REFLECTION AND REFLEXIVITY: WHAT AND WHY, Exams of History

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REFLECTION AND REFLEXIVITY:

WHAT AND WHY

• what you know but do not know you know
• what you do not know and want to know
• what you think, feel, believe, value, understand about your role and boundaries
• how your actions match up with what you believe
• how to value and take into account personal feelings.

This form of reflection seems to enable practitioners to explore and experiment with areas of experience difficult otherwise to approach, such as:

• what you can change in your context; how to work with what you cannot
• how to value the perspective of others, however different they are to you
• how others perceive you, and their feelings and thoughts about events
• why you become stressed, and its impact on life and practice
• how to counteract seemingly given social, cultural and political structures.

Through-the-mirror writing is intuitive spontaneous, similar to initial drafting. Writings then inform discussion in trusted confidential forums. Reflective practitioners write for self-illumination and exploration, not to create a product. We know a great deal more than we are aware, absorbing information unwittingly, and data we do not use and think we have forgotten, and challenging material shoved into boxes mentally labelled do not open. Through-the-mirror writing can give confidential and relatively safe access, using narrative and close and accurate observation. It enables the vital skill to use knowledge thus gained (for perceptive diagnosis for example). Constraining structures and metaphors can become clear, offering power to take more responsibility for actions. All action is founded upon personal ethical values. We are what we do, rather than what we say we are. Yet it is hard to gain clarity about ethical values expressed in practice, far easier to say what we believe (espoused values). Through-the- mirror writing enables discovery of who and what we are in practice, and why we act as we do (for an exercise, see Bolton, 2009). This process can be unsettling (Pollner 1991) or even uneasy, leading to the uncertainty of genuine questioning, the foundation of all education. Education is about perceiving and developing our own searching questions, rather than being given answers. The search for solutions leads to yet more pertinent questions and more learning. In learning and understanding about human rights, for example, law students need to learn ‘not only the practice of law. Rather it means the practice of people, their lives and the values, needs, beliefs that people hold and wish to protect, or promote, or advocate’ (Hinett 2002; Williams 2002, p. 134). Through-the-mirror writing can help practitioners towards perceiving and taking full responsibility. It is never good enough to say: ‘I don’t have time to do X’, ‘I did that because my senior instructed me to/it was in the protocol’,

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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 5

‘I thought everyone did Y’, ‘Oh I’ve never thought about why I do that, or if I should!’ There is much in life we are genuinely not in control of, such as birth, death, illness, accidents, and others’ impingements upon ourselves (for example, a bureaucratic rule-bound manager with no interest in developing staff). We may not be in control of responsive feelings and thoughts, but we are surely responsible for our actions. Reflection and reflexivity are essential for responsible and ethical practice, yet there have been arguments against it. One is lack of time (Copeland et al.

1993. and packed curricula taught by demotivated and over-stretched tutors (Davis 2003). Current expectations of constant activity and busyness make reflection a luxury; this, paradoxically makes it more important to point out the value of reflection (Hedberg 2009). Reflection and reflexivity can be seen as threats to position or status in organisations, where such practices are often impeded by prescriptive meetings with a low level of engagement, high role- based demarcated and political dimension, high degree of threat and task orientation (Heel et al. 2006). Reflective practice leading to change and development only happens in learning organisations (Gould 2004), with supportive mechanisms of coach, mentor or facilitator (Gray 2007), and not when top-down, organisational visions are imposed leading to compliance (Senge 1992). Effectively facilitated reflective and reflexive professional development is amply repaid however, as practitioners take decisions more accurately and quickly by drawing upon effective trustworthy intuition (Cartwright 2004). And organisations gain from workplace reflection because critically reflective practitioners have increased morale, commitment to clients, openness to multiple perspectives and creative innovative non-dichotomous solutions, and clearer boundaries (Fook 2002). Reflection on the part of professional evaluators is also crucial, given the inherently politicised and value-based nature of evaluation, and the need for critical monitoring of bias (Clark/Keefe 2007). Reflective practice which genuinely affects practitioners’ lives, and those around them, needs confident experienced teaching and facilitating. Students or employees required to write journals and accounts of practice without being inducted and facilitated well are likely to experience feelings of helplessness, frustration and eventual burnout (Gray 2007), be resistant (Bulpitt and Martin 2005), negative (Hobbs 2007), or even ‘angry, challenged, threatened, demoralized, shocked, and put off by the leap into the unknown ’ (Trelfa 2005, p. 206), and they might focus merely on technical skills (Truscott and Walker 1998), or write safely and hypothetically about themes rather than specific experiences (Clarke 1998). Leadership development students in business environments often block reflection due to negative ‘mindsets’ (Smith 2001) if appropriate educational environments are not created, and tuition offered. There are no half measures: if organisations want reflective reflexive practitioners they need to pay in time and facilitation.

