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Abstract

This article reflects on the meaning of ‘reflection’, and on enablers of ‘reflection’, in higher education. Irrespective of what university managers might want us to think, the key point is that student reflection cannot simply be seen as an intended learning outcome (ILO) of teaching. The author contends that reflection is better seen as the occasioning of a questing self-consciousness in students. The ‘self’ in the questing is key. Reflection in higher education is no mere outcome of teaching.

Keywords

higher education intended learning outcomes reflection learning and teaching

‘Il est plus difficile de s’empêcher d'être gouverné que de gouverner les autres. It is more difficult to avoid being governed, than it is to govern others.’

Maxime (Maxim) 151 (1650s) of François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680), here as translated by Arthur Humphreys (1665)

Higher education exists to interpret the world, to be sure, but it also exists to help enable the world to conceive change and to be changed; this sentence paraphrases Karl Marx in 1845 composing his Thesis 11.

But how can this become so, if ‘reflection’ in higher education is now modelled as a mere delivery – reduced and traduced to outcomes pretended as intended by their teachers? The agenda to frame intended learning outcomes (ILOs) arises from product-differentiation directives from university managers. They think marketing all their degrees requires them to be as slim, distinct, explicit, and yet as standardized as they can be. Yet the university's teachers – not its managers – are the only ones who can implement, let alone conceive, these intended outcomes their managers think they need.

This article reflects on the meaning of ‘reflection’, and on enablers of ‘reflection’, in higher education. I suggest student reflection should not be seen as an intended learning outcome of teaching. I turn to philosophers who, for millennia, have been sceptics of anything that smacks of order and authority in higher education. ‘Reflection’ is here seen as any occasioning of questing, questioning and disciplinary self-consciousness among students.

I also write to suggest that the student ‘self’ in the questing and questioning is key. I suspect academe tends to indulge fantasies of the teacher as the key agent of change. This contrary focus on the student ‘self’ in the questing and questioning is why reflection cannot be taught, let alone mapped. It must be provoked. It must allow an open road.

Occasioning reflection in higher education also summons to students to assay and finesse their own metaphors about their disciplinary/professional predicaments. Donald Schön's classic ‘professional’ goal for higher education (1983) – the enabling of self-aware and self-sustaining capacities for reflection – remains pertinent, but any focus on developing these capacities in students in higher education now means we academics as teachers need to attend more to the student experience. Thinking of reflection as an intended outcome of our teaching suppresses this focus on student experience, privileging (our?) knowledge-what over (their and our?) knowledge-how and -maybe (Winchester, 2023: 88–89).

This educational agenda of mine makes me want you to take phenomenology seriously (Jones, 2011a, 2011b, 2019; Peshkin, 1988). Student-owned and -generated metaphors, meanings and narratives (Bruner, 1990, 1991; Nelson, 2018) – not just teacher-scripted ILOs – are key ways in which higher education students develop capacities for reflection.

This key point is argued here on cognitive, philosophical and sociolinguistic grounds. I draw on my experience as a retired educator, secondary and tertiary, and as a supposed manager of teaching and learning in a humanities and social sciences faculty. I recoil against models of reflection in higher education as craven acts of student vassalage to their teachers’ intentions. Instead, reflection in higher education also requires student self-awareness of ways ‘people [in their profession] understand their language and experience’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: ix). The key task of higher education becomes enabling students to walk, talk and write their own way into their own life as a ‘disciplinary’ or ‘professional’ person with self-sustaining capacities for reflection.

I am influenced by Simone Weil's reappraisal of her own education, written while she was a refugee in Marseilles in Vichy France in 1941 before fleeing to Casablanca in May–June 1942. Higher education to her was ‘waiting in patience’ (her translation of ἐν ὐπομένη as la salle d’attente). She thought higher education was about occasioning student capacities to relish problems, not to expect solutions to be dictated to them (Weil, 1973: xi; Zaretsky, 2021: 43–45, 54). She emphasized how developing ‘the faculty of [student] attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies’ (Weil, 1973: 105). She explained that ‘attention’ is not a muscular exertion, not some narrowing and furrowing of brows as demanded by someone else. ‘Attention’ is rather a questing and questioning students are occasioned to own and enjoy because both help them redefine themselves. Like open conversation, like making sense of art, ‘attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, ready to be penetrated by the object’ (Weil, 1973: 109–111).

Learning-outcomes-driven models of higher education overlook this. They are now one of many ‘dysfunctional illusion[s] of rigor’ identified by Craig Nelson as plaguing teaching and learning practices and policies isn contemporary higher education (Nelson, 2010). My thinking is also influenced by Robert Nelson's erudite and passionate book (2018) about a ‘creativity crisis’ in contemporary higher education. Like Robert Nelson, I suggest curricula in higher education should model student reflection as also encouraging students to develop constructive forms of misalignment. Constructive misalignments often arise when students have scope to develop new metaphors about their predicament.

