The mirror in motion: redefining reflective practice in an undergraduate fieldwork seminar

In Education, Schon's (1987) model of the reflective practitioner has been enriched by the call for a more contextual approach. Yet even the revised conception of the reflective practitioner needs renewal in order to meet the persistent demands of teaching and of learning to teach in diverse, difficult settings. Using postmodern identity theory, this paper examines two illustrative cases of student reflection in a field work seminar led by the author in order to analyse the ways in which students and instructor carried out reflective practice from a range of subject positions in response to complex, sometimes chaotic contexts. This analysis invites the construction of more dynamic metaphors (Cook-Sather, 2003b) for reflective practice. While such metaphors are necessarily only partially successful in representing the dynamic, unfinished processes of and under reflection, they are better suited to the challenging contexts of teaching.