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Smooth-running social, political and professional systems run on the well-oiled cogs of stories we construct, and connive at being constructed around us. Welcoming of diversity can be mere window dressing. Effective reflective practice and reflexivity are transgressive of stable and controlling orders; they lead cogs to decide to change shape, change place, even reconfigure whole systems. The structures in which our professional and personal roles, values and everyday lives are embedded are complex and volatile. Power is subtle and slippery; its location is often different from how it appears. Reflection and reflexivity for development involve:

• recognizing authority over and responsibility for personal and profes- sional identity, values, action, feelings
• contestation of lack of diversity, imbalance of power, the blocking capability of managerialism, and so on
• willingness to stay with uncertainty , unpredictability, doubt, questioning.

The route is through spirited enquiry leading to constructive developmental change and personal and professional integrity based on deep understandings. It is creative , illuminative , dynamic , self-affirming. Academic study has lost its suppressive attitude to artistry (Glaze 2002). ‘Any dinosaurian beliefs that “creative” and “analytical” are contradictory and incompatible modes are standing in the path of a meteor; they are doomed for extinction’ (Richardson and St Pierre 2005, p. 962). People only learn and develop when happy and benefiting personally. The route is not through angry confrontation: such revolution leads to destructive cycles of action and reaction. Yet it is not a thornless rose bed, as any dynamic process. Einstein ([1929] 2002) was successful partly because he doggedly and constantly asked questions with seemingly obvious answers. Childlike, he asked why? how? what?, rather than accepting givens or taken for granteds. He ‘love[d] the questions themselves like locked rooms’, and certainly ‘ live[ed] the questions’ (Rilke [1934] 1993, p. 35). Stories make sense of ourselves and our world. This world and our lives within it are complex and chaotic: seemingly governed by forces not only beyond our control, but beyond our understanding. We tell and retell episodes both minor and major to colleagues, loved ones, therapists and priests, strangers on the train, a wedding guest (Coleridge [1834] 1978). A dynamic way of grasping understanding, it prevents us being pawns in events seemingly beyond our control. The danger is that story making can merely be tucking ourselves securely under a quilt patchworked out of safe and self-affirming accounts: our stories can only too easily be essentially uncritical. Or, even worse, they are censoring tools: ‘cover stories’ (Sharkey 2004). This self-protectiveness can ensure our stories do not explore sensitive issues, but are expressions of what we feel comfortable with, or would like to be.

