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Private practice: exploring the missingsocial dimension in ‘reflective practice’Ben Kotzee aa Department of Social Policy and Education , Birkbeck College,University of London , London , UKPublished online: 17 Feb 2012.

To cite this article: Ben Kotzee (2012) Private practice: exploring the missing socialdimension in ‘reflective practice’, Studies in Continuing Education, 34:1, 5-16, DOI:10.1080/0158037X.2012.660521

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Private practice: exploring the missing social dimension in ‘reflectivepractice’

Ben Kotzee*

Department of Social Policy and Education, Birkbeck College, University of London, London,UK

(Received 24 September 2010; final version received 17 January 2012)

In professional education today, Schon’s concept of ‘reflective practice’ underpinsmuch thinking about learning at work. This approach � with its emphasis on theinner life of the professional and on her own interpretations of her learningexperiences � is increasingly being challenged: often cited objections are that themodel ignores factors like power and ideology and that it is too individualistic inits conception of learning. One line of criticism is that Schon’s focus on reflectionis too individualistic. Another possible fault is that Schon conceives of a practicein an overly individualistic fashion. This is the criticism that I will explore in thispaper. Ultimately, a social view is need to explain wherein a practice consists; sucha view also throws light on the limitations of relying on reflection to developprofessional expertise.

Keywords: reflection; Schon; practice; expertise

Introduction

There is little doubt how important ‘reflective practice’ � a concept due to the work

of Donald Schon � is in the current educational landscape and perhaps nowhere

more so than in professional education. Despite dating from over two decades ago,

Schon’s best known works on reflective practice (Schon 1983, 1987) still exert a

powerful influence in the field (Winch 2010, 136). Increasingly, however, critical

questions are being asked about the reflective practice approach and its application

in professional education settings. At the least we can say with Bradbury and others

that reflective practice is now a mainstream educational activity (Bradbury et al.

2010, 2) and that it has lost its critical edge. At worst, one may be tempted to say that

reflective practice has become ‘one of a handful of approved party lines’ in the

subject (Kagan 1993, 43; quoted in Newman 1999, 3).

Some authors have taken issue with exactly how the demand that students reflect

on what they do has been institutionalised in higher and professional education (see,

for instance, Boud and Walker 1998), while others have taken issue with the thinking

behind the idea of reflective practice and have asked whether reflection really

explains how it is that people learn professionally (see for instance Newman 1999;

Erlandson 2005; Procee 2006).

One prominent line of criticism (common to both sorts of approaches) is that

reflective practice is too individualistic in its conception of learning and that it leaves

*Email: b.kotzee@bbk.ac.uk

Studies in Continuing Education

Vol. 34, No. 1, March 2012, 5�16

ISSN 0158-037X print/ISSN 1470-126X online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2012.660521

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out the ‘social dimension’ of learning. Interpretations of what this missing social

dimension is, however, often differ. The usual line is that Schon’s conception of the

process of reflection is too individualistic: the question is whether people genuinely do

learn through a process of introspection rather than through conversation andinteraction with other people and it is held that this social perspective is left out in

imagining the reflective practitioner to be more in conversation with herself during

reflection than with other people.

Another possible fault is that Schon conceives of a practice in an overly

individualistic fashion. This is the criticism that I will explore in this paper.

The nature of ‘practice’ and the importance of the tacit

In the broader social science literature, one can identify a growing interest in ‘social

practices’ and in the role that the concept of ‘practice’ can play in thinking about the

social. Searle (1995) suggests that the social practice should be the primary unit of

analysis in social science and the importance of practice as a concept is also

underlined by Schatzki et al. (2001), who write of a ‘practice turn’ in contemporary

social theory. While a social practice can be defined as ‘any coherent and complex

form of socially established cooperative human activity’ (MacIntyre 1981, 187),1 a

key idea in this area is that the entirety of how people act in terms of a social practicecannot always be explained verbally. In taking part in any social practice (such as

playing football, arguing a case in a law court or negotiating a purchase � see below)

people act in regular and predictable ways that are similar to how everyone else acts,

but it is not always possible to state in terms of precise rules or procedures how

people know what to do in terms of that practice. The concept most often appealed

to in order to explain this is ‘tacit knowledge’ of what the practice requires and � at

bottom � explanations of what it is that people know or can do when they can take

part in social practices comes down to the sharing of a body of tacit knowledge

between them.

