Reflexivity: towards representation, legitimation, and praxis

Not only are things not what they seem, they aren’t even what they are called

– Francisco Quevedo

 

In many areas of education, ‘reflection is now expected to form part of every student’s analytical learning-to-learn armoury’ (Clegg 2004 in Ross 2011). Though reflection is often conflated with reflexivity, both have their distinct differences. Reflexivity is usually defined in terms of something ‘turning back’ upon itself in the form of a subject-object-subject gaze or action, distinguishing it from reflection, which involves a subject contemplating an object outside itself (Archer 2010, 2). It is this difference that reflexivity unlike reflection, lends itself to address the more complex and intractable problems in Education and Educational Research, such as:

 

·         How to comprehend and engage constructively with difference,

·         How to gain awareness of one’s own cultural situatedness, and, thereby, also

·         How to recognize and address issues of discrimination, inequity, and injustice.

 

Additionally, reflexivity, as Kögler (1996, 22) puts it: ‘alerts us to the possibility that the reasons behind what we think and do, including our attitudes, beliefs and responses to others may be “out of reach” of the subjects themselves, since they are imposed through disciplining socialization and normalizing education.’

 

A critical examination of the social construction of the legacy of psychological concepts, such as intelligence and development, challenges us to confront, Cartesian reductionism in education - the tendency to disconnect the production of knowledge from the social-political context in which it is situated. This also serves to caution us against the traps of both biological determinism and environmental or social determinism. Such caution is also indispensable because any form of determinism occludes human agency - the heart of reflexivity and reflexive pedagogy.

 

A reflexive awareness of the social world includes an understanding of how one’s own and other people’s life histories are situated in social, historical, cultural, political contexts. It is essential to examine the interplay between our cultural practices, our beliefs and values and our personal history: the processes by which we have been constituted and the way in which we operate our day-to-day lives: in order to make visible the taken-for-granted cultural practices that underpin our thinking and praxis (Shea, 1996; Giroux, 1995).

 

The aim of this note is to position critical reflexive thinking as having a key part to play in professional research in closing the loop between the approach taken to carry out the research, the research findings, the contribution to academic knowledge and how the research practically informs professional practice. We draw upon hermeneutics and critical discourse analysis highlighting the role of critical reflexivity to illustrate how these qualitative research methodologies can be used to bring professional knowledge, practice and engagement in the academic world.

 

A reflexive approach has much to recommend it to the researcher who is specifically seeking to develop professional understanding and make a contribution to knowledge, understanding and academic praxis. It is structured around a praxis inquiry protocol that encourages researchers to investigate their own professional practice through an integrated process of describing, explaining, theorising and attempting to change practice.

 

Denzin and Lincoln observed, qualitative researchers today continue to struggle with an ongoing crisis in qualitative methodology: a “triple crisis of representation, legitimation, and praxis” (2000:17). This proposed introduction to an exploration of researchers’ reflexivity seeks to demonstrate that the concept of reflexivity allows us to break this crisis down into three questions that are important to explore in any qualitative inquiry.

 

• First, in our representations of the social world, what are our underlying assumptions about the production of knowledge – how do we know, and who can claim to know?

 

• What is considered legitimate knowledge, and what role does power, identity and positionality play in this process? Finally,

 

• How does one put into practice the reflexive techniques and address methodological issues in a way that results in valid, good-quality social research?

 

These are the three main methodological dilemmas, which this discussion will explore. The intention here is not to offer a resolution to any of these issues, but rather to demonstrate that it is in reflexively thinking-through these dilemmas that the researcher may benefit the most. Thus, introductory presentation argues that the concept of reflexivity offers an important opportunity to explore crucial questions in the “thinking,” the “doing” and the “evaluation” of qualitative methodology.

 

Reflexivity and reflexive pedagogies fit easily into the epistemological frameworks of social science education. Reflexive approaches assert that all knowledge is situated and seek to expose the assumptions underpinning different academic practices and conventions rendering problematic those discourses that seek to purport scientific knowledge as factual, value-free and objective.

 

Reflexivity calls researchers to see the importance in noticing and criticising their own pre-understandings and to examine the impact of these, on how they engage with the social world of academics. This form of self-comprehension requires, as researchers to “challenge their epistemological pre-understandings” and to explore “alternative possible commitments”. This “reflexive turn” increasingly encourages researchers to be aware of, to evaluate and to be suspicious of the relationship between themselves as researchers and the object of their research.

 

Researchers who take up the reflexivity approach to education give up some degree of authority, as the final meaning of their work is always determined in negotiation and, as such, eschews finality.