Professional Experience and the Investigative Imagination

The Art of Reflective Writing

Alyson Buck, Paula Sobiechowska, Richard Winter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134645992
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explains and demonstrates how creative writing can be used successfully in the context of professional education where traditionally a more distanced approach to reporting on professional experience has been favoured. It is based on many practical examples, drawn from several years' experience of running courses for social workers, nurses, teachers, managers and higher education staff, in which participants explore their professional practice through imaginative forms of writing. The participants experience of the work is presented through a discussion of interviews and evaluative documents. The book includes a set of distance-learning materials for those wishing to undertake such work for themselves or to establish similar courses, as well as a full analysis of the link between professional reflection and the artistic imagination. The book makes available a new and more broadly-based approach to the process of professional reflection, and the concept of the patchwork text has general relevance for debates about increasing access to higher education qualifications.

1

REFLECTING ON EXPERIENCE
AND THE IMAGINATIVE
CONSTRUCTION OF MEANING

Writing and sharing ‘fictions’

Prologue

The general argument of this book is that the role of the creative, ‘artistic’ imagination has been regrettably neglected in courses of professional education. It is based on several years’ experience of courses for professional practitioners, where participants explore and represent their professional practice through ‘artistic’, ‘imaginative’ forms of writing, in particular, ‘fiction’. We usually think of the term ‘fiction’ as referring to events that didn’t actually happen, characters who don’t actually exist, i.e. a sort of ‘fantasy’ —as opposed to the ‘facts’ or ‘theory’ of ‘non-fiction’. And that is indeed part of what this book is about— exploring experience by imagining ‘stories’. But the word ‘fiction’ also has a broader meaning, derived from its Latin origin, ‘fingere’—meaning ‘to shape, to fashion, to mould’, and it is this meaning which is more central to our argument. So writing ‘fictions’, in the title above, refers generally to the process of exploring and reflecting on the meanings of experience by representing it in forms of writing which have been shaped by the writer’s imagination. By ‘imagination’ we don’t just mean general mental agility and resourcefulness; we mean specifically the creative faculty which shapes the raw material of experience into artistic form.

Of course, the artistic imagination uses many different media (paint, music, dance, sculpture, and so on) and so our general argument could, in principle, be expanded and adapted to suggest the value of all these media in exploring the meanings of our professional experience. But we focus on just one medium— writing. We celebrate the learning potential of the writing process, but suggest that the largely analytical forms of writing in which we are usually asked to explore and represent our understanding of experience are too limited: they do not draw on artistic and imaginative capacities which we all possess, so that many people are prevented from doing justice to the power and subtlety oftheir thinking. Hence, our argument is not simply that the artistic imagination could play a larger role in professional learning, but that it should do so.

Most of the book is centred on examples of imaginative work by a range of professional practitioners (nurses, social workers, schoolteachers, managers, university lecturers, counsellors) exploring their practice by means of stories, poems, satires, fictionalised descriptions, etc. We begin with these examples almost immediately, but this brief prologue provides a preliminary statement, a general summary and a ‘menu’ for what is to follow.

In an important respect, this book is a challenge—a challenge to current conceptions of the role of imaginative literature in society and in education. The world of literary art is conventionally seen as the specialist realm of famous novelists, dramatists and poets, in which the rest of us think of ourselves as merely spectators. But let us remember that the term ‘artistry’ is regularly applied to common features of our everyday performances. There is, we say, an ‘art’ to parenting, to packing a suitcase, to driving a car, to organising a party, and—of course—to the skilful practices of nursing, social work, teaching, management, and so on. The ‘artistry’ of reflective practice, says Donald Schön, refers to that close link between expert action and understanding which occurs whenever we deal sensitively and effectively with ‘situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value-conflict’ (Schön 1983: p. 50). In other words, ‘artistry’ is required on all those many occasions when there is no simple general rule, no single ‘right way’ of doing things. And yet, in spite of Schön’s repeated references to the artistry of skilful professional performance, he nowhere suggests that artistic means of expression might be valuable or appropriate as a way of representing practitioners’ understanding of their work.

But if many (or even most) people regularly demonstrate a capacity for artistry in their actions, why should we not assume that they can use artistic means for expressing their understandings of those actions? And indeed, our work suggests that professional practitioners do indeed have a capacity for representing and exploring their professional lives in the artistic medium of fiction, which they themselves find both surprising and impressive. The examples presented in this and the following chapters are intended to show the scope and nature of their work and to indicate its professional value. In this way our argument is fundamentally about widening access to advanced qualifications: it introduces formats for representing professional understanding which enable practitioners to draw on the full range of their cultural resources and the full range of their capacities (including imaginative empathy), rather than requiring them always to present their understandings within the restricted but normally dominant modes of ‘description’ and ‘analysis’.

