Critical Reflection as Inquiry and Practice-Based Evidence

Abstract

I became interested in both critical theory and narrative practice at the same time. This came about partly as a result of beginning my doctoral research in a critical pedagogy and cultural studies specialization, after my research interest had developed from reflecting on practice. It was while I was pursuing my doctoral work that I first read Schön (1983) and Fook (1999,2000) and recognized the value of their approaches to reflecting on practice for the further development of practice theory and knowledge. As I was reading Giroux and Simon (1989), hooks (1994) and Freire (1970) in the area of critical pedagogy, I began to recognize the influences of critical social theory across the fields of education and social work. At the same time, I was becoming fascinated by the post-modern and post-structural elements of narrative practice and later realized the commonalities within both narrative practice and Fook’s approach to critical reflection of practice, partly because of these elements. Fook, in an interview presented in Béres, Bowles and Fook (2011), clarifies why it is that critical reflection looks so similar to narrative practice, saying that it is because both draw on the same broader theories and approaches: The ideas of Foucault, for instance, have been used by many different disciplines and in different ways and have gotten filtered into those disciplines in a way that they think they are separate kinds of things, but in fact a lot of the socially based disciplines use particular theories anyway. So all I’ve done with critical reflection is taken it and theorized it a bit further, using post-modern and post-structural ideas and grafted them on to Brookfield. So my version of critical reflection just happens to use some Foucault, which makes it look like narrative therapy, but I also use Brookfield which makes it look like education. (Béres, Bowles & Fook, 2011, pp. 85–6)