Reflexive Pedagogy: Towards Crafting Discourses of Professional Knowledge, Practice and Engagement for Social Justice

Reflexive Pedagogy: Towards Crafting Discourses of Professional Knowledge, Practice and Engagement for Social Justice

“Reflection – Critical Reflection – Reflexivity – Self-Awareness – Selfless-Service”

Anthony Joseph

                                                                    Research Scholar

Department of Education

University of Delhi

Extended Abstract*

Plagued by neoliberal depredation, influential and pervasive non-state actors’ endless pursuit of profiteering, and politics of capital have managed to wrest ‘education’ in India from the state to the market. Where once conventional principles and concepts of autonomy, innovation and social good were the goals of education, today unadulterated ‘Taylorism’ used analogously for ‘competence’ is often used as a tool to straitjacket education and its transactions. Myopic and exclusive views of ‘quality’ and ‘professionalism’ appear to have given rise to competing discourses carefully attempting to shape teachers and the teaching profession through behavioural-heavy standards, with little regard for the attitudinal, emotional and intellectual dimensions of the trustworthy professional (Ryan & Bourke, 2013). Given the thrust of the National Curricular Framework for Teacher Education, 2009 (NCFTE,2009) and the context of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, (2009), such a protracted onslaught on teachers’ and learners’ socioeconomic security, access to services, democratic accountability, and equity challenges teachers to construct new identities and subjectivities.

With personal and professional identities inescapably interconnected, teaching today demands - significant personal investment (Leitch, 2010), and forms of ‘new professionalism’ (Goodson, 2000) which foreground reflexivity through ‘continuous learning’ and ‘self-directed search’ (p. 187) to enable real and sustainable quality outcomes for teachers and students. Thus, this ‘new’ professional is a reflexive professional (Goodson, 2000) concerned with the behavioural, attitudinal and intellectual dimensions or the emotional, social, cognitive and moral aspects of teaching (after Evans, 2011). Albeit, the ‘paying lip service’, references such as “teachers need to plan lessons so that children are challenged to think and try out what they are learning…” (NCF 2005: 20) the significant paucity or lack of literature related to the comprehensive nature of the new professional, in India, the paper posits is perplexing. The dearth of literature on ‘how reflexive pedagogy or teacher/teacher educator thinking shapes education’ denies us opportunities to recognize and value the unique ‘insider knowledge’ that teacher educators as researchers bring to improve our understanding of professional knowledge, practice and engagement.

Considering the value of using reflexive pedagogy as a credible and rigorous vehicle for reflexivity, this paper posits that teachers and specifically teacher educators as strategic agents of transformation deserve critical consideration for their potential to facilitate ethical reception that contributes to progressive public memory and social change. The theme of a teacher’s or a person’s affectivity as the ground to awareness, sensitivity and aliveness and reflexivity – i.e. her/his role, place or ethics in the myriad contexts – needs constant inquiry. An interpretivistic experiential engagement would help foster reflexivity and affectivity to incorporate a Capability for Voice and a Capability for Deliberation so that pedagogical frameworks and public and local education policies and reforms with concomitant acknowledgment of the realities of ‘multiethnicity’, ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘multilingualism’ can address the shared and contested ambitions of excellence, equity and access related to the Indian education system.