Knowing what to reflect upon out of the whole of one’s professional experience is not a clear process. The more it is focused upon, the more the truly important issues become elusive. It can become like looking for Piglet: ‘It was still snowing as [Pooh Bear] stumped over the white forest track, and he expected to find Piglet warming his toes in front of the fire, but to his surprise he found that the door was open, and the more he looked inside the more Piglet wasn’t there’ (Milne [1928] 1958, p. 163). Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories are celebrated because they express natural philosophy. Here Milne says in simple terms how the more we look for something important the more it is not there. Only with the courage to stop looking and trust the reflective and reflexive processes, will we begin to perceive the areas we need to tackle. Discovering what needs to be reflected upon, and how, can be an exhilarating journey. Insights gained and inevitable changes seem obvious afterwards. Although reflective practice has become a standard in initial and continuing professional education and development, it is often elusive to curriculum planners. Through-the-mirror writing is an educational approach which makes the difference between 20 years of experience and one year of experience repeated 20 times. Through-the-mirror writing uses an intuitive spontaneous form, the way a novelist or journalist writes their first draft. The writings then inform discussion in trusted confidential forums. Reflective practitioners write in order to learn: a self-illuminatory and exploratory process, rather than one focused upon creating a product. Writings often focus on non -critical incidents, or perhaps non -‘critical’ aspects of such events. Insight is gained by allowing reflective and reflexive processes to light upon and enlighten that which most needs examination. These areas might be simple daily habitual actions, rather than ‘critical’. Or actions hitherto unnoticed because focusing upon them is more problematic, often for unexamined reasons. ‘Critical’ incidents, described by Brookfield (1990, p. 84) as ‘vividly remembered events’, such as giving the wrong vaccine because they had been stored higgledly-piggledly in the fridge, will inevitably be examined. The events we ‘forget’ most need reflection, and give rise to the deepest reflexivity: ‘we need to attend to the untold’ (Sharkey 2004). Jonathan Miller said ‘it is a passionate, almost religious belief of mine that it is in the negligible that the considerable is to be found … The unconsidered is deeply considerable’. A human resource development exercise is writing what you do not remember (Goldberg 1991; Joy-Matthews et al. 2004). Plato, who said ‘the life without examination is no life’ (Plato 2000, p. 315), reckoned education is finding pathways to what we do not know we know. This is probably a return to the original meaning of critical incident : critical processes are brought to bear upon what might have been a routine or typical event, rather than the event itself being critical. A problem has arisen with the term, leading many reflective practitioner students to think they must focus

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fresh ways, offers understandings and insights as no other process can. For example, a practitioner can retell a story from the point of view of students or clients, reconstruct it with the genders of the actors reversed, or create a satisfactory ending in place of a horrible one. Effective reflective practice and reflexivity meet the paradoxical need both to tell and retell our stories in order for us to feel secure enough, and yet critically examine our actions, and those of others, in order to increase our understanding of ourselves and our practice, and develop dynamically.

What’s in a name?

The term reflective practice is not a terribly useful one. The metaphor it embodies is limited: a mirror reflection is merely the image of an object directly in front of it, faithfully reproduced back to front. What is the reflection of shit? Shit. Through-the-mirror , however, is a creative adventure right through the glass to the other side of the silvering. Such reflective practice can take us out of our own narrow range of experience and help us to perceive experiences from a range of viewpoints and potential scenarios. It can do this by harnessing a vital human drive – to create stories about our lives, and communicate them. The mirror image model of reflection suggests a me out there practising in the big world, and a reflected me in here in my head thinking about it. This model is located in unhelpful modernist duality: this as opposed to that , in and out , here and there. An ancient Zen Buddhist text tells us:

You must first forsake the dualities of: self and others, interior and exterior, small and large, good and bad, delusion and enlightenment, life and death, being and nothingness. (Tsai Chi Chung 1994, p. 95)

The word reflection has static connotations, meaning ‘the action of turning [back] or fixing the thoughts on some subject’ (Oxford English Dictionary) , with the associated definition of the reversed reproduction of an image. Reflective practice is purposeful, not the musing one slips into while driving home, which can be as dynamic as rumination , a sheep chewing smelly cud. I have a cartoon of a sheep nose to nose with the reflection of herself and the surrounding meadow. She’s saying: ‘I’m sure the grass is greener in the mirror, but whenever I try to reach it, this ugly ewe bars the way and butts me on the nose.’ The ‘ugly ewe’ is of course herself reflected. We need intensive explorative and expressive methods in order not just to be confronted by our own ‘ugly ewe’ reflection. We need to get beyond a notion that to reflect is self-indulgently (or painfully critically) thinking about ourselves. Isolating the