I therefore doubt John Biggs’ and Catherine Tang's influential and current teacher-centric model of higher education. Theirs is a logistics exercise: ‘constructive alignment’ (Biggs and Tang, 1999, 2011). Biggs and Tang peddle ‘outcomes’ affording teachers and managers illusions of control over students’ learning. But this view of higher learning as a feat of fulfilled intentions misleads. Higher education does not function only by institutional mission statements and teacher intentions.

As quoted at the outset, La Rochefoucauld was one of the first to question what reflection requires. He chose the transitive French verb ‘gouverner’, with connotations of ruling, steering and determining. Yet he also resisted its absolutist connotations. He thought – and I think – that the students’ reflections always matter more than their would-be teachers’ intentions (Pace, 2017; von Manen, 1991).

This is also how teaching and learning in higher education differs from the parallel world of research as conducted in universities. In the mind of the researcher, though not external research funding bodies, the higher education researcher's agenda is all that matters. If the researcher's agenda aligns to a funder's agenda, government and private instrumentalities, money streams follow, kudos too. Yet when higher education teaching and learning come to mind, the reflections of students – i.e. what the student does – matter much more than their teacher's agenda. Teachers are almost always humbled by their students’ responses – positive or negative! – to their teaching. Researchers, by contrast, sometimes drown in hubris, confusing teaching with discipling. La Rochefoucauld's ‘gouverné/gouverner’ enigma suspected a true higher education meant freeing oneself not only from the ‘government’ of teachers as would-be governors delivering outcomes, but also freeing oneself from reflex, ruled or rote learning. La Rochefoucauld suggested reflection had to insinuate students’ own learning praxis.

Why did La Rochefoucauld tilt at these windmills? La Rochefoucauld was a proud rebel who survived despite his support for an aristocratic rebellion (‘Le Fronde’, 1648–1653) against his stripling absolutist king, Louis XIV (b. 1638, r. 1643–1715). La Rochefoucauld was wounded in the eye and head when he was a Frondeur in Faubourg St Antoine in 1652. He convalesced at his Château Verteuil in the Charente. La Rochefoucauld belatedly re-entered Parisian and Port Royal salon life around 1660. This was the context for the epigraph beginning this essay: his barb 151 about absolutist (i.e. scripted) le roi soleil (Sun King) gouvernement in and over education, politics and life. No. 151 was written while La Rochefoucauld was in self-imposed exile. Read in salons after his return, La Rochefoucauld decided it was easier – not better – to govern and to be governed, i.e. unreflectively. He knew caution was needed when confronting would-be rector-CEO-sun kings whose legacy has still not perished with Louis XIV. Some rois soleils are even pundit academics. Reflection, so he decided in the epigraph quoted, required freeing oneself from the governing – conceptual, political, gendered, discursive, habitual etc. – of others, such as absolutist kings, pompous clerics and higher education aligners. La Rochefoucauld used ironic aphorisms to challenge received understandings. His No. 199 closes this essay.

While reflecting on reflection is as old as philosophy, it is still not a common topic among academics and scholars who worry about, and value, their teaching. This rarity is a problem in contemporary higher education, compared to kindergarten, primary or secondary education, where teachers really do want to reflect on their in-class impact and praxis. The research symposium of my old history department in academe, however, would not consider anything written on history teaching and learning as ‘research’. I suspect much the same view applies in most science and social science departments in universities.

University managers have since responded to this academic myopia in higher education by employing ‘educational developers’ to help boost student-retention-and-satisfaction rates. Meanwhile, their academics were just miffed that this new money was not spent on more of them. But I doubt educational developers have helped much. The types of narrow task-oriented time-outs, texts and talks on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) so often developed by professional educational developers now tend to be too empirical and too instrumental (Cook-Sather et al., 2019). SoTL also tends to de-emphasize different disciplinary ways of learning, preferring to align everything (Biggs and Tang, 1999, 2011). They are also more prone to miss their mark because academics’ working life as researchers and teachers remains tied to their disciplines more than to their universities. Constructive alignment tasks educational developers to apply William Tell archery tests of delivery accuracy between nominated aims and targets. I think it would be better if the new money was used to encourage academics also to develop their skills as enablers of student learning, rather than just as expert researchers who may or may not be able to enable others to learn. Likewise, many empirical SoTL studies only seem important to their writers, but not to the disciplinary academics whose practices they hope to shift. This is because few academics – unlike university managers, who want curricula to be mapped – think they teach the same things the same ways. This is also because academics tend to focus only on their (disciplinary) peers. Institution-wise, SoTL also functions via stand-alone centres and conferences empowering educational developers to benchmark and rank, tracking purpose and performance. But teaching and learning do not reduce to performance targets. Prioritize reflection, but do not expect to benchmark it.

