TRANSITION EDUCATION
Emerging Opportunities for Using Reflective Practice to Support Practitioners Across Disciplines in Guiding Others Toward Personal, Community, and Global Transition
This 2016 think-piece stems from Jeremy's developing interest and experience in the use of reflective practice as an approach for enhancing his work as an educator as well as from the experiences that have shaped how he has come to appreciate the broader possibilities for application of reflective practice as a systematic way to support people as they examine and then decide to change their working practices, how to make such changes, and how to evaluate their progress.
Reflective Practice Overview
Without referring directly to the many explanations and variations of how reflective practice is described by others, I instead provide my own definitions for now. Here, I’m referring mainly to personal (individual) practices rather than practices that agreed-upon and adopted across a group and followed in the same way by all (but see below for additional explanation about how interaction between individuals and groups might work). A practice 1) is a way that someone does something in their work or life at the personal level with the intention of reaching a certain outcome, 2) can be seen as having a consistent form over some period of time (although a person need not be able to describe the structure in clear terms or even have full awareness of it), and 3) involves personal autonomy (meaning that an individual has at least some agency in directing their own actions in order to carry out the practice, although the practice itself may have been decided by others).
A fundamental assumption here is that there are numerous ways for a practitioner to self-direct at least some aspects of how they act in certain situations, even when certain procedures have fixed requirements mandated by a higher authority. For example, a nurse working at a blood donation center has to follow specific steps when drawing and storing a blood sample from a donor to ensure safety and quality control. Even so, the nurse may be able to make personal choices around the specific way that they communicate with anxious patients, and they can make choices around the way that they share certain responsibilities or equipment with colleagues during peak busy hours. The practices being addressed in this discussion can be “smaller” ones, operating on a day-to-day scale within the wider scope of someone’s defined roles and responsibilities.
Practices can refer to personal habits, activities, methods, strategies, tools, or ways of interacting with others. A practice refers to a person’s behavior, but it can be a thinking behavior as well as a physical one. A teacher’s curriculum plan is not itself a practice, but using one in a specific way could be. Other examples are the way that a customer service call operator responds to certain kinds or complaints, the way that a home health care aide manages stress at the end of a long day, the way that an organizational leader chooses to praise important contributions from staff members or coach new staff, the way that a scientist gathers feedback from colleagues about the limitations of a new research tool, or the way that someone organizes their daily task-list when it is time for chores at home. In short, practices define how we come to address certain needs that tend to come up over and over in our endeavors.
The reflection aspect refers to looking at one’s own experiences and understanding what they mean, and what this meaning then tells them what to do next, and how to do it. Through reflection, we (re)discover and confront the original sources of how we think and reason when we’ve lost touch with them, we (re)view what has been known in the light of new experience, and we (re)tell the stories of our lives, finding new ways to be influenced by the new possibilities that emerge.
Through reflective practice, we are able to appreciate what has worked well so far, and we acknowledge what hasn’t worked and what could be changed. Taking this even further, I also include a more specific issue of reflective practice the more specific issue making mistakes and then engaging in processes of recovery, repair, and restoration as a result (where mistakes may be single occurrences, rather than patterns of working behaviors that are not leading to desired results). I consider reflective practice to involve the creation of a space where we can engage in “authentic learning from mistakes” and even celebrate them. Ideally, reflective practice means that individuals are encouraged to “carry” their mistakes into this space and truly see them in a positive light as learning opportunities.
Reflective Practice as a Community-Based, Multi-Disciplinary Approach
While I’ve referred to an individual’s attention to a personal way of working, I ultimately consider it reflective practice to involve an ongoing interaction between an individual and a supportive community. Individuals carry out their practices in their own workplaces and other settings and then periodically return to engage with a group, where discussions or activities help the individuals to clarify their understanding of their work (and provide chances for mutual learning between group members). The activities might involve many forms: group dialogues focused on specific themes, short presentations or verbal reports from group members on their progress, role-playing, experimental activities that help individuals to prepare to plan how to take new practices back to their real-life environments, and so on.
Additionally, “reflection” itself, rather than simply being an activity performed in isolation, is enhanced through the experience of clarifying our thoughts in the company of others who listen, provide feedback and questions, and offer ideas that together become the basis for the set of lenses that an individual applies in the course of examining their personal experiences. The “I” never strays too far from the “we.”
When we start to talk about reflective practice as involving collaborators, we then have to ask “what group?” Most naturally, we might think of a group of colleagues within an organization, or peers with similar roles across a field. It makes sense that such peers would gather as reflective practitioners along the way and use their common experience and knowledge as a basis for their discussions and interactions. One might easily imagine a workshop on reflective practice that would be given at the annual conference for individuals in a certain field.