The appeal to tacit knowledge in explaining how practices are possible is

important not only in contemporary work on social practices (Collins 2001), but also

in much current thinking on the nature of professional expertise, leading one recent

commentator to write: ‘a new picture has come to hold the professional and

vocational educator captive: that of the tacit expert’ (Winch 2010, 136). Winch

stresses the important influence that Schon’s work (and also that of Hubert and

Stuart Dreyfus) has had in establishing this picture, but questions Schon’sinterpretation of wherein the tacit knowledge of the expert consists. Schon’s thinking

about the tacit is ‘infused’ by the work of Polanyi (Kinsella 2007, 396). Drawing on

Polanyi’s (1966) original elaboration of the idea of tacit knowledge, Schon has long

held the importance of tacit knowledge to be that ‘we know more than we can tell

and more than our behaviour consistently shows’ (Argyris and Schon 1974, 10; also

see Schon 1987, 22). Examples of the ‘more’ that we can know but not say are, for

instance, how to recognise a face or how to ride a bicycle; for Schon, mastering this

‘more’ underpins our professional practices, such as designing a building, teaching aclass or diagnosing an illness, too. While ‘tacit knowledge’ is equally important to

‘individualists’ about practice (like Schon) and ‘socialists’ (like Searle, Schatzki and

Collins) it is in the interpretation of wherein tacit knowledge consists that the two

differ. To anticipate, I will try to build an argument that Schon conceives of both

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‘tacit knowledge’ and (consequently) ‘practice’ in an individualistic light and that

Searle’s or Collins’s explanation of the tacit in an explicitly social light should be

preferred.

Schon’s conceptions of reflection and practice

How does Schon conceive of matters like professional practice and expertise and

what does reflection have to do with it? What sets the professional apart from the

novice, according to Schon, is the professional’s greater store of tacit knowledge of

the domain in which she operates, but for Schon tacit knowledge comes down not so

much to having the ability to do discrete things, but comes down to how the

professional approaches and solves problems. Schon’s emphasis on the manner inwhich the professional acts is important. Winch (2010, 138�49) holds that Schon’s

theory of expertise is � like Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s (1986) well-known stage-model of

expertise � a ‘fluency’ theory. According to such theories, expertise consists in the

fact that performance is not only of a high quality, but that it is conducted fluently,

that is, rapidly, without hesitation and largely intuitively (i.e., without making

reference to rules or theory and in a way that cannot always be articulated in words).

Winch holds fluency theories to be the dominant theories of expertise in education

(Winch 2010, 136).What distinguishes Schon’s account of expertise from (for instance) Dreyfus and

Dreyfus’s account, is that, for Schon, the expert continually reflects on what (s)he

does. At first, this may strike one as odd. Reflection � thinking about what one does

� sounds like a very intellectual activity, akin to, rather than opposed to, theorising.

For Schon, though, the reflection of the expert has a rather different character:

reflection, for Schon, is a matter more of doing than thinking. As Schon writes: ‘our

knowing is ordinarily tacit, implicit in our patterns of action and in our feel for the

stuff with which we are dealing. It seems right to say that our knowing is in ouraction’ (1983, 49). The expert can reflect on action (that is, think about action), but,

more importantly, can reflect in action (that is, reflect by doing things in a certain

way, rather than reflecting intellectually) (Schon 1983, 49�69). In acting reflectively,

the reflective practitioner carries out an ‘experiment’ in acting (Schon 1983, 68).

