Critical Reflection in Teacher Education

DEVELOPING AND SUSTAINING CRITICAL REFLECTION IN TEACHER EDUCATION John Smyth Deakin University It is interesting to speculate on the reasons for the recent upsurge of interest in what might be broadly described as a reflective approach to teacher education. While there is a good deal of contention at the moment as to precisely what this might mean, it is clear that we have been down a very similar track before, most notably with the work of Dewey (1904/1965) earlier this century. So what makes the current revival so significant? For an answer to that question we have to look carefully at the social, economic, and political times in which we live and at the way in which the emphasis on reflective approaches represents something of a calculated response to the prevailing views about the nature of schooling and knowledge. There can be little doubt that as we rush headlong into this era of neoconservative ways of thinking and acting educationally, the reflective approach represents an interesting and challenging counter discourse to the ensconced technicist views. At the same time that we are being increasingly courted and urged by technologically minded policymakers and educational reformers into believing that all our social and economic ills will somehow magically dissolve if we place our faith in their capacity to get the mix of techniques right, significant questions are being asked as to whether the applied science mentality that lies behind their thinking and their strategies has the efficacy to resolve the complex issues in the ways being suggested. It is clear that the work of Donald Schon in his Reflective Practitioner. How Professionals Think in Action (1983), and his more recent work, Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987), has been important in all of this. Indeed, Schon's work has come to be something of a rallying point for besieged liberal progressive educators who are under tremendous threat at the moment as a consequence of educational conservatism. Connelly and Clandinin (1988) regard as remarkable "the speed with which Schon's . . . recent works [have] penetrated the reference lists of teacher education writers" (p. 1). Schon's work does provide something of a convenient focus by which to reinforce and keep alive the tradition of experiential knowledge, but his substantive arguments are of major importance. In the face of widespread and continuing demands for technocratic ways of operating, Schon argues that proposals for more stringent forms of accountability based on research evidence are entirely wrongheaded. For Schon the problem has much more to do with a deep-seated "crisis of confidence" (as distinct from "competence") that amounts to a manifest inability of the professions to deliver solutions on the pressing environmental, economic, and social problems of our times. His claims are rooted in the argument that those who persist in arguing that professional practice should have a demonstrated 'scientific' basis and should adhere closely to prescriptions deriving from large-scale, objective, outsiderinitiated research ignore the extent to which practitioner-derived knowledge is, in fact, trustworthy and relevant in and of itself (see Smyth, 1987a). By choosing to focus exclusively on the products of other peoples' research, at the expense of the process by which understandings are reached, proponents of such views actually misconstrue the value of research, which lies not in its being definitive, but rather in the tentativeness of disciplinebased research as something to be explored, confirmed, or rejected in the light of experience. 7 Continuing to seize upon the instrumental applicability of other people's research findings about professional practice is tantamount to placing a level of certainty on research that social scientists themselves would deny. Schon argues that across a range of professional areas, the nature of professional practice seems to have shifted from "problem solving" to "problem setting" (or problem posing); that is to say, from a rational process of choosing from among possibilities that best suit agreed-upon ends, to a situation that opens up for contestation and debate the nature of those decisions, the ends to which they are to be directed, and the means by which they are achievable (Schon, 1983). Rather than relying upon discipline-based knowledge, the scene, according to Schon is becoming increasingly characterized by...