As an alternative, I propose here that there is great potential value in a multi-disciplinary approach to reflective practice group engagement, where the individual practitioners are drawn from many different fields, types of life and work experience, and diverse perspectives. Here, we are necessarily pulled toward issues related to the development of practices that exist at a more general, even universal, level. What we lose in terms of continually attending to subject-matter knowledge shared by practitioners in a single field is replaced by what we gain from what practitioners across fields hold in common.
Continuing with my example of a nurse in the blood donation center, we could imagine a group of nurses in similar or related roles seeking to develop their reflective practice around the way that they respond to patients experiencing increased anxiety in certain situations involving their care. Individually, the nurses would consider their personal experiences and share with each other, learn from what others have done in similar situations, and establish commitments to try to systematically apply certain kinds of responses in the future, and then come back to the group at the next meeting and report on the results.
In a multi-disciplinary setting, a group might be composed of nurses, teachers, community organizers, organizational leaders, and others. Rather than focus on what happens in hospitals and with medical patients, for example, the group might frame discussions around themes such as “responding to those under our care (customers/clients/patients/staff) who are experiencing distress.” Many types of practitioners could benefit from these types of discussions, even though they don’t share each other’s field-specific expertise. Additionally, individuals in such a group now have an opportunity to learn about methods and perspectives not easily available to them in their own settings; the diversity of the group adds to the learning that can happen as the members are exposed to unfamiliar ways of thinking.
Of course, a single individual attending to their development as a reflective practitioner may value engagement with both types of communities; participating with a single-discipline group and then separately with a multi-discipline group may involve complementary benefits, even when some overlap occurs.
Countless directions might be taken in a multi-disciplinary group to explore these more general issues. Many issues cut across disciplines; examples are “responding to crisis situations,” “organizing work flow and time management,” “developing leadership and initiative,” “creative problem-solving,” “using technology-based tools,” “advocating for myself with my supervisor,” “making more realistic commitments and following through in a timely way,” “using humor in my lesson plans to engage students in my classroom,” “promoting more community involvement in my project,” “being a better listener to customers with complaints,” “mentoring new staff,” and “self-care during stressful times.” These kinds of issues are relevant to many kinds of practitioners. We can imagine people who wish to establish specific goals and work toward improvements in these areas, and such individuals would be able to learn from and share with each other apart from expertise unique to individual disciplines. Additionally, many such issues are likely not part of the formal education that many of us have experienced. Because they are overlooked in favor of concentrating on the immediate subject matter of particular school courses, for example.
Transition Education and Guidance: Purpose Across Disciplines
Now that I’ve widened the scope of reflective practice to something that involves interactions between individuals and a community of diverse practitioners, I suggest now that I now find it useful to narrow the scope once again. Reflective practice can address the kinds of common needs listed above, but I suggest now that a multi-disciplinary reflective practice community can still be formed around a shared purpose, even when its members come from many disciplines or interests in life. Purpose can be a common point through which reflective practitioners establish more substantive connection to each other—it captures the values, ethics, and goals that reflect what a practitioner most wants to accomplish through their work, beyond the functional needs of a single organization or workplace.
One theme that emerges as a common purpose across many types of practitioners is what I call Transition Education and Guidance. Many kinds of people are doing work that ultimately involves supporting and influencing others to make fundamental changes in their thinking and behaviors, particularly with respect to the current state of the world. Challenges and problems seem to involve increasing complexity, shrinking resources. We need to be prepared for changes that we aren’t able to predict, and we need to be flexible in responding to those changes. Lifelong learning is a necessity to support our growth and development, and traditional models of schooling under the industrial age no longer serve us in moving forward into the post-Information Age (what some are calling the Knowledge Age, the Understanding Age, the Learning Age, the Infrastructure Age, the Creativity Age, or Experience Age).
Preparing for transition refers to personal, professional, community, and global contexts. Personal transition refers to things like moving between jobs or careers, or shifts in personal and lifestyle habits. Community transition refers to the changes at the town and city scales to make them more “livable,” reorganize transportation and housing resources, and serve local communities through arts and culture initiatives, social services, business development, and so on. (An example is the Transition Towns movement.) Global transition refers to the broad changes that ultimately support global sustainability; these include ways of creating and using energy and the use and restoration of natural resources; food and water systems, global human rights and international relationships, and other issues that are fundamental for human and ecological life.