In our work over the past six years, we have developed two approaches to the use of imaginative writing as a medium for reflection: first, the writing and sharing of short fictional stories; and second, the production of what we term ‘patchwork texts’, in which different forms of writing are ‘shaped’, ‘fashioned’ and assembled to explore the relationship between a variety of perspectives.Both approaches involve the sharing of short pieces of writing, so that writers can learn from several readers how their writing may be interpreted in different ways, and incorporate this learning as a ‘critical commentary’ on their original text. (Hence earlier versions of the ideas presented in this book used the term ‘fictional-critical writing’ to describe the overall process—see Winter 1986; 1989; 1991; Bolton 1994). In their different ways, both stories and patchwork texts take advantage of the ‘openness’ of artistic representations of meaning; they shape experience into meanings which are purposeful and yet ambiguous and inevitably incomplete, and they represent experience in such a way that the form itself suggests that interpretations are open to question and critique. In this sense, then, they both use the methods of ‘fiction’ (shaping experience through artistic form) to represent the ‘uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value-conflict’ which, as Schön says, is characteristic of professional work. These two approaches to the use of fiction as a method for professional reflection are introduced separately in the next two sections of this chapter.

The plan of the rest of the book is as follows. Chapter 2 begins with an introduction to the nature of ‘stories’, describes the story-writing workshops, and presents a collection of stories written by professional practitioners concerning an aspect of their work experience, together with discussions of each story’s professional significance. Chapter 3 gives, first, further explanation of the concept of the ‘patchwork text’; second, a description of the University ‘Reflective Writing Course’ in which the patchwork text is the basic format for participants’ writing; and third, a number of examples of the work produced in this format. Chapter 4 consists of ‘distance learning’ course materials, which enable readers, if they wish, to work through, step by step, the same process as the participants in the reflective writing course whose work is presented in Chapter 3. Groups of practitioners could use this chapter, together with the rest of the book, as the basis for a sequence of professional development workshops; and tutors responsible for professional education courses (whether in universities or in the workplace) could use it (or adapt it) as the basis for their own courses. Chapter 5 describes and discusses the impact of the ‘fictional’ approach to reflection, based on interviews with a number of participants and on their own written evaluations. Chapter 6 is a detailed case study of one participant’s involvement, first as a student and then as a tutor; it then describes the impact of this method of working on her subsequent practice and on her personal response to a bereavement. Chapter 7, which may be of particular interest to staff responsible for professional education and training and also to staff involved in teaching ‘literature’, provides a detailed theoretical elaboration of the argument outlined above, concerning the relationship between the educational processes of ‘reflection’ and the creative aesthetic work of the imagination in producing ‘fictional’ representations of experience; tracing the argument to its philosophical roots and drawing out its political and cultural implications. Finally, the brief Epilogue presents a couple of examples to reinforce the parallel between the cultural role of the artist and that of the reflective practitioner.

The book as a whole is intended to provide sufficient examples and explanations to enable practitioners and professional educators to try out for themselves an innovatory approach to professional development, using what we take to be the widespread (but curiously ignored) human capacity for understanding experience through imaginative representation.

Sharing stories

Let us take a look through this window of the university building and see what is going on. At one end of the room is the usual whiteboard and overhead projector, and a litter of furniture is pushed to the edges to create a space for three separate circles of five or six chairs. The people occupying the chairs may be social workers, or nurses, or teachers, or health visitors, or school teachers, or university lecturers, or managers, or counsellors, or doctors. And what they are doing—with great concentration—is reading and discussing the ‘stories’ concerning their professional work which they have written since the previous session, a week ago, when the idea was introduced and the task explained.

At the moment this group is reading a story by Christine Dale, a social worker. It is neatly typed on two sides of A4, about 800 words, and is called ‘Great expectations’, and can be summed up as follows:

A client has a dream in which a social worker arrives bathed in light, a fairy godmother figure, called Pandora. The client’s children are Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Jack (of beanstalk fame), and in complaining to the social worker of her difficulties with them, she comi-cally turns the three fairy stories of children’s heroic initiative upside down to provide symptoms of ‘problem’ behaviour! (‘Jack will not do as he’s told…. He’s dug up the few flowers that we had and planted this bloody great plant in the back yard.’) The fairy godmother social worker opens her bag and brings out magical gifts for the children—a coach and six white horses. The children step into it and wave to their mother. At this point the client is awakened from her dream by a knocking on the door: ‘It’s probably that bloody social worker again.’ (The End).

