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Ethics and reflective practice : continuing the conversation

journal contribution
posted on 2008-01-01, 00:00 authored by V Pollard
This paper is a response to the question asked by Tony Ghaye in Reflective Practice Volume 8, Number 2, 2007, ‘Is reflective practice ethical?’. My response is to re‐consider the pervasive idea in reflective practice that experience is always private and personal. This common understanding of experience leads to a reluctance when writing for the purpose of assessment and to a type of writing that tends towards the confessional. Contrary to that notion of experience, I suggest that a return to Charles Sanders Peirce enables the acknowledgement that experience is not personally owned but rather a conversation between the self and that which is not‐yet known. This conversation is precipitated by the element of surprise, thus making the study of surprise a central feature of reflective practice. This argument is illustrated through examining a dramatic moment in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus spake Zarathustra (1887) in which Zarathustra’s teaching techniques are challenged and rendered different. Eschewing the belief that experience is ‘personal’ offers a version of reflective practice as the attempt to continually engage in conversations precipitated by the Other

History

Journal

Reflective practice : international and multidisciplinary perspectives

Volume

9

Season

November

Pagination

399-407

Location

London, Eng.

ISSN

1470-1103

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2008, Taylor & Francis

Issue

4

Publisher

Routledge