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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 11

pawn of myself to reflect upon away from the chess game is not helpful. It is helpful to reflect in order to locate the white pawn which is me, clearly, boldly and critically within the four-dimensional chess game of my life and work. The through-the-mirror reflective practice writing model involves wide potential interactions, opens up developmental reflexive and reflective space. ‘Reflection is the central dynamic in intentional learning, problem-solving and validity testing through rational discourse’ (Mezirow 1981, p. 4). Yes, true, but there is an awful lot more than just the ‘rational’ for us to explore. Professionals can be enabled to think and discourse way beyond the rational using the methods outlined in the following chapters. They can explore the wide and rather perplexing other side of reflection, questioning everything, turning their world inside out, outside in and back to front.

Reflective practice: a political and social responsibility

Practitioners need to take responsibility for all their own actions and values, and their share of responsibility for the political, social and cultural situations within which they live and work. Reflective practice can fall into the trap of becoming only confession. Confession can be a conforming mechanism, despite sounding liberating, freeing from a burden of doubt, guilt and anxiety (Bleakley 2000b). Confession has a seductive quality because it passes responsibility to others. The desire to hold an audience with a ‘glittering eye’ (Coleridge [1834] 1978) is strong. Jennifer Nias, a researcher into the experience of women teachers (Nias and Aspinwall 1992), noted with surprise that all her potential interviewees were keen to tell their autobiographies at length. People always are, but they do not want their stories questioned: this is the role of reflective practice. Reflective practice is more than an examination of personal experience; it is located in the political and social structures which are increasingly hemming professionals in (Goodson 2004). Their right to make moral and professional judgements is being eroded; they are being reduced to technicians, their skills to mere technical competencies. Practitioners are increasingly under pressure to perform, to have ‘strong and stable personalities and to be able to tolerate complexity’, are pushed destructively and distortingly by obsessive goals and targets in a masculine culture of assertiveness and competitiveness (Garvey et al. 2009, pp. 97, 153, 217). A supported process which allows, encourages even, doubt and uncertainty paradoxically gives them strength in the face of such attempts to control. In order to retain political and social awareness and activity, professional development work needs to be rooted in the public and the political as well as the private and the personal.

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 13

example, preventing them from being merely confessional. I would argue that a range of different forms of text, such as from different points of view, can similarly offer layers of unwitting subtext for critical review. Trainee cognitive therapists reported a ‘deeper sense of knowing’ of cognitive therapy (CT) as a result of reflective practice writing (Bennett-Levy et al. 2003, p. 145). ‘The written reflections are, in my view, crucial to the process, enabling trainees to look in depth at the implications for themselves, for their clients, and for cognitive theory’ (ibid. p. 205). School students are encouraged to write reflectively too. Science students ‘write to learn … to help acquire a personal ownership of ideas conveyed in lectures and textbooks … [which] promotes the production of new knowledge by creating a unique reflective environment for learners engaged in scientific investigation’ (Keys 1999, pp. 117, 119). Phye (1997) reports school students similarly writing reflective portfolios. Kim (1999) reports a highly supported model: nurses write and share descriptive narratives in interview with a researcher, developing depth of description and reflexive and reflective critique.

Reflection and reflexivity: demystification

Through-the-mirror writing enables both reflection and reflexivity. There is a clear distinction between the two. Reflection is learning and developing through examining what we think happened on any occasion, and how we think others perceived the event and us, opening our practice to scrutiny by others, and studying data and texts from the wider sphere. Reflection is an in-depth consideration of events or situations outside of oneself: solitarily, or with critical support. The reflector attempts to work out what happened, what they thought or felt about it, why, who was involved and when, and what these others might have experienced and thought and felt about it. It is looking at whole scenarios from as many angles as possible: people, relationships, situation, place, timing, chronology, causality, connections, and so on, to make situations and people more comprehensible. This involves reviewing or reliving the experience to bring it into focus. Seemingly innocent details might prove to be key; seemingly vital details may be irrelevant. Reflection involves reliving and rerendering: who said and did what, how, when, where, and why. Reflection might lead to insight about something not noticed in time, pinpointing perhaps when the detail was missed. Reflexivity is finding strategies to question our own attitudes, thought processes, values, assumptions, prejudices and habitual actions, to strive to understand our complex roles in relation to others. To be reflexive is to

