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My interest in reflective practice originated from my own concerns and
reflections about my practice which has included the teaching and
training of Child and Youth Care workers for more than ten years. Most
of my early work was with Child and Youth Care practitioners who had
experience but very little theoretical knowledge. For the last three
years, this situation has been reversed. I have been working at an
institution of higher education where most of the students come straight
from school. They are young and virtually all of them come to study
Child and Youth Care with no experience and very often with no clear
idea of what Child and Youth Care work is. Most of them come with a real
desire to work with young people and contribute to their community and
society as a whole. I believe that much of the theory we teach is
appropriate and most of the students pass their diplomas in three years.
A growing concern for myself, others in my academic department, and members of the Child and Youth Care profession in the community, has been the relative inability of students/graduates to put their knowledge into practice. Learning “good” theory has not turned these students into effective practitioners, or in the words of Eisikovits, Beker & Guttmann (1991:7), “the assumption that turning the unknown into the known would lead directly to effective knowledge utilization has proven to be unwarranted.”
My discovery of the concept of reflective practice heralded the beginning of an exciting journey for me, a journey which I rather suspect has no absolutely final destination. In fact, it would be incongruent with the notion of reflective practice if my exploration and reflection did have an objectively-defined end-point. This paper serves as an introduction to the concept of reflective practice and explores its relevance in relation to a Child and Youth Care approach, and specifically, to Child and Youth Care in the South African context.
On the value of reflection and reflective
practice
The notion of reflective practice was popularised by Donald Schon (1983)
in his book The Reflective Practitioner. According to Schon,
the need for reflective practitioners has grown out of dissatisfaction
with the effectiveness of the professions and the methods they use.
Professionals have invented devices and processes to provide solutions
to problems but at times these new solutions have resulted in
unanticipated difficulties with potentially far-reaching deleterious
social, environmental, or other effects (Schon, 1983). In addition, many
so-called professionals have proven themselves unworthy of such a title
through unethical behaviour based on self-interest. According to Schon
(1983:14), “professional knowledge is mismatched to the changing
character of the situations of practice – the complexity, uncertainty,
instability, uniqueness and value conflicts which are increasingly
perceived as central to the world of professional practice”. This, he
argues, is because professional knowledge is based on a model of “technical rationality” in which knowledge is standardised, scientific,
and used for stable, unambiguous ends (Schon, 1983:21-23). Professional
status has tended to be granted only to groups which use this model
despite the clamouring of others for professional status and the
accompanying remuneration. In the present context, however, there are
rarely single answers to challenges and the power once wielded by
professionals is dwindling as people have begun to recognise their
limitations and the weaknesses of technical rationality.
Schon (1983: viii) suggested that there is a rift between research and practice, as though researchers and practitioners work independently. This often translates into a division between thought and action, suggesting a rather mindless repetition of theory-based actions. And yet, “competent practitioners usually know more than they can say. They exhibit a kind of knowing-in-practice, most of which is tacit ... practitioners themselves often reveal a capacity for reflection on their intuitive knowing in the midst of action and sometimes use this capacity to cope with the unique, uncertain and conflicted situations of practice” (Schon, 1983:viii-ix). As such, a more relevant approach must be able “to account for practical competence in 'divergent' situations” to identify “an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict” (Schon, 1983:49). For Schon, this more “relevant approach” is based on the use of reflection and reflective practice.
Bauer & Hinnant (1987) suggest similar ideas in their discussion of Thomas Kuhn's (1962) notions of normal science versus revolutionary science. Normal science is considered to be an established scientific tradition or paradigm which “dictates permissible techniques and canons of proof and sets forth a probable range of outcomes before an experiment has begun” (p. 213). Theory is not questioned. Rather, anomalies which may occur are put aside or written off as “bad research” or as “equipment failures” (p. 214). This sounds rather like how some young people are treated in the Child and Youth Care system – our inability to provide services which result in some improvement in the young person or family is attributed to some shortcoming of the client. However, over time there may be the “accumulation of bothersome anomalies leading to dissatisfaction with the accepted paradigm” (Bauer & Hinnant, 1987:214). It is revolutionary science when a phenomenon is looked at differently by a person or group able to view events through multiple perspectives.
Reflection and reflective practice have been conceptualised and defined quite differently by a number of authors. According to Ruth-Sahd (2003:2), the philosopher, Dewey wrote that “reflective thinking is closely related to critical thinking; it is the turning over of a subject in the mind and giving it serious and consecutive consideration”. As such, it is a rational, intellectual act that involves the whole person. This idea would seem to connect well with the Child and Youth Care principle of working with the total person.
Schon (1983) himself wrote that since professionals face unique and complex situations which are unsolvable by technical rational approaches, there are three methods which may be adopted:
Reflection-in-action – thinking on your feet, a crucial aspect of effective life-space work. It should be conscious, critical and give rise to experimentation.
Reflection-on-action – thinking about events after they have occurred, and,
Reflection-for-action – this guides future action and involves planning and pro-activity.
