Docile bodies and imaginary minds : on Schön's reflection in action

Abstract

The modern debate on reflection in education started in the Anglo-American world at the beginning of the 1980s and spread from there to the Nordic countries. The focus in this debate has been on how professional practitioners, such as teachers and nurses, can use reflection in their professions. At the center of this debate is, and has been since 1983 when it was first published, Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. A pivotal concept in Schön’s discussions, as well as in his theory on the reflective practitioner, is reflection-in-action. Schön uses this concept to explain how practitioners develop a certain kind of thinking – thinking incorporated in action – which enables them to accomplish their work. Schön’s reflection-in-action concept is the main focus of this thesis. I analyze the concept as well as the discursive resources on which it relies. In the introductory background section, I first discuss Schön in the modern reflection-field in education and teaching. I then proceed to consider the relevance of Dewey to an outline of Schön’s theory of the reflective practitioner. I complete the background section with an introductory analysis, where I use a Wittgenstein-influenced critique by Newman in order to discuss the epistemological validity of Schön’s concept of reflection-in-action. This discussion about Newman’s critique is also the point of departure for the four articles in section two in which I develop my main theoretical claims in this thesis. I use two kinds of analytical modes. In articles 1 and 2 I mainly use conceptualizations from Merleau- Ponty whereas in articles 3 and 4 I use conceptualizations from Foucault as analytical resources. These two analytical modes serve the overriding purposes of my study and help me to answer the two main questions that structure the analytical efforts in the articles and in the thesis as a whole. The questions are: (i) is Schön’s suggestion “reflection-inaction” valid as an epistemological suggestion for describing and analyzing teacher practice, (ii) how can Schön’s concept of reflection-in-action and its use in education be conceived as matters of discourse? In the first article I claim that Schön’s “reflection-in-action” involves a control-matrix which recognizes the “mind” as controlling and the body as obeying, a claim which, if valid, makes Schön’s concept highly problematic. In the second article I argue that in the modern reflection debate in education there has been a tendency to interpret Dewey as linked to Cartesian ontology, a link from which Dewey needs to be saved. In article three I reframe Schön’s reflection concept and claim that his theory of the reflective practitioner is to be recognized as a concept that is interwoven with a particular historical and political technique for the construction of subjectivity. In the fourth article I argue that the reflection theme may be viewed as a component in a discursive battle about visuality and light.