Old hands may have noticed, nonetheless, how I still hold fast to Ernest Boyer's founding impulse for SoTL (Boyer, 1990). He was an academic ready to reflect on, and to encourage research on, academics’ teaching and students’ learning, affording SoTL reflection and research the same kudos and rigour as the disciplinary research earning academics their jobs. Boyer's SoTL was a variety, besides pure and applied research, of academic discipline-based scholarship, and not a separate career of educational development. As a discipline scholar – history in my case – Boyer helped me realize why I cannot couple higher education with ILOs and benchmarks. Any discipline is more than a sum of teachers’ outcomes.

My surly scepticism may arise because I teach and research the Humanities, the oldest and most hidebound form of higher education. I even quoted La Rochefoucauld, an old sceptic querying the thrall of absolutist will. How many SoTL articles review the 17th-century literature? La Rochefoucauld queried received Christian-Sophist-Stoic-Humanist models of education. When I reflect on 35 years’ teaching and researching European history, I cannot view my learning, let alone my students’ learning, as a function of outcomes I intended. Perhaps this is because I practised inquiry-based learning. Romance and serendipity also shape students’ so-called learning outcomes. Nor can I recognize anything I did in the classroom, or via student assessments I set, as coherent and purposive enough to resemble a method. I just ‘hear[d] students to speak’ instead (Palmer, no date; von Manen, 1991, ch. 5).

Every class is unique, after all … like a river. When reflecting on reflection, Plato's Cratylus (a dialogue dating from 360 bce) reported Socrates endorsing (402A) a reflection of the Pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus (late 6th–early 5th century bce): ‘You can’t step into the same river twice (δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης)’. Provoking with enigmas, Heraclitus was thinking about the immanence and evanescence of thinking. When you rethink your own thinking, the things you think you know dim and dodge – either as reflection in action, or as reflection on action. Likewise, every class you teach.

Benchmarks seldom bench. Outcomes often miss. When outcomes remain open, certainties wane. The key thing about reflection in higher education is that it enables academic and student selves to impinge academic and student selves. When we reflect, we pull ourselves up. My second example of a reflection, the one about rivers, showed such an impingement. The example emerged in Greek Ionia under Persian domination, around 500 bce, just before Hellenic revolts (498–493 bce) and two bitter wars with Persia (490 and 480–479 bce). These events in turn prompted an original reflection on human (not divine) ‘greatness’, prompted by a fear humans might forget. This moment came when Herodotus (1,1) explained his historical researches to a public. By contrast, Heraclitus’ reflection about rivers was a private pearl of wisdom, locked away in a temple in Ephesus. Reflection is an ownership of a change. It is inherently individualistic and creative. It is responsive. This means reflection is always some sort of enabled attempt to lasso some new metaphor, somehow, somewhere.

When tasked to write something, a perennial dilemma of students involves their thinking, ‘Is this to be written for you?’, their academic – i.e. as an expert – or is it to be written for a novice, or for someone in between? Another dilemma asks, ‘Will it be assessed?’ (Jones, 2018a). Like assessment, reflection is therefore never a mere outcome of curriculum or indeed of teaching. In practice, when a teacher says, ‘Let's reflect’, students start to think something is up. Many students then start searching for a script. Yet the whole point of higher education is to enable students to begin to write their own script.

These ‘something-is-up’ students miss the point of higher education. Learner outcomes are no mere function of teacher intentions. Student reflection is, instead, a quirky questing self-consciousness. It disturbs and disrupts. Reflection wanders and wonders. With candour, a philosopher pessimist, Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), explained this as ‘Thinking for Yourself (Selbstdenken)’:
§1 You can apply yourself voluntarily to reading and learning, but you cannot really apply yourself to thinking: thinking has to be kindled, as a fire is by a draught, and kept going by some interest in its object … §4 … A truth that has merely been learnt adheres to us only as an artificial limb, a false tooth, a wax nose does, or at most like a transplanted skin; but a truth won by thinking for yourself is like natural limb: it alone really belongs to us. This is what determines the difference between a thinker and a mere scholar. (1970: 89, 91, the original German text is 1892: 519, 522 as §257, §260)

I have fourth-year undergraduates in mind: the writer of a senior thesis (USA and Canada), honours thesis (Australasia and Scotland) or minor thesis in a coursework Master’s (Bologna-compliant England, Europe, Australasia or Asia). I have in mind student abilities to conduct quirky quests, and the corresponding responsibility laid upon their academics to usher their questing students, but not to script them, towards making sound and yet semi-independent sense of their world. These are classic ‘capstone’ indications in higher education of student attainment of a degree of mastery over a discipline (Sill et al., 2009). In the literatures devoted to SoTL and to educating professionals, this attainment of self-efficacy in studies is also called ‘meta-cognition’ – referring to a professional's capacities to review their thinking about their thinking (Ashby et al., 2005, ch.4; Schön, 1983, ch. 2).

