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mattered to them and were relevant to their day to day work, that change
and learning could happen. As Clandinin and Connelly (2000) note:
―experience is the stories people live. People live stories and in the
telling of these stories, reaffirm them, modify them and create new
ones. Stories lived and told educate the self and others‖ (p.xxvi).
I prefer to use the terminology of ―stories of practice‖ which I took from
Bolton‘s work (2001). Previously, I struggled with the language of ‗critical
incident analysis‘ (Benner 1984, Brookfield 1995) because I felt it inhibited
students‘ learning from the ordinary events in their practice. ‗Critical‘ in
health care terms implies an emergency and a possibly dramatic event
requiring immediate intervention whereas I found over the years most
nurses struggled particularly with practice events that had a managerial,
ethical or emotional aspect (Clarke & Hopkinson 2000, Hopkinson &
Clarke 2002). In contrast the term ‗critical‘ in the language of reflection
refers to a process of challenging the values, contradictions, distortions
and assumptions embedded in practice which I now see as a process that
challenges the dominant discourses that can impinge on practice.
Before beginning this PhD, I frequently heard comments from student
nurses that reflection was purely an academic exercise divorced from the
realities of practice. This was the antithesis of what Schon (1983) was
arguing. He posited the potential for learning from messy, complex clinical
situations and valued practical knowledge arguing for an ―inquiry into the
epistemology of practice‖ (Schon, 1983 p.viii). By this he meant knowledge
which is situated directly in practice and which he earlier described as
―theories in use‖ (Arygris & Schon 1978).
Arygris and Schon (ibid) found that ―theories in use‖ were often different
from the stories of practice told by practitioners, which they called
―espoused theories‖. In other words, we do not always do what we say we
do, and theory does not always prepare us for the reality of practice. So for
Schon it was important to learn directly from practice itself in the mess,
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