examine, for example, how we – seemingly unwittingly – are involved in creating social or professional structures counter to our own values (destructive of diversity, and institutionalising power imbalance for example). It is becoming aware of the limits of our knowledge, of how our own behaviour plays into organisational practices and why such practices might marginalise groups or exclude individuals. And it is understanding how we relate with others, and between us shape organisational realities’ shared practices and ways of talking. Thus, we recognise we are active in shaping our surroundings, and begin critically to take circumstances and relationships into consideration rather than merely reacting to them, and help review and revise ethical ways of being and relating (Cunliffe 2009b). To be reflexive involves thinking from within experiences, or as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it ‘turned or reflected back upon the mind itself ’. This feels like a pretty difficult contortion: hence the need for innovative illuminative methods, like the through-the-mirror model recommended in these pages. A reflexive-minded practitioner will ask themselves, why did this pass me by: where was my attention directed at that time? Reflexivity is: ‘What are the mental, emotional and value structures which allowed me to lose attention and make that error?’ This deep questioning is missed out if the practitioner merely undertakes reflection as practical problem-solving: what happened, why, what did I think and feel about it, how can I do it better next time? Reflexivity is making aspects of the self strange: focusing close attention upon one’s own actions, thoughts, feelings, values, identity, and their effect upon others, situations, and professional and social structures. The reflexive thinker has to stand back from belief and value systems, habitual ways of thinking and relating to others, structures of understanding themselves and their relationship to the world, and their assumptions about the way that the world impinges upon them. This can only be done by somehow becoming separate in order to look at it as if from the outside: not part of habitual experience processing, and not easy. Strategies are required such as internal dialogue, and the support of others. This critical focus upon beliefs, values, professional identities, and how they affect and are affected by the surrounding cultural structures, is a highly responsible social and political activity. Reflexivity involves coming as close as possible to an awareness of the way I am experienced and perceived by others. It is being able to stay with personal uncertainty, critically informed curiosity as to how others perceive things as well as how I do, and flexibility to consider changing deeply held ways of being. The role of a trusted other, such as a supervisor or peer-reader of an account, is vital.

Reflexivity is a stance of being able to locate oneself in the picture, to appreci- ate how one’s own self influences [actions]. Reflexivity is potentially more com- plex than being reflective, in that the potential for understanding the myriad

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and ‘streams full of stars, like skies at night’. It is loss of professional agency and responsibility, because we are unaware of things of which we so need to be aware. An example: Sam, a midwife, brought a furious account of an angry mother she had attended as a National Health Service (NHS) midwife: ‘stupid, hostile upper-middle-class bitch who felt she had the right to boss me around, tell me what to do’. The birth had been exhausting and disastrous for both mother and midwife: Sam still felt bitter 25 years later. The reflective practice group offered insight and comparative cases, and suggested Sam wrote an account from the mother’s perspective. The following week saw a very different Sam: ‘I don’t know exactly what was wrong, but I do know, having relived it from this mother’s point of view, that she was upset and confused. Because I saw her as a stupid, middle-class bitch who thought she could have everything she wanted her way, I never listened to her properly. I think I’ll see demanding mothers in a different way in future.’

Telling the truth?

