Читать книгу Becoming a Reflective Practitioner - Группа авторов - Страница 60

Christopher Johns

The first dialogical movement is to write a description of an experience that becomes the canvass for subsequent reflection. Writing is taking ownership of one’s experience. It is an awakening and inquiry into self. It opens the doorway to become interested and curious about one’s practice. Tufnell and Crickmay (2004, p. 63) note how:

writing gives us time to absorb the feel of what has just happened. While movement is ephemeral, quickly vanishing from our memory, written language remains, giving us a means of dwelling upon and finding significance in what has just occurred.

The practitioner writes to recall the reality of the experience through the rich description, paying attention to detail, and drawing on all the senses in order to capture the experience in the most realistic way. It is ‘replaying the situation in the mind’s eye’ (Boud et al. 1985, p. 27). Recalling the experience is subjective, viewed from the practitioner’s particular perspective. Others involved in the experience may view it differently. This is natural and is not a problem because it is the practitioner’s view that is the focus for reflection. What the practitioner writes is subjective and contextual. It is best written from the perspective of ‘I’ rather than in the third person that depersonalises the experience as if turning self into an object. It is ‘I’ in relationship with others. Gully (2005, p. 151) writes: ‘it is the process of journaling that is by far the most significant act in my practice’, for it records the process of my evolving as a human being and connects me with the other in my nursing relationship; it is the journey from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’. The practitioner may surprise themselves with what they write, as if writing lifts unconscious matters to the surface – ‘where did that come from?’ As Ferruci (1982, p. 41) writes: ‘Writing can be much more powerful that we may think at first. We should not be surprised that unconscious material surfaces so readily in our writing’.

Practitioners may get stuck between telling their story and writing it as if they hit a mental block. Perhaps telling stories is more spontaneous whilst writing is more considered, more cognitive, more self‐conscious, as if an internal censor is at work trying to fit the description into learnt ways of writing that may inhibit expression and stifle the imagination. Some people will always struggle to write despite the advice to just let the words flow in spontaneous flow. However, writing is not arcane or mysterious. It is simply self‐expression in whatever way best suits the practitioner. It is personal, like a diary.

Writing exposes the self and opens a world of possibilities. As Manjusvara (2005, p. 10) writes: ‘the practice of writing takes us to the heart of ourselves and makes it palpable how alive with possibilities we really are’. Manjusvara’s words suggest that writing wakes the self up to our human potential, a self that might have become deadened to the world for whatever reason, where potential has shrunk to virtual nothing.