Based on her previous experience, the practitioner devises a unique solution to some

unique problem that confronts her and ‘tries it out’; elsewhere, Schon explicitly calls

reflective practice a form of ‘trial and error’ (1987, 27). Schon thinks the expert can

follow no textbook schemes in doing this. How the expert reflectively decides what todo cannot be explained by appeal to knowledge and rules; rather, it comes down to a

‘feel’ for something or an ‘intuitive knowing’ (Schon 1983, 55�6). Schon calls

reflection in action an ‘art’ (1983, 50) and holds that that teaching reflection-in-

action is teaching ‘artistry’ (1987, 22) and the examples he appeals to also all draw on

admiration of fluent performances, often from art or sport � e.g., throwing a baseball

or jazz musicians improvising together (Schon 1983, 54�5).

In giving his account of what reflection is, Schon does not to outline the

characteristics of the professional or his way of acting, but rather sketches a numberof (semi-fictional) examples illustrating what it is that the professional does that sets

him apart from the novice. Thus, in his well-known example of the architect’s studio,

Schon (1987, 44�79) explains the different abilities of the architect and his student to

design a building as a difference not in what the student and the architect can know

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or say but in what they can do almost without thinking and saying � the architect’s

mastery compared to the student’s inexperience can be explained in terms of the

architect’s more extensive and fluent ‘reflection-in-action’. Besides holding that

reflection is artistic, Schon holds that practising reflectively amounts to ‘on-the-spot

surfacing, criticizing, restructuring and testing of intuitive understanding of

experienced phenomena; often it takes the form of a reflective conversation with

the situation’ (Schon 1983, 241�2). It is this conversation with the situation that thearchitect demonstrates for the student and, for Schon, the student becoming a

reflective practitioner herself consists in her beginning to have a reflective

conversation with her situation too.

It is important (and puzzling!) that Schon sees the outcome of the practical

teaching situation not so much as the student becoming capable of doing something

specific, but as one in which the student becomes capable of having a certain kind of

reflective conversation with herself about the problem at hand. The object of

reflective practice, is taken by Schon to be the practitioner’s own experience of the

situation and not the experiences that she shares with her teacher or, even, the

situation itself; professional knowledge consists for Schon not so much in being able

to modify or change a situation in a particular way, but in being able to conceive of or

understand the situation in her own way. Taken to its full consequence, the curious

outcome is that, for Schon, the professionalism of the architect has more to do with

how he conceives of architecture than it does with the ability to design durable,

practical and attractive buildings and learning to design has more to do with thestudent thinking about her own interpretations that it has to do with thinking

directly about building sites, materials and spaces.

Why does this curious outcome arise for Schon? How does reflecting on one’s

experience � rather than doing something specific well � become the mark of the

professional? Kinsella (2007) offers the following explanation. What we must

understand is that, for Schon, learning proceeds through the effort to ‘surface and

criticize our tacit frames’ (Rein and Schon 1977, 243) and reflection makes the

individual aware that she can impose different interpretations or frames on her

experience of reality. On Schon’s view, the interpretations or ‘frames’ that the

individual imposes on her own experience has the effect of constructing reality for

her. Without reflection, Kinsella explains, people do not pay attention to the

contingency of their own understanding of the world (their ‘frames’) and do not pay

attention to how they construct their own reality. (2007, 398�9) Kinsella holds that

‘by making implicit frames explicit the practitioner becomes aware of alternative

ways of framing the reality of practice’ (2007, 399) and, presumably, becomes aware

of the possibility that he can both understand things and do things in different waysfrom the norm (thus making improvement possible). It is not surprising that Schon

holds reflection-in-action to be ‘constructionist’ � for him, professionals make their

own professional worlds (1987, 36).

Important as it no doubt is to true professionalism that the professional can act

autonomously and can shape her practice according to her own lights (rather than

just doing what is ‘tried and trusted’), what emerges from Schon’s discussion of

reflection-in-action is a picture of professionals as individuals who, essentially, make

decisions regarding how to act in unique situations based on their own ‘feel’ for the

situation or their individual artistry. It is true that Schon sketches his professionals as

operating within a (complex and messy) social environment,2 but � importantly � he

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still sees the decisions they make about how to act in that messy environment as

coming down to the instinct, inclination and artistry of the individual. The mark of

the professional, for Schon, is exactly that she does not follow any communal rules

(her expertise is about not following rules, but about coming to individual solutions)and that she does not act out shared practices (she makes her own practice by

conceiving of how she acts in her own way).