According to Boud, Keogh & Walker (1985) reflection is a term used to define those intellectual and effective activities individuals use when they engage in exploring their experiences so as to gain new knowledge and awareness from those experiences. Ruth-Sahd (2003:1) states that, “reflective practice is a means of self-examination that involves looking back over what has happened in practice in an effort to improve or encourage professional growth. It is an imaginative, creative, nonlinear, human act in which educators and students recapture their experience, think about it, and evaluate it.”
From this it might seem that there are no shared definitions of these concepts. However, Johns & Freshwater (in Ruth-Sahd, 2003: 5) suggest that it is an academic pastime to try to define exactly what reflective practice is and they blame this desire to define things “exactly” on the rational perspective of society, a perspective which through its limitations gave birth to the interest in reflective practice in the first place.
In the South African context, Child and Youth Care workers have been engaged in a process of professionalisation for almost thirty years. Three major milestones have been the development of a degree offered by “Universities of Technology”, the generation of unit standards of competence and, most recently, the establishment of a professional board for Child and Youth Care work. We are on the verge of individual Child and Youth Care workers being officially branded “professional”. It is no surprise that it has taken such a long time for this to occur when one considers the complexity and uncertainty of this work. Child and youth care work can never be based on a model of technical rationality because human beings cannot be understood by means of a positivist epistemology. At the same time, I am beginning to question whether it is desirable to think of Child and Youth Care as a profession at all or perhaps, we just need to find more relevant definitions of professional.
Reflective practice, even so loosely defined, seems to offer a far more empowering experience than can the lauded theories and methods of positivism. Practitioners discover their own knowledge through reflecting on their own experiences. This seems important in Child and Youth Care work given its somewhat marginal status in relation to the psychologists, social workers and other members of the multi-disciplinary team. Maybe as Child and Youth Care workers” experiential knowledge is validated, they will truly find their voices and no longer need the professional label in order to feel valuable.
The African context
The concept and values of reflective practice fit well in the context of
South African Child and Youth Care practice. Firstly, it is important to
remember that present-day democratic South Africa, and the majority of
South Africans, have emerged from hundreds of years of oppression
through colonialism and apartheid. During this time, black African
people were considered to be inferior to white Europeans. The powerful “proved” this point through application of scientific theories based on
western values and logical positivism. The anthropologist, Fernandez’s (1987:44) comment that, “The colonial mentality is generally associated
with a set of attitudes produced in a privileged class – well suited
to justify and preserve privileges and exclude the claims of the
administered peoples upon those privileges” reflects a similar notion.
Fernandez (1987:46-48) describes some research into African modes of thought using syllogisms with traditional African people. An example of one of the syllogisms used was, “All people who own huts pay hut tax. Boima does not pay a hut tax. Does Boima own a hut?” Fernandez found that traditional people answered this question correctly no more frequently than they would purely by chance, unless they had been to school and therefore, I assume, trained in western logical positivist thinking.
Traditional people respond to such syllogisms by introducing personal evidence, questioning the facts (e.g. “But we don’t pay hut taxes!”) or discussing other experiences relevant to the subject matter. They pay attention to the context in which such questions are posed, share their own experiences and provide other evidence. They answer in terms of the setting and their own personal involvements. As such, there is no single right answer since the “application of a perceived rule is not nearly so important as is availing oneself of the opportunity for puzzlement” (Fernandez, 1987:48). Traditional African thinking seems rather like reflective practice in that it is based in reality, it focuses on the whole, recognises relatedness and gives due consideration to the context in which events occur. Perhaps the encouragement of reflective practice among South African Child and Youth Care workers will not only result in more effective work with children but also contribute to the liberation of African people from the oppression of western science and the pursuit of status and wealth promised by the professionalisation of our field, or at least make this aspect of practice more congruent with tradition and cultural history in the present.
If we take our exploration into the field of African philosophy, we find other connections between African values and the values of reflective practice. In his paper on the foundations of African philosophy, Oniang'o (2004) speaks of the “African cultural world-view of the philosophy of participation and integration” and tells us that “(t)he African culture does not assume that reality can be perceived through reason alone. There are other modes of knowing, such as, imagination, intuitive experience, and personal feelings” (p. 1). All aspects of life are inter-related and connected unlike the western world-view based on dichotomies and compartmentalization.
The value of experiential learning, critical in reflective practice, is mirrored in African philosophy. Oniang'o (2004:2) writes further that “(t)he African maintains that to perceive knowledge of reality, the individual should not detach himself from the universe but rather be an active participant of the life-events in time and space ... The African view is that the individual interacts with other forces and does not therefore exist independently of forces of nature. These forces they interact with are lived, felt and intuitively grasped experiences which are neither rationally measured nor mathematically defined. The events are the measure of past, present, and future. The past and future find unity in now, that is, the present living experience.” From this, it would seem that the use of daily life events as a focus for intervention, one of the principles of a Child and Youth Care approach, is something drawn from African philosophy.
Ultimately, Oniang'o (2004:3) describes the African mode of knowing as the personal experience mode, “a process which may involve immediate and direct experience”, and the European mode, the scientific experience mode, as “an impersonal and mediated or indirect experience” which takes no account of “personal values, institutions, relations, meaning, relevance and significance”.