Educational theorists now posit reflection as ‘an active process of exploration and discovery which often leads to … unexpected outcomes’ (Boud, et al., 1985a: 7). Bona fide reflection – not scripted ILO humbug – is underpinned by a teacher's readiness to relish the unexpected. But teachers also know some students loath this freedom amid uncertainty. The freedoms in higher education can seem threatening to those, whether teachers or students, who confuse it with disciple-ship. For some, the loathing is only initial; for others, it persists – they resent not having been taught … properly! For some, once they have tasted this nectar of freedom, and once they have taken on this burden of self-responsibility, there is no desire to go back. Some students, however, still assume knowledge is unambiguous, male, epic and certain. They presume learning equates with dependency.

Genuine student reflections differ, and cannot be scripted, let alone teacher-intended. One such delight in outcomes unexpected has already been mentioned: the wholly new form of reflective inquiry prompted, named and practised by Herodotus around 440 bce. He named it ‘History’. He just meant his new form of student reflection was an ‘investigation (η ἱστορίης)’ conducted by a named ordinary person (him!) working things out for himself and then communicating his thinking, not hiding it in a temple. Herodotus also admitted his new form of knowledge was provisional and terrestrial; it was not received namelessly and willy-nilly, via muses and gods, as with the far older, and more certain, wisdom of seers, like Homer and Hesiod. The same 5th-century bce Greece also engendered other astounding forms of student investigation and reflection, equally provisional: theatre, natural history, medicine, rhetoric and philosophy. And, soon after, rival ‘academic’ classifications would emerge as to whether these inquiries were natural or metaphorical, forensic or sophist.

Learning in particular and SoTL in general resemble Herodotus’ investigations (οι ἱστορίες). All narrate and weigh to instruct. All express themselves through new metaphors and methods. All who learn are flawed and human; they know their reflections lack divine inspiration. All try to prompt others to reflect. They know everything known is conditioned and therefore provisional. All their investigations prompt narrated ‘accounts (οι λόγοi)’: tasking teachers and students alike to write or tell about senses they make about the things they know.

Another key issue about reflection now arises. What is reflection, really, if it cannot simply be read as a scripted outcome – whether intended (i.e. as ILOs), taught (as curricula), or just rehearsed willy-nilly (as implicit workshop practices)?

The key to reflection, I venture, is any teacher enabling of student capacities to articulate anything pertinent that is also unscripted. This is my key point – my take home for us all as teachers. I want us all of us higher education teachers to ask, ‘Where and how can my students in my subject/degree find the time and space they need to articulate anything pertinent that is also unscripted?’ Teachers from kindergarten to university, from professional work to retirement home, know that if they engender moments of articulable independent reflection, student learning really takes flight. Teachers also know that learners learn best as soon as the learners realize their reflection enables them to monitor and pilot themselves. And learners do not even need to have anything approaching mastery to start ‘to be heard to speak’ pertinently, and unscripted. Watch a baby start to crawl. Observe a student starting to frame meaning via a metaphor they found and are now trying to own.

The change in the learner from passenger to co-pilot just requires teacher–mentor receptivity to enabling next stages of students’ intellectual maturity. Articulable reflection starts and ends with kindergarten teachers’ and university lecturers’ open-ended tasks and questions. Doubting big links and intended-outcome claims, preferring the small beauties – his ‘world in a grain of sand’ – William Blake (1757–1827), in a poem of paradoxes (1803), grasped reasons why reflection lies at the real core of higher education:
The questioner, who sits so sly, Shall never know how to reply, He who replies to words of doubt Doth put the light of knowledge out.

A sole focus on ‘sly questioner’ ILOs is inimical to reflection; its ‘light of knowledge’ shines just once, and … one way. Tutelage trammels. Teachers primary to tertiary know instead how unscripted reflection does not just launch, it also sustains learning. The itch behind reflection must be instanced, scratched, then nurtured. Teachers, likewise, also know their own self-reflection about what their students just did prompts better teaching of their own. This is reflection on action, seen from a teacher's point of view. The teacher reflects on what their students did with what the teacher offered (Biggs, 1999). Only then do teachers know what has been learned. This learning about learning is seldom congruent with curricular ILOs.

Community nostrums of learning tend to proceed otherwise, however. These instrumental views about learning still tend to prevail, not least in our managerial age of higher education, but also among academics (Hamilakis, 2004). These views still tend to see learning as a discrete outcome, whether of teaching, of grit, or of inspiration. Community proponents of these dozy views then worry about why ILOs they valued and measured are just as soon forgotten, or why changes in the priorities of those in authority shift the ILOs willy-nilly. All this instrumentalism suppresses the real prize of higher education: unscripted reflective articulation, which Hamilakis describes as a ‘critical emancipatory pedagogy’ (2004: 287). Community nostrums misconstrue learning as a teacher prescription. Learning then becomes an ‘it’, a hoop to jump through, a burden, a straitjacket.

