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The practitioner strives to understand the nature of creative tension and what must be done to resolve it. Pinar (1981, p. 177) notes that ‘it is only when practitioners truly understand themselves and the conditions of their practice, can they begin to realistically change and respond differently. To understand, the reflective practitioner creeps underneath habitual explanations of his actions, outside his regularised statements of his objectives’. The practitioner must question ‘what constrains me from responding in more desirable ways?’ These constraints or barriers may not be easy to recognise and shift because they form the fabric of everyday practice and are largely taken for granted. Some guidance may be helpful (see Chapter 7). If practitioners were rational, they could change their practice on the basis of evidence that supports the best way of doing something. However, we do not live in a rational world.

Fay (1987) identifies three barriers as tradition, authority, and embodiment (Table 1.1) that govern the fabric of our social world. Fay (1987, p. 75) writes from a critical social science perspective that gives reflection its critical nomenclature:

The goal of a critical social science is not only to facilitate methodical self‐reflection necessary to produce rational clarity, but to dissolve those barriers which prevent people from living in accordance with their genuine will. Put in another way, its aim is to help people not only to be transparent to themselves but also to cease being mere objects in the world, passive victims dominated by forces external to them.

TABLE 1.1 Barriers to Rational Change (Fay 1987)

Tradition	– a pre‐reflective state reflected in the assumptions and habitual practices that people hold about the way things should be.
Authority and power	– the way normal relationships are constructed and maintained through authority’s use of power.
Embodiment	– the way people have been socialised to think, feel, and respond to the world in a normative and pre‐reflective way.

The influence of these barriers lies thick within any experience. They are evident in patterns of talk that are deeply embodied to serve the status quo (Kopp 2000). It is obvious that to bring about desirable change, these barriers need to be understood, and practitioners are skilful and empowered to overcome them. Thus reflection is concerned with un‐concealing these barriers. Greene (1988, p. 58) writes:

Concealment does not simply mean hiding; it means dissembling, presenting something as other than it is. To ‘unconceal’ is to create clearings, spaces in the midst of things where decisions can be made. It is to break through the masked and the falsified, to reach toward what is also half‐hidden or concealed. When a woman, when any human being, tries to tell the truth and act on it, there is no predicting what will happen. The ‘not yet’ is always to a degree concealed. When one chooses to act on one’s freedom, there are no guarantees.