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Action and Stories in Developing Practical Knowledge
“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance” Confucius
Throughout this inquiry I have read consistently, making it difficult to
isolate all my starting influences. Perhaps this is down to my lack of
systematic record keeping but also reflects the plethora of published
material relating to reflection and reflective practice in healthcare. I have
facilitated reflective practice across a range of healthcare professionals for
so long that I came to this research with reading dating back to my first
degree in 1991.
The origins of reflection lie in philosophical thought. Consequently,
reflection is variously understood as ranging from casual ways of thinking
about practice at one extreme to structured processes based on the
philosophical underpinnings of, for example, Dewey, Habermas, Gadamer
(Taylor, 2006, Kember, 2001, Johns, 2000) at the other. In the social
sciences research literature, reflection forms part of the concept of
reflexivity and is associated with action research, critical pedagogy, critical
theory, critical social theory and several qualitative research
methodologies such as feminism, heuristic research and ethnography. The
research definitions of reflexivity will be discussed later in the chapter. 3
The literature is further complicated by the variety and diversity of terms
associated with reflection including: ‗critical reflection‘, ‗reflective practice‘,
‗critical incident analysis‘, ‗praxis‘, ‗reflection-on-action‘, ‗reflection-in-
action‘ and ‗reflexivity‘. While sometimes these terms seem to describe the
same process, a plethora of authors provide differing definitions adding to
the complexity of the phenomenon (Hopkinson, 2009). Kember (2001)
argued that formal definitions of reflection are hard to find in the
overabundance of reflective practice literature, because reflection is
3 See section Establishing Quality in Collaborative Inquiry
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