Visit the Reflective Practice SIG page for details of past events. 

Facilitators at the meeting were Dr Paul McIntosh, Sue Spencer, Carolyn Mair and Elizabeth Smith.  Please find details of their sessions, including ppt presentations, below.

Dr Paul McIntosh

Reflective Reproduction

Using the Arts for Teaching Methodology, Reflection, and Action Research (Ppt, 4.6Mb)

Taking the form of presentation and workshops, Paul McIntosh examines the use of creativity through engaging in visual and literary arts as a means to the exploring of events and the process of reflection itself. His work draws on the use of metaphor and dialogics as ways in which reflective 'data' can be interpreted and represented, leading to multiple possibilities of meaning and knowledge. Grounded in Della Fish's notion of 'researcher practitioner' whereby sketchbooks of practice are created as working drawings of practice through painting pictures with words, his work considers not just the artistry involved in professional practice, but how artistry and creativity can inform its knowledge and thinking.

Dr. Paul McIntosh is a Senior Teaching Practitioner at University Campus Suffolk. He has published in Journals such as the Journal of Educational Action Research, and Reflective Practice and contributed to books on innovative assessment in Higher Education. He is also a co-founder of the Creative Methods Network, a collaboration of academics and practitioners interested in creativity in both teaching and research methodology in health and social care, and is currently commissioned to write a book for Routledge entitled 'Action Research and Reflective Practice: creative and visual methods to facilitate reflection and learning.

Sue Spencer

Beyond Words: an interactive workshop (Pdf, 345Kb)

Exploring the potential of poetry to provide health care practitioners with insight into the uncertainty and instability of living with long-term conditions through mapping responses and reflections.

This session offers an interactive workshop that will provide the opportunity to explore the potential of poetry as an approach to facilitating a reflective and responsive approach to the health care needs of people with long –term conditions. Selected poems will be read and discussed and their utility in health care education will be explored, particularly in relation to finding new ways to express what it is we seek to do in health care practice.
 Reading poetry can be a challenge in that there can be multiple readings of the same text and this can create tensions in relation to “the right” interpretation of what is meant. However I will argue it is exactly this multiple reading that makes poetry a powerful tool in providing insight in to people’s experiences of health care. We will explore how poetry utilised in the spirit of uncertainty and ambiguity rather than certainty can be a useful teaching and learning strategy in health care education

1. Provide participants an opportunity to read and discuss a selection of poems about health care experiences and life changes.
2. To explore the potential of poetry to enable practitioners to gain insight into the uncertainty and instability involved in living with long-term conditions.
3. To discuss what forms of assessment might be used in this approach to teaching and learning
   

Sue Spencer is a lecturer at Northumbria University in Newcastle in the North East of England and has a wide range of experience in working with people with long-term conditions. Five years ago Sue found herself with writers’ block and unable to complete her doctorate. Fortunately she attended a writing workshop for “tired academics” and discovered that she could write poetry. Sue has had some of these poems published, has just completed a Creative Writing MA at Newcastle University and has developed considerable expertise in the delivery of writing workshops within nurse education and the community with patients and carers.

Carolyn Mair

Using meta-reflection to enhance performance (Ppt, 6.9Mb)

Much evidence supports the use of reflective practice for personal development, yet it is not commonly used as a learning tool with students.  More typically, reflective writing is assessed as a stand-alone piece of work. The objective is then simply a grade. The proposed project would actively promote the use reflections to improve performance by means of using technology to record, store and retrieve them. These individual reflections will populate a database so that ultimately, with permission, each individual's reflections can be accessed by others via the database.

Thus these reflections will become a learning tool for students. Using technology facilitates classification and retrieval and reduces the problems associated with human memory.

Dr Carolyn Mair is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Southampton Solent University. Her research interests are in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Carolyn is currently investigating cognitive processes and their relationship with personality in expert problem solving, and enhancing student learning through encouraging a systematic and structured (automated) approach to reflective practice.

Elizabeth Smith

Teaching Reflexivity (Ppt, 1.5 Mb)
Taking time to reflect on our views and actions is important for knowing who we are and how we influence the social, political and physical worlds we inhabit. Being reflective, whether in private contemplation or public debate, is a way of understanding the symbiotic-construction of self and society. Thus the ability to reflect is an important skill for comprehending and constructing knowledge and improving practice. Despite the prevalence of reflective language in professional and pedagogic discourse, there is very little information available to teachers about what reflexivity is or how it can be conceptualized or conveyed to students. From a student’s perspective reflexivity may seem elusive or idealistic rather than a useful set of tools to support learning. 

In this facilitated group session we will make use of emergent questions on the topic of reflexivity to stimulate discussion about four broad areas of teaching: strategies and techniques, theories and approaches, assessment and monitoring, and professional knowledge development. The overall aim is to contribute to bridging the divide between doing and teaching reflexivity by examining how we have learnt to use reflexivity in our own areas of practice.
 
Elizabeth Smith is a Research Associate at the Department of Health funded National Nursing Research Unit, based at King’s College London. Elizabeth is interested in the knowledges people use to make judgements about the world and what triggers them to act upon them.