Editorial

Challenging the domestication of critical reflection and practitioner reflectivity Critical reflection and practitioner reflectivity have assumed a status in educational discourse that merits some caution. Reflective practice discourses embedded in wider educational and professional discourses are often located in close relation to the demands and imperatives of ‘twenty-first century learning ’ and demand that schools, teachers and curricula serve to ensure that students emerge from the schooling system with the competencies and values that will ensure their (economic) success in the future. This alignment domesticated critical reflectivity to a techno-instrumentalist view of schooling and education that has no intention of altering itself or its practitioners as a result of critical reflection. The idea of reflective practice stems in part from thinkers such as Freire, who claimed that because of their human nature, people are able to step back from reality and reflect on it critically by problematising reality, and in this way ‘enter into ’ reality to transform it. Crucial to problematisation is the ability and disposition to see the transformative power of cultural action, that is, the world does not appear naturally but usually as a result of some other cause (Freire, 1973)