In the remainder of this paper, I will argue that Schon’s focus on the individual’s

own interpretations of her practice misses something more fundamental � the role

that the social context plays in constituting different practices in the first place.

Firstly, I shall hold that we can make no sense of the idea that the individual can, by

imposing different frames on her own experience, make or even change her own

practice � without being able to participate in a practice first, there will be nothingavailable for the individual (student or expert) to reflect on. Secondly, I shall hold

that even if the individual could make her own practice by interpreting her own

experiences, this would leave no room for the normative dimension involved in

learning. In order to explain the importance of the social dimension for the

possibility of practice, a detour is needed through recent ‘practice theory’ in the

social sciences.

The social nature of practice

What does it mean to say that practices are constitutively social? Searle’s explanation

of social practices in terms of ‘institutional facts’ and his distinction between

regulative and constitutive rules for human behaviour may help here. Searle (1969,

1995) distinguishes between two different kinds of rules that may drive individual

behaviour. What Searle calls ‘regulative’ rules guide antecedently or independently

existing forms of behaviour, while what he calls ‘constitutive’ rules ‘do not merely

regulate, they create or define new forms of behaviour’ (1969, 33). Take these twoexamples: the rules of dining etiquette (such as ‘keep your elbows off the table’ or

‘hold your fork in your left hand’) regulate the independently existing practice of

eating � these rules prescribe how one should eat, but eating would exist whether one

followed the rules of etiquette or not. But take the rules of football, chess or any new

game that you would yourself care to invent: without the rules of football, football as

a game would not actually exist (and so with any other game).3 Of course people

could kick balls around without the rules of football, but if the rules of football did

not exist, what those people would be doing would not be playing what we know as‘association football’ (it would be playing some other kind of game, or none �compare how rugby union and rugby league, while both different kinds of rugby

are defined and differentiated in terms of their different rules). These sorts of rules

are, for Searle, constitutive � they do not just regulate activities that people would

take part in anyway, but bring distinctive kinds of activities � distinctive social

practices � into being.

Searle’s account makes clear how integral the social dimension is to so many of

the human actions that we take for granted. Take the very existence of phenomenasuch as money, property and government: it does not take much imagination to

realise that ‘democracy’ would not exist without constitutive rules declaring what an

election is and how elections are won or that ‘banking’ would not exist without

constitutive rules determining whose money is whose, when it can be accessed and so

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on. Social practices, to a large extent, make up our social world and this is true also

of the professional world � what it is to file a lawsuit, compile company accounts,

arrest someone or any number of things that professionals do are all social practices,

brought into being and sustained by the constitutive rules for regulating people’sconduct in that particular field. While there no doubt are many things that people do

largely by themselves and that do not necessarily involve acting in terms of

constitutive rules, the importance of constitutive rules to some of the most simple

human interactions cannot be overstated. Take this (seemingly) very simple example:

The philosopher John Searle orders a beer in a cafe in France and the waiter brings itover. Searle drinks the beer, leaves some money on the table and leaves. (Adapted fromSearle 1995, 3�4)

To make sense of this little scene, Searle explains, we need to understand a great

many largely unstated rules that bear on the practice of having drinks in a cafe. For

example: What is a cafe (where one pays for one’s beer) as opposed to a house, say

(where one does not)? Who is a waiter and who a customer and what are the roles ofeach in their interplay? How much money should Searle leave on the table? (Answer:

as much as is stated on the price list that must appear by law next to the bar � and in

France this sum can differ depending on whether Searle sat at a table or at the bar.)

