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Images of reflection: on the meanings of the word reflection in different learning contexts

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Abstract

Reflection is today a watchword in many learning contexts. Experience is said to be transformed to knowledge when we reflect on it, university students are expected to acquire the ability to reflect critically, and we want practitioners to be reflective practitioners in order to improve their professional practice. If we consider what people mean when they talk about reflection in practice, we will discover that they often mean different things. Moreover, their conceptions of reflection are guided by images rather than by definitions. This paper explores six distinct images of reflection and discusses the consequences of adopting one or more of these images in learning situations: (1) dedoublement, (2) analogical thinking, (3) mirror, (4) experiment, (5) puzzle solving, (6) criss-crossing a landscape. Reflective thinking can be improved if we are sensible of what we are reflecting about and according to which image of reflection we are doing it, since the step between using an image and seeing this image as a model is short. Using models, in turn, implies knowing their limits.

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Notes

  1. I have heard this story from professor Bo Göranzon who participated in that conference. I do not know whether my account of the story is really correct, but I think that it nonetheless conveys an important point. Allan Janik has himself commented on the difficulties to define concepts like culture in the essay “Humanvetenskapernas kardinalproblem—oenigheten om begreppens innebörd,” in Göranzon (1988), which in turn is based on Janik’s interpretation of the W. B. Gallie’s thoughts about “essentially contested concepts.”

  2. Diderot cited in Josephs (1969: 101–102), chapter “Dedoublement and dialogue.”

  3. Josephs (1969: 102).

  4. Starobinski (1990: 24).

  5. Göranzon et al. (2006), Part 3—“Case studies”.

  6. Gudmundsson (1996) and a manuscript on the process of writing entitled “Mindship of words” (unclear whether this manuscript has been published).

  7. Hoberg (2006).

  8. For a detailed description of how professionals think analogically in action, see Schön’s (1991: 115 ff.). Schön himself draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s and Thomas Kuhn’s thoughts on “seeing as.”

  9. Johannessen (2006).

  10. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see chaps. 3–4 in Göranzon (2009).

  11. For a discussion of the relationship between theatre and epistemology, see Janik (2005).

  12. Schön (1991: 139). In his analysis of thinking from case to case, Schön refers both to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s use of “seeing as” and to Thomas Kuhn’s description of the functioning of exemplars in scientific problem solving.

  13. Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com, accessed in September 2011.

  14. Bech-Karlsen (2006: 107). Jo Bech-Karlsen is Norwegian journalist and writer who teaches university students how to write essays. He stresses that essay writing and reflection are intimately connected. One of the headlines in his book reads accordingly “story telling + reflection = essay.”

  15. This case and the process of reflection that led to its solution have been described in Steinsvik’s (2008) doctoral dissertation, chap. 5 “Den frakoblete kroppen” [The disconnected body].

  16. Schön (1991: 130–132).

  17. Just because it is “everyday” and simple this meaning of word experiment should not be underrated. One recent example is the research style of the 2010 Nobel Prize winner in physics, Andre Geim, who often conducts playful or “unserious” experiments.

  18. I have discussed the limits of Donals Schön’s idea of reflection elsewhere. See Ratkic (2009); Alsanius et al. (2009).

  19. Emsheimer et al. (2005).

  20. Emsheimer et al. (2005) refer to Moon (2000), for the idea that reflection can be seen as puzzle solving.

  21. Ludwig Wittgenstein made use of this image in the foreword to his Philosophical Investigations to describe why he was not able to write a book where his thoughts would be ordered in a “single direction” Wittgenstein (1974).

  22. The dialogue-seminar method as a method for reflection is described in Göranzon et al. (2006).

  23. For the idea that we can distinguish between spontaneous and artificial memory, I am indebted to the Swedish physicist and writer Pehr Sällström. See chapter “Minnets konst” [The art of memory] in Sällström (1999). Of course, the question about the human memory’s structure is much more complex than the distinction I use here.

  24. For a detailed elaboration of this view, see Johannessen (2006).

  25. Åberg (2011: 99).

  26. Taylor (1971).

  27. This argument was recently very clearly spelled out in a discussion at the meeting between two schools of reflective practice, the students and researchers from the Centre for practical knowledge of the University of Nordland in Bodö, Norway, who use to arrange reflective thinking according to the mirror image and the students and researchers from the Dialogue seminar milieu, held in Växjö, Sweden in November 2011.

  28. Philosopher Max Black has analysed connections between imagery, metaphors and models, claiming that every metaphor can be seen as a “submerged model”. See Black (1962).

  29. Ratkic (2009).

  30. For reasons for the choice of particular classics, see Ratkic (2009).

  31. The whole book by Göranzon et al. (2006), which I have been referring to above, contains argumentation against the idea that tacit knowledge can be transformed to explicit knowledge.

  32. Morgan (1998: 299).

  33. Morgan (1998: 303).

  34. Morgan (1998), chap. 11 “using metaphor to manage in a turbulent word.”

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Ratkic, A. Images of reflection: on the meanings of the word reflection in different learning contexts. AI & Soc 28, 339–349 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-012-0409-z

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