Motion and Marking in Reflective Practice: Artifacts, autobiographical narrative and sexuality

Abstract

This paper introduces a reflective methodology of the body as a resource for reflective practice based on an analysis of my personal response and experience of autobiographical narrative. It offers an approach in which the movements and markings of the body serve as important sites for collecting additional evidence of the daily practices that shape our lives. The paper extends and develops the notion of reassembling 'artifacts' from Watson and Wilcox (2000), in order to expand the possibilities for enlarging methods of reflection. Two forms of artifact are presented: visual illustration and movement vignette. Re-collecting and reading these artifacts, allows the personal history stored in the body, as well as the body's contemporaneous knowledge to become more accessible for examination, dialogue and reflection. In a dialectic relationship with narrative writing, an example is presented of this reflective model that mines one's impulses for motion and stillness, movement and marking. Drawing upon the researcher's larger concerns, the paper concludes with a critical discussion of autobiographical inquiry and sexuality, heterocentric value systems, and reflective practitioners' ability to exhume the 'taken for granted' oppressions suffered in the world.