A number of specific vocations involve, to some extent, a role that serves others who are making transitions or otherwise need to prepare for transition at the personal, community, and/or global scales. These vocations include (but may not be limited to) the following:
Educators
Policymakers
Organizational leaders
Healthcare and wellness providers
Community organizers
Clergy
Human Services professionals
Designers and engineers
Artists
Social workers
Activists
Scientists
Journalists and writers
Other kinds of more personal roles involve supporting others around transition:
Mentors
Coaches
Advisors
Counselors
Parents
In all of these cases, the respective practitioners share a common role to some degree within their professional work or within their personal lives; they are charged with influencing others to be prepared for upcoming transition or support others through it. The roles above also imply that we need to look beyond well-defined formal job titles and see that people across many different personal and professional settings take on these roles to various degrees. Some of these practitioners are teaching new skills, strategies, or knowledge or otherwise facilitating greater awareness of critical issues; some are researching, exposing, and communicating new knowledge about the natural world or human existence; some are modeling or guiding others to take on new actions, habits, dispositions, or behaviors; some are pointing others toward resources; some are inspiring others to take on new thinking or express their creativity; some are helping others to get “unstuck” or move beyond trauma or hardship; some are leading or directing others to improve their performance in some activity or area of life.
My proposal is that this common role represents a crucial hub through which common experiences and needs are connected across broad and diverse populations and disciplines. By using Reflective Practice as a starting point and organizing around this common role of transition education and guidance, I have come to believe that we have a path forward to a stronger and more positive experience in taking on the responsibility of global and human sustainability as we regard the collective that is composed of these individuals as a single, interconnected, worldwide community. This view requires us to shift our perceptions and assumptions about the traditional boundaries between the professional roles and disciplines that were required by the Industrial Age. Now, the perspective of Transition Education and Guidance as a common role blurs those boundaries and opens new possibilities for practitioners to engage at the general level of the kinds of practices that relate to moving others toward transition.
Reflective practice provides the space for examining the experiences of practitioners and both address the continuing challenges and build upon the past achievements that affect transition. Reflective practitioners, then, take the time to examine their own thinking and practices and consider what they have been trying to do in the service of supporting transition, reflect on their experiences, make decisions about how to bring change to themselves, and therefore have a foundation for exploring how those changes improve their capacity for educating and guiding the transitions of themselves and others. Through the participation in a supportive community bound together by this common role, these practitioners can see their practices in relationship to the practices of others and learn in a unified way while still attending to the specific needs of their individual disciplines and workplace or community or family responsibilities.
Transition Education and Guidance as a Role that Spans Traditional Vocational Boundaries
My attention to Transition Education and Guidance involves some basic assumptions about the core principles that need to be held in the effort to sustain a healthy human community and global ecology. These principles help to orient reflective practitioners in prioritizing which practices to initiate or continue in the role of Transition Education and Guidance:
The world that we’re about to have is markedly different than the one that we’ve gotten used to and will involve many unpredictable developments.
It’s no longer “possible to continue along previous lines”.
We can’t “pass the buck” to the next generation; those of us here now need to take responsibility for steering us into the new thinking and action quickly.
We can’t continue on a path of unlimited growth and need to reconsider our view of “progress” and make appropriate adjustments as a result.
Those involved in Transition Education and Guidance may not have explicit or formal training in this area but are capable of learning, and this learning needs to be served by informal education as well as formal education and schooling.
Those involved in Transition Education and Guidance are capable of making systematic change to their practices and want to do so, rather than rely on only on arbitrary choices or whims. Practitioners appreciate being able to shape their work by reflecting upon their experiences within a supportive community, taking ownership of the choices that they make in changes to their practices, implementing those changes, and then evaluating the results and continuing to repeat these steps over time.
Transition Education and Guidance includes the lifelong learning of not only the practitioners but also the communities that they are serving through their work and practices. This lifelong learning extends beyond personal enrichment and includes the development of learning habits. This lifelong learning is based on motivations that are owned by individuals and their communities rather than institutions or industries.
Certain core values are intrinsic to Transition Education and Guidance, such as social justice, long-term environmental sustainability, and nonviolence.
Next Steps
Based on the ideas described here, there are possibilities for initiating and sustaining groups of practitioners who share the common goal of Transition Education and Guidance and wish to use reflective practice as a process for helping them continue to develop their capacities around this role. One possibility is an ongoing forum in which such practitioners would meet periodically, participate in activities that involve reflection and examination of their development and learning needs, experiment with new practices in preparation for bringing these practices into their real-life settings, make commitments to implement changes in practice, support each other to follow through and learn from what happens, and take other steps to build and develop the forum itself and establish it as a resource for the broad community of others taking on the Transition Education and Guidance role.