What should the waiter do with Searle’s money and why? (Answer: he should not

keep it, but should pass it over to the owner of the cafe, unless he is himself the

owner.)4

One may think that waiting tables is a relatively simple practice, but doing it to an

acceptable standard requires not only being conversant with an enormous amount ofsocial conventions and rules, most of which few waiters (or customers, for that

matter) would ever explicitly have considered, but also following them pre-

reflectively, without thinking. The point is that, while there are some things that

we do (any mere individual action, in effect) that do not require adherence to any

social rules or conventions for doing them successfully, taking part in any social

practice requires adherence to a range of constitutive rules for that practice in order

to be seen just as taking part in it (never mind taking part in it successfully). Any

account of practice that wishes to explain what the waiter, air traffic controller,accountant, lawyer or what-not does in his or her job and how they become expert at

it, needs to understand how all of these people can act in accordance with the various

constitutive rules that make up their practice even though many of these will not have

been explained explicitly (or even be capable of such explanation). None of this is

possible to explain solely in terms of individual reflection.

Wittgenstein, private language and private practice

Searle’s account of constitutive rules draws heavily on another important account of

social practices � Wittgenstein’s account in Philosophical investigations (1953) of

language as being constituted (like games are) in terms of rules for the use of words.An important consequence of Wittgenstein’s approach to language as a game is that

a private language (a language that only one person can ever understand) is

impossible � language is constituted socially, or, at the very least, publically (i.e., in a

way that other people can understand and could take part in too).5 As is the case

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with language, so it is with all rule-constituted practices � they cannot come into

being completely privately.

In making his celebrated ‘private language argument’, Wittgenstein asks us to

imagine trying to name a private sensation � say a certain kind of headache. Say you

resolve to call a certain stabbing headache you sometimes experience ‘S’ and another

kind of throbbing headache ‘T’. Wittgenstein asks whether this resolution constitutes

having given names to these private sensations (names only you can understand �since only you can actually know what these headaches are really like, only you

would be able fully to understand the language).

In sections 243�273 of Philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein explains why

your naming your sensations in this way could not form the basis of a language. He

begins by noticing the following feature of meaningful words: meaningful words can

be used correctly or incorrectly. For instance, a word like ‘cat’ is used correctly when

used to refer to a cat, but incorrectly if used to refer to a dog. But take the case of a

word for a private sensation, like the sensation you named ‘S’ today. What happens

the next time you try and use your word ‘S’? Say tomorrow comes and you wonder

whether the dullish headache you have then should be called ‘S’. You ask yourself:

‘yesterday, did I intend for ‘‘S’’ to mean this kind of dull headache too?’ Imagine you

are not quite sure whether you meant yesterday that this kind of headache must be

called ‘S’ too. The important point is that you can convince yourself either way: if it

seems to you now that you then intended ‘S’ to mean this sort of headache too,

nothing can stop you from calling this headache ‘S’ and regarding it as an ‘S’ �nothing will decide the matter of whether this kind of headache is really an ‘S’ or

not.6 Wittgenstein holds that, for a private word, whatever seems the right way to you

to use it will be the right way to use it � for a private word, the distinction between

using it right and wrong simply collapses. And if this were the case, it would clash

with the assumption about meaning stated earlier, that for meaningful words there

has to be a distinction between correct and incorrect use. There being no right and

wrong ways to use private words, Wittgenstein concludes that they cannot be

meaningful and, therefore, cannot form part of a language.

In the current context � where we are not interested in language so much as in

what it might illustrate about social practices � the account is helpful to make one

thing clear: practices cannot be invented privately � they cannot be constructed by

the individual alone through reflection on only her own experiences. Another remark

of Wittgenstein’s bears squarely on the case in hand. Wittgenstein (1978, 349) asks:

‘Can a solitary person carry on a trade?’ Wittgenstein does not answer the question

directly, but clearly implies that it would make no sense imagining such person (that

is, someone who is not part of a community in any sense) carrying on a trade.