Now the group have finished reading and start to discuss what they think the story is saying, while Christine listens and makes notes. Clearly, it is about the unrealistic expectations to which the social work profession is subjected. As though they could suddenly wave a wand and change clients’ lives! And anyway, what would happen if such dreams could be realised, since the client seems to have an excessively negative view of her children, and seems even to want them to vanish! Furthermore, the fairy godmother social worker is called Pandora, and her ability to produce limitless gifts from her capacious bag (like Mary Poppins) is actually very worrying, because when Pandora’s box was opened, all the evils of humankind were let loose, leaving us only ‘hope’. Sothis seems to be a story about the dangers of unrealistic expectations on both sides: social workers’ powers are limited, and that is as it should be: professionals and clients are both liable to be misled by their ‘dreams’. There is a lot of careful poring over the text to see what it actually says, and much serious discussion of the nature of the professional role—as it is and as it is idealised— as well as considerable laughter.

The two sessions on story-writing came at the beginning of a course where the participants’ main task was the compilation of a ‘journal’ of reflections on their professional work. The purpose of the story sessions was to broaden their sense of what might be important themes to look for in their own interpretations of events. The suggestion, the previous week, that they should write a fictional story based on their professional life had initially been greeted, as usual, with anxiety. They associated ‘writing’ with, on the one hand, producing a professional case report, or on the other, an academic essay or perhaps making descriptive entries in a diary. The notion of a ‘story’ offered a somewhat worrying form of liberation from these familiar formats and often evoked distant but still powerful memories of not being ‘good at’ a school subject with the curious title ‘English’. Writing ‘stories’, they had assumed, was either for children or for ‘specialists’—Jane Austen, perhaps, or Graham Greene, or Barbara Cartland.

Once upon a time (so the story goes) everyone used to be a story-teller. Every traveller, from nearby or afar, was expected to have a tale to tell; personal experience was recreated and represented, shaped, framed and structured into performances for collective entertainment. And not only travellers: there was pleasure to be gained from celebrating the familiar—anecdotes concerning local events and characters and myths embodying timeless patterns of experience. So stories were exchanged—round the fire, in the shade of a tree, in the village inn and in the workshop—to pass the time on a journey (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) or even while waiting for an outbreak of plague to abate (Boccaccio’s Decameron). But, this story continues, that happy time is now past. The popular and universal art of story-telling has been extinguished by the passive habits of reading professionally published novels and watching the products of the film and TV industry. This is a popular myth of cultural decline, feeding the pleasures of nostalgia as we shake our heads lamenting lost arts, skills and forms of social relationship.

But there is another, contrasting story—that the art of the story is alive and well. In the offices and canteens of workplaces, in the staffrooms of schools, colleges and universities; in pubs and parks, on beaches and round dinner tables; stories are told of the bizarre/comical/extraordinary/‘typical’/ depressing/delightful behaviour of acquaintances, relatives, colleagues, bosses, customers, students, clients and patients. The specialisation of life in modern societies means that we are all travellers in realms unknown to some of our neighbours, while the mass media remind us endlessly of the themes which provide a framework of general significance both for public events and for individual experience: technological progress and social suffering, oppressionand resistance, catastrophe and hope, glamour and sleaze, the investigation of wrongdoing and incompetence, and (above all) issues of justice and injustice. Moreover, our ancient ability to tell stories orally is now enhanced by our familiarity with the written narrative. And whereas the oral narrative has to have a simplicity and directness to be immediately understood there and then by the listener, the structure of the written text can be more complex and allusive, because it can be re-read, pondered at length, and analysed in the light of alte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of stories and patchwork texts
• 1 Reflecting on experience and the imaginative construction of meaning: writing and sharing 'fictions'
• 2 The imagination of meaning: writing and interpreting stories in a professional context
• 3 The 'patchwork text': shaping meaning through the exploration of diversity
• 4 The reflective writing course: distance-learning materials
• 5 Participants' views: 'What was it like and what effect did it have?'
• 6 'Breaking the mould', a case study: experiencing the reflective writing course
• 7 Artistry, fiction and reflection: the strange absence of the creative imagination in professional education
• Epilogue: The professional worker and the artist-two myths of betrayal
• Bibliography
• Index