The narratives we tell and write are perspectival. Looking in through a window at experience objectively to reflect on it from outside is impossible. To be objective is to be ‘not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering or representing facts; impartial, detached’ ( Oxford English Dictionary ). Humans, however open about themselves and their practice, can only perceive and understand from their own viewpoint, broad and empathic and professional as that might be. ‘We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are’ (Nin, quoted in Epstein 1999, p. 834). Individual perspectives, values and understanding can be widened and deepened. One can look on the glass and only see one’s self reflected, or through it to whatever is the other side as in George Herbert’s poem: ‘A man that looks on glass, / on it may stay his eye; / or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, / and then the heav’n espy.’ Lewis Carroll’s Alice does even better: she crawls right through the looking-glass, leaving her stuffy Victorian rule-bound world, entering a world in which everything ‘was as different as possible’, things are ‘all alive’ (Carroll [1865] 1954, p. 122), where dynamic connections are made between divergent elements. A creative leap is required to support widening and deepening of perspective, and the effective ability to mix tacit knowledge with evidence- based or explicit knowledge. The professional arena can be opened up to observation and reflection through the lens of artistic scrutiny. We are still anchored to our own perspective, but these perspectives will be artistically and critically widened. We cannot really pass through the mirror’s silvering,

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REFLECTIVE PRACTICE: AN INTRODUCTION 17

and can inevitably reflect only upon ourselves, our own thoughts and experiences. Artistic processes such as writing can, however, enable a harnessing of, for example, material such as memories which we do not know we remember, and greater access into the possible thoughts and experiences of others. The perspectival nature of such writing is acknowledged (that is, they do not purport to be objective or true), and many of the skills used are those of literature. Professional writers are being heard clearly, both students (for example, Charon 2006; Gomez et al. 2000) and practitioners (Charon 2006; Clough 2002; Helman 2006; Loughran 2004). Samuel Shem says fiction writing has been an essential way of humanising medicine (2002; see further Annals of Internal Medicine: Physician-Writers Reflection series). Writers acutely observe small details and subtle nuances of behaviour and situations. A teacher- or clinician-writer observes details missed by good observant teachers or clinicians (see Charon 2004, 2006). Try it. Observe a student or client walking into your practice place. Capture on paper how they hold themselves, breathe, move their limbs, their characteristic gestures and sayings. What do they remind you of – a cat? A soft deep armchair? A locked filing cabinet? A writer has the unparalleled privilege also of entering into the life of another. That this person is a character on a page does not make it any less of a insight-creating privilege. Deep understandings can be gained by entering (virtually) another’s feeling, thinking, perception and memories. This is writing beyond what you know, and has to be: if you know where writing is going to take you, start at that known point, and write on into the unknown. Try it. Take the person you have just described. Write the conversation they might have had on returning home that night. Remember this is an artistic exercise: do not think about it, let your hand do the writing, free of your normal controlling thought processes. If you add in something about how they got home, where they live or drink, you really are allowing your imagination to take you through the glass. You tap into latent understandings which have possibly not been so fully exercised before. This is fiction; the writing has been invented imaginatively: it removes the straitjacket of what really happened. Writers are therefore free to draw deeply upon their imagination and aesthetic sense, and upon their intuitive knowledge of social and human areas such as relationships, motives, perspective, cause and effect, ethical issues and values. You bring what you understand and think about this person into the forefront of your mind. It matters not a jot that you do not depict what actually happened, or what your student or client really thought. Medical students write patients’ illness stories in the voice and vernacular of the patient, imaginatively and vicariously entering patients’ contexts. They ‘become the other’ through creative writing (Engel et al. 2002, p. 32, 2008).

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There is a magical moment in teaching, when the penny drops, the light goes on, the doors open. Success is achieved. I was starting to worry. We weren’t getting there! ‘Malcolm, how many eyes has Naheeda got?’ Malcolm counted slowly, as if it was the first pair of eyes he had ever seen. ‘One … two’. ‘Good, you’re doing really well.’ We carried on round the class. Eager faces looked up to have their eyes counted. I was growing desperate as we ran out of children. Was I leading Malcolm on an educational wild-goose chase? Were we pursuing an idea that was not yet ready to be caught? The last pair of eyes was counted. ‘One … two.’ The finger carefully went from eye to eye. There was only me left. ‘Malcolm,’ I said, trying to hide my desperation, ‘how many eyes have I got?’ Malcolm studied my face carefully. He looked long and hard at my eyes. I waited expectantly in the silence. His brow furrowed. Finally he spoke. ‘Take your glasses off.’ (Kevin Marsden)