(Malcolm 1986, 175) On the most basic level, a solitary person could not carry on a

trade because they would have no one to trade with. Furthermore, in the absence of

other trades people, it would be impossible to say what trade is being carried on: the

butcher, for instance, essentially cuts and sells meat in shapes that other butchers

would recognise and that cooks can use, the electrician wires electrics in ways that are

safe to householders to handle and according to a pattern that other electricians can

add to, etc. The most natural descriptions of the various trades mention distinct

services provided in standard ways to other people (and as with trades, so with

professions too).

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The problem for Schon’s conception of an individual or ‘private’ practice that

consists wholly in the individual changing his or her actions on the basis of her own

artistic interpretations and experiences of unique situations is that no one can create

a practice (like the practices of a trade or a profession), for which there exists real

rules that determine the content and shape of the practice over time, just on this

basis. The problem is not that Schon sees professionals as being essentially solitary

people � as was made clear above, Schon very clearly does conceive of professionalsas acting within a society. The problem is twofold: firstly, Schon holds it to be the

height of reflective sophistication when professionals � even when they are acting

with other people � act according to their artistry and feel for the situation. For him,

the emphasis is precisely not on following the rules that are crucial to the constitution

of practices on the Wittgensteinian view, but on acting according to an individual

understanding of what the situation requires. It looks dangerously as if, in her

reflective practice, whatever Schon’s professional thinks is the right thing to do will

also be the right thing to do; this signals that her reflective actions either cannot be

part of practices or, at least, cannot constitute practices by themselves. Secondly,

Schon continually stresses the uniqueness of complex situations (cf. Schon 1983, 14)

and that the reflective actions of the professional are unique. Again, it is impossible

to see how a practice can be based entirely on unique actions. As Wittgenstein holds

in section 199 of Philosophical investigations, it is impossible to conceive of a rule that

can only ever be followed once and so it must also be for practices. To qualify as what

we would normally call a ‘practice’ people have to act in regular and repeatable ways

that is understood by (or at least understandable to) other people and Schon’sconception of ‘reflective practice’ is simply too open to individual whim and unique

inclination to make possible full-blooded practices.

It is clear that people can reflect on the practices they take part in once these

practices are up and running (and once they have become competent participants in

those practices); people may even change practices on this basis. There is no

suggestion that Schon held the (bizarre) view that professionals always act in ways

that are entirely unconstrained by what others do. The most probable interpretation

is that Schon took the existences of up-and-running practices for granted in his

thinking about reflection and merely admired it when people could ‘break’ with the

practices they were already part of and act in highly inventive ways. Schon clearly

thought that this was the height of professional knowledge, but what should be clear

from the discussion above is that Schon placed the emphasis regarding what

constitutes professional practice in the wrong place � on the individual’s reflection,

rather than on the necessary groundwork of first learning to act according to the

rules that is required for anything to count as a social practice (not to mention that

one must first be able to take part in a practice before one can break with it orreinvent it in interesting ways). Since so much of what professionals do involves

social practices we need to explain first how professionals learn to take part in these

practices not on the basis of how they interpret their own experiences but in terms of

highly conventional interactions with other people in terms of constitutive rules.

How people can begin taking part in and can improve in social practices requires a

social explanation and this perspective is simply left out on Schon’s account.

While considerations of space prohibit a full working out of these ideas, the

developing social theory of expertise as found in, for instance, Collins and Kusch

(1998), Collins and Evans (2007) and Collins (2007) suggest avenues for working out

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the possibilities. In a recent paper,7 Collins (2007) addresses the question of tacit

knowledge and asks what the observation that there are things that we can do but

cannot say should imply for thinking regarding expertise. Collins distinguishes

between two kinds of tacit knowledge. What he calls ‘somatic limit tacit knowledge’

is the sort of tacit knowledge Polanyi describes (such as riding a bicycle or

recognising a face). According to Collins, understanding this sort of tacit knowledge

poses no specific puzzle: it is not that it is in principle impossible to describe the

physics of riding a bicycle (robotic bicycles, for instance, have been constructed), it is

only that humans usually do not appeal firstly to the principles of physics when

learning to ride bicycles (Collins 2007, 258). Knowledge of how to ride bicycles is notmysterious at all, or of a special kind or nature that requires a special epistemology, it

is just simpler for humans to learn how to ride bicycles by being shown. The second

kind of tacit knowledge � ‘collective tacit knowledge’ � however, does pose a special

problem. As Collins points out, even if knowledge of how to ride a bicycle does not

require a very puzzling kind of knowledge, knowledge of how to ride a bicycle in

traffic does. Such knowledge requires grasping the ‘social conventions of traffic

management’ (Collins 2007, 259). As Collins holds:

