Learning conversations as reflective practice

This article presents some recent experiences of reflective practice within a UK university business school by two lecturers who are currently reading for doctoral degrees in education, and is partly based on material presented at ‘The First International Theorising Education Conference’ at the University of Stirling in June 2010. It describes how, having agreed to meet regularly to discuss the implications of postmodern educational theories for their practice, the authors set about holding a series of ‘learning conversations’, each beginning with a presentation and discussion of a reading from educational theory or philosophy of education and with no further agenda than a ‘live encounter with the other’. The paper includes a review of some useful texts dealing with both the practicalities and some theoretical frameworks within which to locate reflective practice. There follows a discussion of the rationale for using unconventional ways of presenting (and re-presenting) experiences of this kind of activity. The authors use a layered text technique to illustrate one way of doing this, and to present (re-present) parts of learning conversations held between January and June 2010. The essential claim of this paper is that while a great deal of literature on reflective practice seems to concentrate on ‘reflection on practice’, there is also a need for discussions about the interface between educational theory and pedagogical practice as a particular means of moving ourselves beyond the limits of a self-referential context into a more open-ended and critical space in which we learn to name our experience in new ways