Читать книгу Becoming a Reflective Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 26

Schön (1983, 1987) distinguished reflection‐on‐action with reflection‐in‐action as a way of thinking about a situation whilst engaged within it, in order to reframe it as necessary to overcome some impediment. The practitioner naturally adjusts to minor interruptions within the smooth flow of experience because the body has embodied knowing. However, the practitioner is sometimes faced with situations that require the practitioner to stop and reframe the situation in order to proceed. This requires a shift in thinking and contemplating new ways of responding. As such, it is problem solving yet recognising that old ways of thinking are inadequate. Reflection is the practitioner’s unique encounter and conversation with a situation through which, as Schön (1983, p. 163) puts it, ‘he shapes it and makes himself part of it’.

Schön (1987) drew on exemplars from music and architecture, situations of engagement with inanimate forms. His example of counselling is taken from the classroom not from clinical practice. The classroom is a much easier place to freeze and reframe situations in contrast with a clinical practice grounded within the unfolding human encounter. It is easy to misunderstand reflection‐in‐action as merely thinking about something whilst doing it.

Schön (1983) responded to the idea that reflection interferes with action. He acknowledges the difficulty of ‘being in the firing line’ when the practitioner must respond quickly and intuitively. However, I make a distinction between cognitive thinking and embodied thinking based on the body’s tacit knowing. Hence the quick intuitive response is an example of embodied thinking – the body knows how to respond. Subsequent reflection on the experience, as with all reflection on experience, feeds tacit knowing and the intuitive response even if the practitioner does not recognise it as such. As Schön concluded (1983, p. 281), ‘there is nothing in reflection, then, which leads necessarily to paralysis of action’. Perhaps when reflection has not been embodied, as for novice reflective practitioners, an attempt to reflect‐in‐action can seem to interfere with action as if cognitive thinking gets in the way of intuitive thinking and response.