The second kind of tacit knowledge is not a matter of the accident of the humanconstitution, but a matter of the knowledge itself. This knowledge has to be knowntacitly, because it is located in human collectivities and, therefore, can never be theproperty of any one individual. (Collins 2007, 260)

As Collins points out, the two kinds of tacit knowledge are easily confused,

because they are both learned by humans in the same way � through participating in

social learning processes. Only the second poses a specific problem, though, and

coming to have such tacit knowledge clearly does not call for any special individual

flair or artistry, but rather for immersion in culture. Educational thinking regarding

the nature of expertise and professional knowledge needs both to distinguish

rigorously between different kinds of tacit knowledge (cf. Collins and Evans 2007)

and to explain each in its own terms.

The normative dimension of social practice: an argument from ‘learning’

Thus far, our focus has been on the possibility of social practices and on how Schon’s

account falls short in being unable to explain how social practices become at all

possible. There is, however, another argument to be made against Schon’s veryindividualistic notion of what practice amounts to and that is that grounding

professional knowledge in a form of reflection misses another important feature of

social practices (related to its socialness): that learning how to take part in social

practices is a normative endeavour. The point will be that, even if a wholly private

practice is possible (contrary to what has been argued above) it is hard to see how

individual reflection may amount to learning.

One line of criticism of reflective practice has always been that reflection

(especially as found in the reflective writing assignments commonly found in nursing,

social work and teacher education) is prone to fakery and leaves little room for

criticising � and attempting to improve! � someone’s performance.8 If it really is the

case that a student in a reflective assignment can draw pretty much any lesson they

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want from any experience (and reflection in Schon’s sense is, after all, just about

imposing different frames on one’s individual experiences) then there really is very

little room for a teacher ever to criticise a student for drawing a bad lesson from

reflection. This is not to advocate a particularly directive conception of education,

but to hold that, without the space to criticise a performance it is also very hard to

hold that someone is really improving at something or learning something at all. By

definition, improvement and � more importantly � learning how to do something

require that someone moves from a state in which they are less good at an activity to

one in which they are better at it and talking of performances that are ‘less good’ and

ones that are ‘better’ in this way already makes space for criticism of the less good

performances or at least for evaluation of someone’s performances in terms of an

external standard. ‘Learning’ is a normative concept, which is to say that, if someone

is to be capable of learning anything, we have to leave space for ‘good’ and ‘bad’

performances.

Take the following example. In season 4 of the television drama The Wire, the

mathematics teacher Mr P demonstrates a multiple-choice problem � A, B, C or D �on the board and asks one of his students, Kelvin, to solve it. Kelvin immediately

answers correctly � C � but when quizzed regarding how he worked out the answer

Kelvin explains that he had come across multiple-choice questions before and that he

has learnt that teachers always draw attention to the correct answer (without their

knowing it!) by tapping on the blackboard with their crayon next to the right answer

and that that is how he could tell the right answer straight away. One could say thatKelvin had learnt a pretty sophisticated reflective lesson from his earlier exposure to

multiple-choice questions and arrived at a unique solution through trial and error:

the ‘dinks’ that the teacher makes with his crayon next to the correct answer

unintentionally gives the answer away. In the scene in question, Kelvin was genuinely

pleased with what he had learnt and, no doubt, had reflectively thought that he had

learnt a very good lesson. But even though Kelvin was pleased with his learning, from

another perspective � the perspective of mathematics � Kelvin’s learning journey was

disastrous, for he had failed to learn how to solve mathematical problems at all.