Implications of reflection for South African
practice
The following story attempts to demonstrate how a Child and Youth Care
worker might use Schon's “reflection-on-action” to consider the
appropriateness of her response to a young person and plan a more
appropriate response for the future.
Thembi is a twenty-five year old, newly-graduated Child and Youth Care worker, employed in a community-based programme working with children and families affected and infected by HIV/AIDS. The Khumalo family, one of the families with which she works, comprises a mother dying of AIDS and four children aged one, five, seven and nine. The three older children are healthy but one-year-old Busi is regularly ill. Thembi knows that Busi is HIV-positive even though she has not been tested. One day, as Thembi is leaving the Khumalo homestead, seven-year-old Vuyo says to her, “Busi’s very sick. Is she going to die?” Thembi’s mouth goes dry but quickly she responds, “All people die. Now go and play. I'll see you tomorrow.” As Thembi walks away from the Khumalos” home, her mind keeps returning to Vuyo’s question, “Is she going to die?” She is troubled by the question from one so young, but she is also troubled by her own answer. This puzzles her: “Surely, my response was appropriate. I answered the question. I spoke kindly. I told the truth. I protected Vuyo from pain" – but her dissatisfaction with her own response remains.
As Thembi lies in bed that night, her thoughts turn to her younger brother, Bongani. The previous year he had moved to another province to find work. Within a few months, he had died, and Thembi still felt enormous pain that she had never had an opportunity to see him or even speak to him after he had left home. If only she had known that she would never see him again. If only she had had a chance to say “goodbye”, maybe the pain wouldn’t be so bad. Thembi starts to see the parallels between her own experience and what is happening in the Khumalo family. She begins to wonder whether the three older Khumalo children somehow might cope a little better with the illness and inevitable death of baby Busi if they are told the truth. Perhaps, their pain will be easier to bear if they have been prepared and helped to say, “goodbye” before it’s too late. Perhaps, this can be an opportunity for the children to show love and support for each other, young as they are. Perhaps, with the guidance and care of a skilled adult, they can be strengthened to face their reality in all of its harshness. Perhaps too, this is what is meant by using crisis as an opportunity, or building resilience, or recognising the potential in children. She also remembers how she found comfort in her spiritual beliefs and her knowledge about the role of the ancestors in the lives of the living. Perhaps, she could ask Mrs Khumalo to clarify her cultural and spiritual beliefs so that these may be passed onto the children and used to assist in the healing process.
As Thembi considers the situation more deeply, she becomes excited about these new possibilities. She is uncertain about whether she has found “the solution” and then, remembers the importance of creating unique responses to unique situations. She decides that she will attempt to implement her new, loosely-formulated plan with the Khumalo children the following day.
A concluding comment
Reflection and reflective practice offer a key to South African Child and Youth Care workers and their educators. I believe that further
exploration will furnish me with more practical tools to heal the rift
between theory and practice so that we will experience the positive
outcomes of reflective practice which have been identified by Ruth-Sahd
(2003:4): “integration of theoretical concepts to practice, increased
learning from experience, enhanced self-esteem through learning,
acceptance of professional responsibility, enhanced critical thinking
and judgement making in complex and uncertain situations, based on
experience and prior knowledge, thereby enhancing (client) care,
empowerment of practitioners, increased social and political
emancipation, improvement in practice by promoting greater
self-awareness and helping students expand and develop their clinical
knowledge and skills”.
References
Bauer, D.F. & Hinnant, J. (1980). Normal and Revolutionary Divination: A Kuhnian Approach to African Traditional Thought. In Karp, I. & Bird, C.S. (Eds.) Explorations in African Systems of Thought, pp. 213-236. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Boud, D., Keogh, R. & Walker, D. (1985). The Reflective Process in Context. London: Kogan.
Eisikovits, Z., Beker, J. & Guttmann, E. (1991). The Known and the Used in Residential Child and Youth Care Work. In Beker, J. & Eisikovits, Z. (Eds.) Knowledge Utilization in Residential Child and Youth Care Practice, pp. 3-23. Washington, DC: Child Welfare League of America.
Fernandez, J. (1980). Edification by Puzzlement. In Karp, I. & Bird, C.S. (Eds.) Explorations in African Systems of Thought, pp. 44-59. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.
Higgs, P. (2003). African philosophy in the transformation of educational discourse in South Africa [online]. Journal of Education, 30. pp. 5-22. Available at: http://www.edu.unp.ac.za/joe/joepdfs/joe%2030%20higgs.pdf
Kuhn, T. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Oniang'o, C.M.P. [s.a] The Foundations of African Philosophy. LockHaven University of Pennsylvania. http://www.lhup.edu/library/InternationalReview/african_phil.htm
Ruth-Sahd, L.A. (2003). Reflective practice: A critical analysis of data-based studies and implications for nursing education [online]. Journal of Nursing Education, 42, 11. November. http://proquest.umi.com
Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. Aldershot, Hants: Arena.
This feature: Winfield, J. (2005). An exploration of reflection and reflective practice. In Gannon, B. and Garfat, T. (Eds.). Aspects of Child and Youth Care Practice in the South African Context. Cape Town: Pretext.