Genuine reflection also involves a ‘thou’, to apply Martin Buber's deepest insight about reflection. When the student articulation is unscripted, it is ‘owned’ by the student – relationally and provisionally, respectfully and personally. As aims for education, this contrast of an instrumental and impersonal ‘it’ I have learned and a relational and personal ‘thou’ I have taken up and owned refers to Buber's work in German of 1923: Ich und Du (1970: 14–15, 41–42; Buber, 2016), as translated into an appropriate archaic arch-respectful English as I and Thou. Buber's German ‘Thou (Du)’ is personal and affectionately social. Professional and ethical reflection depends on dialogue, Buber maintained. Buber promoted a ‘we-to-we’ inclusive vision of higher education, neither the distancing didactive ‘them–us’ learning the reified ‘it’ outcome of ILOs (Buber, 1993: 85–86; Grünzweig and Rinehart, 2013: 18). Reflections about human worlds like education were always ‘vis-à-vis’ or ‘relational (gegenüber)’ in Buber's terms. The ‘vis-à-vis’ inherent in all higher education study means reflection in higher learning needs to be personal and equal, provisional and conceptual, and it is seldom about anything that 's simply the acquisition of an outcome or even a fact.

Another great contemporary philosopher, Levinas (1987), commented on this aspect of Buber's work. Levinas admired Buber's ethic and insight, but Levinas nonetheless thought Buber had erred when Buber considered equality and symmetry between teacher and learner was needed when eliciting student reflection. Yet I still think Buber was right. The symmetry is key (Peshkin, 1988). With eliciting genuine student reflection in mind, there has to be a symmetrical openness, a genuine ‘meeting between’, explains Andrew Kelly:
The word ‘Thou’ merely indicates the initiative on the part of an I of turning toward and addressing that which confronts the I … [without reducing] the other to an object, that is, an It. (Kelly, 2004: 232)

Put another way, the key thing an academic or teacher must do is to hear their students speak, as Palmer (2007) explained.

Likewise, for Minnich (1990) and Carla van Boxtel (2011), reflection needs also to be inclusive, open and responsive. They suspect every conservative claim that education is heritage retrieval – a universal repository of facts which we must all know and transmit. This knowledge bank transfer view is unreflective. One such error is Allan Bloom (1987) ‘heritage’ ideas of ‘excellence’ in education; myths founded on privileged exclusivity are misrepresented as standards others might debase. Discussing ‘thinking’, Elizabeth Minnich explained:
[Reflection] is political because it is an ability which we all share, a need we all have, and a responsibility we can all accept or flee. (Minnich, 1990: 10)

Minnich's view of reflection was that it is necessarily critical and political. In this respect, it surely matters that we are now living in an age of mass access to higher education. Heritage notions linked to elite educational pasts will hold us back. Martin Buber's Thou of reflection in human learning likewise requires its human subjects and objects always to be in dialogue: social, historical, gendered, ideological etc. In a later and more despairing work, Minnich discusses this as a crisis of critical thinking, urging ‘thinking close-in’: ‘the closer in we move, the harder it is to hold onto ways we have had of thinking’ (Minnich, 2017: 4).

This ethical, political and educational point about the differences eliciting and elicited by student reflection also has affinities with Gilbert Ryle's distinction between ‘knowing how’ and ‘knowing that’ (Ryle, 1949, ch. 2). Reflection pertains to learning provoked by ‘disorienting dilemmas’ (Mezirow, 1990, ch. 1), such as the discombobulating experiences of Other-ness when travelling (Jones, 2021; Sill et al., 2009). Whatever the context or instance, learning becomes ‘transformative’, according to Jack Mezirow (1990: 1), when:
Reflection enables us to correct distortions in our beliefs and errors in problem solving. Critical reflection involves a critique of the presuppositions upon which our beliefs have been built …. What we perceive and fail to perceive and what we think and fail to think are powerfully influenced by habits of expectation that constitute our frame of reference … It is not possible to understand … adult learning without taking into account the cardinal role played by these habits in meaning making.

This reflective capacity is meta-cognitive. Students become aware they are no longer the same (Clark, 2012; Kegan, 2000). Notice how, as here conceived by Mezirow, and as worried over by Minnich, ‘reflection’ was equated with forensic critique.

