The Body Disciplined: Rewriting Teaching Competence and the Doctrine of Reflection

Abstract

Shortly after the publication of The Reflective Practitioner (1983) and the sequel Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987) ‘reflection-in-action’ became a major concept in teacher education. The concept has, however, been criticised on ontological/epistemological as well as practice oriented accounts (Van Manen, 1995; Newman, 1999; Erlandson, 1995). In this paper I argue that reflection-in-action is a theoretical construction that snatches the interacting, working, and producing bodies from their practices, and consequently, matters of politics, of discipline, of institutional interaction and of the workings of social categories are reduced to matters of thinking. Turning to Foucault (1991) I claim that the doctrine of reflection is interwoven in the logic of discipline.