In Chapter 5, I explore insight. Insights are the learning accrued through reflection. They are described as embodied learning because they change the person in some way so that they now view and respond to the world differently, however slight. They are not necessarily easy to identify because of their embodied nature. Insights are initially tentative and held loosely. They are most often acknowledged reflexively through subsequent experiences.
In Chapter 6, I explore the third dialogical movement between the practitioner’s tentative insights and informing literature whereby relevant information from whatever source is accessed, critiqued, juxtaposed with insights and assimilated into personal knowing. I show how theory can be explored as theoretical mapping enabling practitioners to position themselves within the theory and plot movement towards a more desirable position.
The second part of this chapter is devoted to the fourth dialogical movement, the dialogue between the practitioner with a guide and peers. Guidance opens a learning space where the practitioner can share their experiences and insights, inviting the guide to offer their own perspectives. As a result of this dialogue, new insights emerge, deepened, and co‐created. Guidance radically shifts the relationship between student and teacher and, as such, has profound implications for curriculum as explored in later chapters.
In Chapter 7, I explore the fifth dialogical movement as weaving insights into threads and patterns represented in reflexive narrative form. The word ‘narrative’ has seeped into everyday speak. I wonder, have we moved beyond the technical rational to value experience and anecdote reflected in this seepage? Or is narrative simply a word to reflect ‘the story’ or ‘vision’. Whatever, it does suggest a valuing of context and subjectivity; that people are not machines. People are human and that experience is human and unique. And that no matter the difficulty, learning through reflection is dynamic. Narrative is creative. The practitioner has a license to construct narrative in ways that best express their reflexive learning and journey, for example, through poetry, art, metaphor and images. It cannot be prescribed even though academic institutions will nevertheless impose criteria about how it should be expressed.
In Chapter 8, I apply the model for structured reflection to my description of being with Peggy one morning at the Day Hospice. I apply the MSR in a systematic way to illustrate my use and understanding of each cue and as an exemplar to readers.
In Chapter 9, I set out my narrative of ‘patients I do not give a therapy to’ written as a series of prose poems about different patients who share the fact I did not give them a physical therapy, challenging myself about my role and the concept of therapy.
In Chapter 10, I explore the sixth dialogical movement as the dialogue between the text and its audience. In doing so, I emphasise that the text is more than simply an account of the practitioner’s journey. It offers an audience a focus for their own reflection and learning. The practitioner invites the audience to dialogue with an intent to stir the audience to draw and act on their own insights. With this idea in mind, the practitioner writes in a way to engage the audience and open this reflective space. Audience can be readers or listeners through performing the narrative.
In Chapter 11, I explore the idea of performing narrative to an audience in contrast with an audience reading a narrative. I give an example of how one practitioner converted her written assignment into a play ‘Musical chairs’ that was performed at a reflective practise conference.
In Chapter 12, I set out the performance narrative ‘people are not numbers to crunch’. It was written from my perspective as a partner to witness Otter’s experience of undergoing an angiogram. It exposes issues which reflect an unsatisfactory level of care, notably that nursing staff do not introduce themselves and treat Otter as if she is an object and myself as an outsider beyond their gaze. The performance is set against a CQC report of care at this particular hospital. Otter’s graphic storyboard of this experience can be accessed on the Wiley Blackwell website.
In Chapter 13, I explore with Otter how art and storyboard offer as a particular visual approach to reflection and narrative that may offer an alternative to language approaches and hence may benefit visual reflectors. Breaking narrative into visual scenes, like poetry, aids the revelation of insights. Poetry and art are expressive forms that open up the neglected right brain moving away from rational thought to nurture imagination, perception and ultimately intuition. We use Otter’s storyboard of bullying in the workplace. We know from experience that many practitioners will relate to this because bullying is endemic within the workplace. Storyboard’s visual storyboard is easy to relate to, opening a clearing for practitioners to explore their own experience of being bullied and how such pernicious behaviour can be confronted.
In Chapter 14, I contemplate the reflective curriculum. It is fascinating to look back at the previous editions to see this chapter’s reflexive development. It is the most vital chapter because health discipline curriculum is entrenched in a technical rational modus where reflection is viewed as just another teaching technique. If this is the case, then much of the benefit of reflective practice is lost. The reflective curriculum views professional artistry and identity as its education aim, and reflective practice as its primary approach, re‐orientating theory to inform this process. In other words, it turns the traditional relationship between practice and theory on its head. Easier said than done. I imagine how two teachers with differing teaching approaches explore teaching nursing students about stroke. John takes a theory‐driven approach typical of a dominant technical rational approach. Jane takes a reflective approach that embraces performance and with it, cross‐discipline teaching. At Bedfordshire, I involved drama and dance teachers as co‐supervisors for reflexive narrative doctoral students. Their involvement opened up the performance potential as a profound learning space. Performance engages and empowers people. It is an embodied learning that is necessary for practice disciplines where the body has to learn rather than the mind simply think.
Developing post‐registration reflective curriculum is illustrated through two courses; one as part of a ‘top‐up’ degree and one as a total masters degree in leadership.
Much of the reflective practice taught in Universities is by people who are not reflective. As a consequence, they adopt technical rational approaches to teaching reflection that are inadequate. The whole book is itself a treatise on the need to create reflective learning environments if we are to practice reflective practice critically rather than as a superficial problem‐solving exercise. Of course, it has value even at that level if it enables practitioners to pause and reflect on what they are doing in terms of best practice. But much of what we do and the way we think about what we do is culturally prescribed, And so, the reflective teacher, like the reflective practitioner, must pierce this cultural veil to understand and shift the norms that govern teaching of teachers if the value of reflective practice to develop professional artistry is greater than a technical rational approach to do reflection.
In Chapter 15, I explore how reflective academic writing can be meaningfully graded from a professional artistry perspective in contrast with a technical rational perspective. I argue that the focus of all reflective examination should primarily focus on the insights the practitioner draws from reflection, not on the reflective process itself. I use Jill’s