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But is all reflection also a critical reflection? Other work suggests this equation is not always required. Articulable self-immersion is also always important (Weiss, 1997). Reflection can be more like a poet's, a theologian's or a memoirist's dwelling on a topic. Reflection need not critique. Critique and meta-cognition do not apply, for instance, to reflex ‘hands-on’ (unpropositional) ways of being and knowing: for example, to Aristotle's techne τέχνη and associated ‘know-how (phronesis φρòνεσις)’ (Metaphysics, 1029B–1043B passim), or to Martin Heidegger's ‘readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit)’, even though their practitioners are as self-absorbed. In Heidegger's case, in an age before nail guns, Heidegger had a claw hammer in mind when he discussed Zuhandenheit. The hammer is embodied unconsciously in a master carpenter's adroit, and yet unreflective, hands (Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) 1927, many editions and translations: paras 13, 17, 29). Even so, reflection is still affected (in part) by the received (Heidegger's term was ‘thrown (geworfen)’) nature of human existence as being-in-time (as Dasein in Sein und Zeit, para 2).

This fact that reflection is student-‘owned’ – i.e. student-embodied – is always important, however (Bresler, 2004; Stolz, 2015). Akin to asceticism, John Dirkx responded similarly to Mezirow, associating a quasi-spiritual outlook with reflection. It is informed and applied. Dirkx pointed to the encouragement of student capacities to articulate self-awareness through immersion or through engagement with others: as a ‘vocation’ or a ‘calling’, an ‘imaginative engagement’ with ‘the inner community of the self’ conducted in an honest ‘imaginal dialogue’, involving genres like journals and confessionals (Dirkx, 2001: 66, 2008; Dirkx et al., 2006: 135). Dirkx's collaborators, Lyle Yorks and Elizabeth Kasl, show ‘how [these] expressive ways of knowing can be used to evoke the experience learners seek to know more about, [to] bring emotion into consciousness, and [to] codify learning experiences for future access’. Yorks and Kasl see these ‘expressive ways of knowing’ as phenomenological; the focus is ‘what [students] perceive through images, body sensation, and imagination’ (Yorks and Kasl, 2006: 43).

These points about how an articulable openness and immersion underpin reflection are also shown in Dorothy MacKeracher's response (2012) to Jack Mezirow's work. Critique of a method or a subject per se matters little, even though so much of higher education seems to be focused on teacher and student capacities to pick holes in the things under study. Disciplinary self-criticisms matter more. As a mentor of student expository writing, MacKeracher noticed that the novices who never improved their academic writing were the ones who felt that an academic voice either never would, or never could, align with their voice. MacKeracher concluded that one of four subsets of Mezirow's model of ‘transformative learning’ had to ‘nudge the other’ for student progress to occur. Each such nudge prompted reflection. In her view, received knowledge either had to be accepted by the student as (1) displacing, or (2) assimilating their prior/received subjective knowledge, or else the knowledge they were being invited to construct had to be accepted by them as either (3) displacing, or (4) assimilating their procedural knowledge. Thinking about history students having to write ‘academic’ essays, similar points have been made about history students’ barriers to learning (Jones, 2018a, 2018b).

The anthropological work of Donald Schön on professions and professionals shows the same concerns as Martin Buber, Jack Mezirow and Elizabeth Minnich. Schön emphasized how and why educators should trouble to elicit practices of reflection among students and would-be professionals, whose self-regarding education may otherwise abjure and injure. Professionals need more from their higher education than inculcating supposed expert models of ‘problem-solving’ through ‘technical rationalities’ and competencies:
Many practitioners, locked into a view of themselves as technical experts, find nothing in the world of practice to occasion reflection. They become too skilful at … selective inattention, junk categories and situational control, techniques which they use to preserve the constancy of their knowledge-in-practice. For them, uncertainty is a threat; its admission a sign of weakness. (Schön, 1983: 69)

The influential work of Étienne Wenger and Jean Lave on ‘communities of practice’ points in similar directions (Wenger, 1998; Wenger and Lave, 1991). Their key point is that milieux teach every bit as much as teachers.

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This view of student reflection is not still reflected in university priorities and in disciplinary curricula, however. Higher education researcher, Ronald Barnett has explained the paradox: he found no inherent equivalence between dispositions to learn and the qualities of what might be learnt (Barnett, 2009). A learner might might want to become a chemist, but first they must memorize the periodic table. Yet continuing dispositions to learn, not passing last week's assessment, are the most prized outcomes of higher education. Barnett lauded the Bildung agenda of the Romantics who built liberal-arts universities in Germany and the USA: ‘the process of coming to know has person-forming qualities’, Barnett explained (2009: 435). As one comes to know, one becomes something, changing one's being of being (Dasein) (Heidegger, 1927: para 2; Jones, 2019). Barnett added (2009: 437): the ‘practice of coming to know has educational properties irrespective of actually reaching a position of knowing itself’. If one only comes to know lots of ‘stuff’, one is not yet equipped to ‘become’.