The iterative, recursive, and “holographic” with “swirls and eddies” process that informs reflexive pedagogic inquiry has the potential to uncover rich reoccurring themes, through practitioner/researcher-generated narratives that answers “How” and “What” questions about the life story and meaningful experiences that have socio-cultural implications for the self and others, enable access to phenomena that are often subconscious and provide a means of interpreting participants’ experiences of personal teaching-learning journeys and hopefully set off a continuum of reflection – critical reflection – reflexivity – self-awareness – selfless-service. Reflexive pedagogues, the paper argues are constantly engaged in provocative and controversial analysis and driven to engage critically with the existing social system and ask, ‘what kinds of analytic tools and cultural politics are needed to critically engage with the current moment to foster egalitarian alternatives?’ Reflexive Pedagogy as a vehicle for reflexivity invites teachers to venture past the baroque form and delve more deeply into feelings and needs, that may touch upon very personal issues related to teachers’ self-concepts, their upbringing and their deepest motives for being a teacher, their quest for an autonomous self-directed person supported by the beneficial effects of the view of human growth underlying the reflexivity approach.  Reflexive Pedagogy through reflexivity and affectivity offers an ominous warning and a cherished hope. It warns of the danger we could run into, namely not only that of turning our backs on a meaningful portion of reality – a socially just world - and the possibility of properly examining it, but the even greater danger, due to our narrow outlook, of vitiating our very capacity for reflection on the part to which we thought we were properly attending. Reflexive Pedagogy hopefully argues that educators and learners would benefit by being able to further illuminate and contextu­alize an understanding for a more culturally responsive pedagogy.

National documents related to teacher education in India, blueprints for teachers’ work are yet to mobilize the pedagogical potential of reflexivity as an essential and overarching discourse of teacher professionalism. Drawing on Margaret Archer’s theories of reflexivity and morphogenesis, this paper argues that teacher educators’ professional reflexivity can be explicitly mapped by competent and trustworthy professionals. With a social-constructionist perspective, this paper, conceptualises teacher educator teaching and learning - as a relational, social and enacted process/practice, as a way of being and acting – and asks a central question of reflexive pedagogy, How do teacher educators as researchers con­vey the idea that teaching and learning is an enacted product of experience where educators are co-constructors of the teaching and learning experi­ence. Mindful of the ‘crisis of representation’ involved in researching the idiosyncratic and complex insider perspective of teacher educator thinking this paper advocates a participatory or collaborative approach to research, to include key participants in processes of meaning-making.

The paper highlights, teacher-as-researcher methodologies, emphasizes the agency of teachers and learners and also recognizes the wider institutional and national constraints on their diverse experiences and practices. The paper posits that in deepening their understandings at the local level, wider connections can be made that will help shed light on broader educational policy and practice. This paper argues that reflexive pedagogy is underpinned by particular epistemological perspectives and ontological positions and makes particular (culturally specific) assumptions about education. Additionally while eloquently pressing the case for re-integrating teaching and scholarship, reflexive pedagogy, supports the view that knowledge production from an insider perspective and at the localized level, are of great value in developing more nuanced and complex understandings of educational experiences, identities, processes, practices and relations. The pedagogical potential of reflexive pedagogy contains an inherent warning - committed to exploring complex educational practices involves critical reflection and takes this process further to include an interrogation of the taken-for-granted assumptions that teacher educators bring to their practice may serve to illuminate the problematic assumptions and discourses that unwittingly reinforce educational inequalities and exclusions.

While coming to terms with the profound and critical concept of reflexivity, in the paper, we ‘encounter’ ‘teacher educators as critical pedagogues’ and the idea that ‘the purpose of education should be to develop a more socially just world’ (Kincheloe, 2004). With the ideas of a critical pedagogue, we light upon a continuum, ‘Reflection - Critical Reflection - Reflexivity - Self-Realization - Selfless Service’, and wonder whether the overarching theme of reflexivity that ties the teaching act – partly scripted, largely intuitive, unpredictable and messy, characterized by a self-reflective dynamic interplay between faculty and student identity, content, and pedagogy - together in teacher education serves to lay the foundation for selfless service and a socially just world.

Like the title of NCFTE (2010), “Towards Preparing Professional and Humane Teacher”, the title of this paper, “Reflexive pedagogy: towards crafting discourses of professional knowledge, practice and engagement for social justice” deliberately points to the fact that further work is needed. While clarifying concepts the aim of this paper is to provide ‘glimpses’ of ‘new professionalism’ grounded on reflexivity. As experience is gathered and research progresses, it will certainly be necessary to update and improve the present text and our own discourses of professional knowledge, practice and engagement.

Key Words: reflexive pedagogy, teacher education, reflexivity and affectivity, social justice, and culturally responsive pedagogy

*Extended Abstract submitted for the Fifth CESI International Conference 2014, Delhi,

November 16 – 18, 2014.