Kevin read this to his established sub-group of five teachers. They trusted and felt confidence and respect for each other’s professional abilities and views. Kevin was able to share his frustrations and sense of failure; the group learned about the methods, joys and problems of special-school teaching. They were able to explore the probability that Malcolm had had a different understanding of his task than did Kevin. Possibly Malcolm thought he was to count the eyes, rather than ‘guess’ how many each had. To do this he would have had to ask for spectacles to be removed so he could see clearly. The situation of a mismatch between a teacher’s intentions and a child’s understanding must happen so often.

Why reflective practice now?

The grand stories of patriarchy/patriotism, religion, family and community no longer bind society. We look to counsellors, psychologists, teachers, clerics, police, life partners, general practitioners (GPs) or social workers for essential support. Marriages founder and professionals increasingly experience stress as they now bear the burden previously carried by a nexus of local and family community. Faith in that great god science has also been shaken: ‘Science, in my view, is now at the end of certainty’ (Prigogine 1999, p. 26). There has been a powerful frontier (boundary) between science (and scientific professions like medicine) and the arts since the Enlightenment. A blinkered view of what constitutes knowledge and experience cannot be held for much longer.

The assumption that an objective view of the world (Kantian) is ‘grown-up’, that we should shed our subjective view along with sand and water play, is being questioned (see also Sacks 1985, pp. 1–21). Paul Robertson (Director of the Medici String Quartet) supports this argument from the artistic perspective: ‘If any of us are out of touch with any part of ourselves we are in an impoverished state. The dominant culture is scientific, but the scientist who concentrates on this side of themselves exclusively is as impoverished as is the musician or writer who concentrates only on the artistic’ (Robertson 1999). An ethnographer can no longer stand on a mountain top from which authoritatively to map human ways of life (Clifford 1986). Clinicians cannot confidently diagnose and dictate from an objective professional or scientific standpoint; teachers do not know answers; lawyers do not necessarily know what is right and what wrong. The enmeshment of culture and environment is total: no one is objective. ‘Since the seventeenth century, Western science has excluded certain expressive modes from its legitimate repertoire: rhetoric (in the name of “plain” transparent signification), fiction (in the name of fact), and subjectivity (in the name of objectivity). The qualities eliminated from science were localised in the category of “literature”’ (Clifford 1986, p. 102). These categories have returned from that 300 year marginal position, to be embedded alongside the scientific approach. Holistic coherent understandings which might support us out of our alienated mess are increasingly entertained. ‘We now see the world as our world, rather than the world’ (Reason 1988, p. 28). Complementary healing considers our wholeness, not just within ourselves, but also within our environment and community. ‘We seek a knowing-in-action (and thinking-in-action) which encompasses as much of our experience as possible’ (Reason 1988, p. 30). Ideal professionals, gathering data on which to base their pedagogy diagnosis or care, are like social anthropologists. Geertz suggested that successful ethnographers create a ‘thick description’: a web of ‘sort of piled-up structures of inference and implication through which the ethnographer is continually trying to pick his way’ ([1973] 1993, p. 7). The reflective practice writer who explores and experiments with different writing approaches, using whatever seems appropriate at the time, is like Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur (1966). This knotted nexus has then to be understood and interpreted to some degree: ‘a good interpretation of anything – a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society – takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation’ (Geertz [1973] 1993, p. 7). An effective reflective practitioner attempts to understand the heart of their practice. Understandings gained in this way, however, are always partial; the deeper the enquiry, the enquirer realises the less they know and understand: the more you know, the more you know you do not know. Geertz also stresses that it is vital not to generalise across cases but

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