This attention to reflection in higher education as involving ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ – and not just the traditional obsession with only ‘knowing’ things their teacher intended them to know – adds up to an ‘ontological turn for higher education’ (Dall’Alba, 2009; Dall’Alba and Barnacle, 2007). Whether the agenda for reflection is aimed at professionals or whether it is aimed at students taking generalist degrees matters not. What matters is ‘how to become [while studying] what we are’, or rather what we as learners would like to think we could or would become. The challenge to reflect then charges novices to develop professional appreciations of professional possibilities and authenticities (Thomson, 2001, 2004). This experiential or ontological turn should prompt more focus on mentoring students’ group work, on occasioning authentic student writing and research tasks, and on suggesting more civic engagement in their degree (Jones, 2011a, 2011b, 2015, 2017, 2018a). Every academic who teaches towards ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ – not just ‘knowing’ – also credentials students in other ways. Great mentors like Booth (2014), Kelly (2013) and Calder (2006) influenced my thinking on teaching and learning in my discipline of history.

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How then do we evaluate reflection? It is important to outline how teachers could assess the efficacy of any new work eliciting student reflection. This is really a measure of judgement, otherwise viewed as a capacity to recognize and avoid student ‘stuck-ness’ (Boxer, 1985) when it comes to inviting them to reflect. Peter Willis has suggested a ‘narrative phenomenological approach’, tasking students to explore self-perceptions of their new modes of being (Willis, 2012). According to other informed contributors to a recent Handbook of Transformative Learning (Cranton and Hoggan, 2012) and to an older collection, Reflection: Turning Experience into Learning (Boud et al., 1985a, 1985b), evaluations of reflection could traverse (Minnich-stye ‘closing-in’) self-appraisal (via interviews, a check-list, a survey, or journalling (Walker, 1985)) to (gatekeeper-like) external observation, and even to (postmodernist) metaphor analysis and concept mapping. John Heron, moreover, listed ‘loose construing and divergent thinking; presentational construing; free or directed association; use of metaphor, analogy, allegory, story-telling; qualitative description and theorizing; tight construing and divergent thinking’ (Heron, 1985: 136–137). Another example envisaged students making oral presentations (Kasl and Yorks, 2012). My former history colleague, David Potts (1981), set students to take turns, reciprocally bidding them to listen with rigour, then to respond likewise to their pair, constituting one-on-one cycles of one-minute unilateral ‘conversations’, with just one rule: no interruptions. Powell (1985) emphasized autobiography.

Three contributors to a collection, Using Experience for Learning (1993), David Boud, David Walker and Angela Brew – as reiterated by Boud and Walker (1998), as developed by Peseta et al. (2017) – were sanguine. They found student self-evaluations via journals tended to be trite; some learners loathed interrogating themselves. Autobiography was seen by some students as prurient. A humble encounter with other perspectives was often enough, these three suggested. Let the comparisons with past preconceptions remain implicit, these three maintained. Peseta et al. preferred explicit discussion. All agreed, however, that just realizing what should not be done (any more?) was enough to enable reflection.

This means reflection is not incremental. Angela Brew understood this well. Championing ‘un-learning’, Brew explained why ‘un-learning’ was not the same as ‘forgetting’:
The decision to treat everything as if it is relevant makes us open to a larger variety of concepts for learning and an openness to learning content. What we learn and where and how we learn it are not only unpredictable, they may cover a vast range … Wisdom may come through experience, but it does not come through an accumulation of experience. Un-learning is about being prepared to throw out what one has learned and begin afresh. (Brew, 1993: 97)

This ‘open’ model of higher education welcoming explicit ‘un-learning’ resembles Donald Schön's previously quoted critique of empirico-techno-instrumentalism in the education of professional people. Recall Schön's scepticism about would-be professionals’ education for ‘selective inattention’ and their ‘junk categories’ (i.e. ‘My only focus is lung biopsy’). Recall Schön's point about professional power games of ‘situational control’.

Anticipating Brew and Schön, the pessimist, Schopenhauer, also once explained in the mid- to late 1840s, when evaluating Selbstdenken, here numbered as his 264th and his translator's 7th examples of ‘Practical Wisdom (Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit)’:
§7. Mere experience is no more a substitute for thinking than reading is. Pure empiricism is related to thinking as eating is to digestion and assimilation. When empiricism boasts that it alone has, through its discoveries, advanced human knowledge, it is as if the mouth should boast that it alone keeps the body alive. (1970: 92, and the original German is 1892: 525 as §264)

I grope towards a conclusion. It is personal and political. The agenda now shifts from ‘what’ to ‘how’ – the harder task. We are now grappling with an ‘open’ model of education: the body, not just the mouth; digestion, not just eating; processes, not just outcomes; learner in focus, not just the teacher.