Theme: Education, Politics and Social Change

Sub Theme: Education and Social Justice

Anthony Joseph,

Research Scholar

Central Institute of Education, University of Delhi

E-mail: <ajcounselor@gmail.com>

Engaging with School Leadership Behaviours, Perceptions, and Cultures to Lead Self and Others

Invited as a consultant, at NCSL – NUEPA Delhi, to work on the “Roles and Responsibilities of School Heads – A National Perspective” was exciting! Within a brief span of six months, even while analysing documents for the project, I was skilfully and enthusiastically led to collaborate with a fascinating range of teaching and learning activities related to School Leadership – Tutorials and mentoring for the participants of the maiden Post Graduate Diploma in School Leadership Management Programme, participation in National and International Seminars, facilitating School Leadership Development Capacity Building Workshops for State Resource Groups in - Tripura, Manipur and Mizoram and coordinating the NCSL - SLDP in Tamilnadu, if that sounds ‘too much’, add in, the many opportunities to participate in insightful colloquiums, interactions with faculty and friends and visits to a well equipped and staffed library ... ought to sum up life at the NCSL, well not entirely! 

Journeying with NCSL – NUEPA, for me, entails a constant discourse with ‘School - as places of possibility; as sites for myriad expressions of leadership’. This has fuelled my desire to create and be a part of an organization that “anticipates” learning opportunities, particularly the process of systematically improving performance by identifying, understanding, and adapting professional school leadership knowledge, practice and engagement.

Facilitating School Leadership Development Capacity Building Workshops meant addressing the calls for shaping an effective training experience. Training means that the participants will be able to do something they could not do before. I wonder if I can confidently state, what that “something” is.  I have discovered achieving a golden mean between presentation and participation - is both challenging and rewarding.

The facilitation experience while allowing me glimpses of “resistance to change” where initially reluctant and anxious individuals (participants) expressed varying levels of doubt about the changes they were led to encounter also privileged me to witness how these same participants gradually willed themselves to “let many leadership styles bloom”.

The predominant fascination with the heroic model of a leader has effectively blotted out of focus the transformative qualities of Leadership – missing the forest for the trees. School heads have a definitive need for accessible, useful processes and tools that can assist foster school improvement. Despite their strategic position to focus on providing direct program services or capacity building activities, school heads often do not have access to the research skills or other resources that corporate or academic institutions use to identify effective practices. The SLDP of NCSL – NUEPA, Delhi, through its experiential capacity building workshops explicitly empowers participants towards professional knowledge, practice and engagement, to acknowledge that there is no one type of leader who is most successful at creating a high-impact school. Instead, many different styles can succeed (charismatic, humble, strategic, and detail-oriented) if leaders are willing to put their cause, and their school, above their own egos.

Ideally, a consultant brings an independent perspective to an organization sans the direct power to make changes or implement programs. My brief engagement with Tripura, Manipur and Mizoram, has prompted in me more questions than answers, for example “are we asking the right questions about school leadership in the North-Eastern states of India?” Schooling in India is a complex and diverse landscape. An ever present danger in engaging with the complexities of school improvement in the North-East, this could well apply to the whole of India, is the naive realism that dilutes rigor. I have reasons to believe that applying the principles of quality questioning to four critical leadership functions: maximizing, mobilizing, mediating, and monitoring – would help identify practice needs among school heads, identify existing practices, identify and validate new practices, promote and implement effective practices. Questions and not answers would serve to help drive school improvement in the North-East.

Towards ‘Engaging with School Leadership Behaviours, Perceptions, and Cultures to Lead Self and Others’ is a call to a lifetime journey of exploration, practice and discovery. An invitation to collaboratively imagine with learners our journey toward co-creating, fostering and maintaining an atmosphere for the curious, critical and compassionate interrogation of inequality, justice and change in school education.

* Anthony Joseph PhD - Senior Consultant with the National Centre for School Leadership - NUEPA, Delhi, since Feb 2015.