The point is that if learning is no more than reflection on one’s own experience,

then Kelvin’s learning can be counted a success and one has little grounds for

criticising his learning journey. Admittedly, few teachers using the tools of reflective

practice in the classroom will see matters this way. Surely, the objection will go,

reflective practice is not entirely without standards: in assessing students’ reflections

one must judge whether their reflection is deep and thorough and one judges whether

they arrive, through their reflections, at original and effective solutions to complex

and unique problems. But this is exactly the point. If you feel that students mayreflect well or badly, successfully or unsuccessfully (like if you think that Kelvin had

missed the point of his mathematics lessons so far), then you are in fact adopting a

view of when learning is a success that does not come down to individual

interpretation (like Schon’s) but, instead, relies on shared criteria for when learning

is a success. The point is that in order to be in a position to say that a student (like

Kelvin) got something wrong in his reflection on a problem, you need to mention

that he has failed to pick up the rules of the practice that you are trying to teach (in

Kelvin’s case, mathematics). The problem with Schon’s account is that what it means

to do anything well is not a matter of individual artistry and personal construction,

but of social judgement. In order for anyone to not only take part in a practice, but

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to take part well, it is not enough for someone to rely on their own interpretation of

whether they are doing well, they must submit to the standards and criticism of other

people.

Schon’s constructivism is a major problem here.9 Recall that, for Schon, the

reflective conversation with the situation is a remaking or reinterpretation of their

practice world. Besides the point raised above, that the individual cannot invent their

practice world by themselves, if one takes Schon’s individualism to its full conclusion,

reflective practice looks less like learning to do something specific well and more like

simply seeing one’s own practice � that may be terribly bad, from the position of the

observer � in a different (and perhaps even flattering) light. Perhaps this is why

reflective practice as we encounter it on professional courses today is less an exercise

in improvement, but more one of reassurance or self-congratulation � not ‘look how

clever I’ve become’, but ‘look how clever I’ve been all along’. As reflection on

experience is individual and unique (and no-one’s reflection on their experiences can

be better than anyone else’s), all really can have prizes in (private!) reflective practice.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have attempted to show how Schon’s individualistic account of what

‘practice’ amounts to � by leaving out the social dimension � fails to be able to

account for how people can learn to become part of social practices or can improve

at them. Rather than explaining the possibility of professional knowledge, Schon’s

account presupposes the existence of social practices and the ability of individuals to

take part in them; rather than focussing on the ‘unsayable’ in individual experience,

investigations of the nature of professional expertise and of tacit knowledge may

focus much more fruitfully on the question of how social practices are constituted

and how people are initiated into them. In the theoretical study of professional

knowledge and expertise a thoroughgoing ‘practice turn’ (as has taken root in

broader social theory) seems past due.

Notes

1. While there are interesting parallels between MacIntyre’s and Searle’s accounts, MacIn-tyre’s views have shifted and are hard to interpret (Winch 2010, 11�3). The starting point inwhat follows will be Searle’s interpretation.

2. For instance, he writes that ‘a professional’s knowing-in-action is embedded in the sociallyand institutionally structured context shared by a community of practitioners’ (1987, 33); Ithank an anonymous reviewer for Studies in Continuing Education. See below for furtherdiscussion.

3. The example is also mentioned in MacIntyre (1984), whose thought parallels Searle’s here.4. The list continues. See Searle (1995).5. Newman (1999) also suggests the relevance of Wittgenstein for this debate, but does not

notice that what Schon advocates is private practices. See Kenny (1973) for a goodintroduction to Wittgenstein’s thought. For a discussion of the question whether languageshould properly be seen as ‘social’ or as ‘public’, see Malcolm (1989). Either interpretationrules out what Schon has in mind.

6. It is no good to say that you will remember that you did not call a dull headache ‘S’yesterday, because you may remember wrong. Remembering is just another sort of seeming.

7. And book. Collins (2010).8. Compare, in this regard, Saltiel’s paper in Bradbury et al. (2010)

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9. See Kotzee (2010) for a discussion of the problems around standards that constructivismthrows up in the classroom.

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