My conviction is that we enable student reflection by enabling and valuing their expression of metaphors of constructive misalignment. Students need to be able to test evidence without limits, to query their place in their profession, and to ponder the mission of their profession. If this is really what reflection amounts to, the key question now becomes how to enable it among students in ways that do not just peddle Donald Schön's phoney-professional ‘junk categories’, and in ways that do not succumb to Schön's ‘selective inattention’.

Angela Brew has already pointed a way. She welcomed explicit ‘un-learning’. You just find ways in every higher education class to focus on how the learning on a topic has evolved, and its how and why: teacher's learning and your students’ alike; and also as each responds to feedback.

Brew's way also resembles John Heron's model of transformative adult learning as an ‘up-hierarchy’ (Heron, 1992). Brew's and Heron's work indicates how academics can enable genuine (i.e. unscripted) student work of meta-cognition: i.e. reflecting on reflection, thinking about thinking, whether it is ‘theirs’ or even ‘ours’ (professionally), or whether it is someone else's (i.e. something they were tasked to read). Heron's ‘up-hierarchy’ needs unpacking because it has been overlooked, and because it helps we higher education teachers rethink what we do with students in our classes. Here is how John Heron approached the work of stimulating, not scripting, student reflection. As a phenomenological psychologist specializing in the study (and improvement) of interpersonal medical consultations, Heron promoted humanistic models of collaborative research. Heron pioneered educating medico-professionals in whole-of-person approaches. Heron focused on the doctor or medico as an adult learner, reconceiving transformative learning of adults as an enabling of reflection on experience and on feeling, contending ‘the world we feel is deeper than the world we perceive’ (Heron, 1992: 22, 205). (Teacher educators advocate something similarly collaborative, when nurturing pre-service teachers (Harford and MacRuaire, 2008; Loughran, 1996).)

Heron maintained medicos and teachers should prompt reflection on experience from below simply by proceeding up, not the usual professional top-down. Heron named his way his four-stage ‘up-hierarchy’. Because the human experiences below are always immanent, the educator-as-facilitator had to start at Heron's Stage One: soliciting feelings (in his case, patient and doctor alike) about their learning, past and present, as prompted by ‘disorienting dilemmas’ (to use the term of Jack Mezirow) or ‘dissonances’ (Heron's term). Like Grundy (1982, 1987), Heron also tasked teachers and medico-professionals to value divergent reports. Heron maintained professionals’ need to suppress their customary top-down curricular-dominion agendas – otherwise known by academics as a practice of ‘covering’ a topic/tutorial/lecture/subject, here as discussed in my discipline of history ‘teaching’ (Calder, 2006), but which can apply to any discipline. The error of this top-down approach is its model of education as the teacher's dominion. A coverage model results. It posits students as redeemed by their teacher's command and commands, but few – if any – students find fulfilment in externalized dominion. At Heron's Stage Two, the teacher-, doctor-, or whoever-facilitator opts instead to enable students’ reflective ‘imagineering’: any kind of open envisioning, provided it respects evidence and experience. Stage Three then invites remodelling the ‘imagineering’, inviting in and adapting concepts as tools of ‘defensive rationalization’. Students are invited to draw on any concepts that might be useful to make sense of the evidence and/or their experience. Heron called this ‘cycling’:
If you go round the cycle of experience and reflection several times then you can progressively improve the validity of the reflection by testing it and re-testing it against the content of experience and action. You can repeatedly check your concepts for what they incorrectly include and omit. (Heron, 1985: 129)

Stage Four, Heron's last, then scaffolds a new praxis in response, reinviting open reflection on dilemmas and repetitions. Heron sets students to discuss ‘modes of theorizing’, the open reflections which might suggest causes, postulate systems, reveal contexts, or consider practicalities. You just eschew uni-polar reductions. The key, explained Heron, was remaining open to di-polar thinking (i.e. to interdependent opposites) (Heron, 1985: 137). When discussing the educational, the sociocultural, the political and the historical, this means there can be no science-style hierarchy of dominant concepts. Ockham's Razor cannot apply: the best explanation is not necessarily the most economical (Jones, 2019: 382).

And so, my open model for reflection in higher education returns to La Rochefoucauld and his translator Humphreys. La Rochefoucauld's 199th maxim poked and prodded again, maintaining: ‘Le désir de paraître habile empêche souvent de le devenir. The desire to appear clever often prevents our being so.’

Whenever authority is invoked in curriculum setting and in classrooms, reflection chokes even as it is routinely invoked as an ILO. This is the great dilemma of contemporary higher education. Its hierarchies and its intending of outcomes occlude the very thing – an unscripted capacity for professional self-development – it has long claimed it values.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Adrian Jones

Author biography

Adrian Jones OAM is a retired Associate Professor of History specialising in European History.

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Unalignment: Reflecting on unscripted reflection in higher education

Abstract

Keywords

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Author biography

References