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Conference
Background
Scholarship about “reflection” in the context
of professional education and practice has burgeoned since the early
1980s. In recent years, academics and practitioners in health care have
joined these conversations, creating new and exciting interdisciplinary
scholarship at the nexus of various fields.
Scholarly writing about reflection in
professional life can be found in fields as diverse as:
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Adult education; higher education;
philosophy of education; curriculum studies; teacher education;
psychology
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Health professional education; medical
humanities; ethics; health information science; health
administration; public health; community health
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Nursing; social work; occupational
therapy; physical therapy; speech-language pathology; audiology;
counseling psychology and medicine
Given the unprecedented complexity of
contemporary life in the health professions, there has never been a more
urgent need to engage practitioners, students, the public, policymakers,
and academics in processes of reflection. Yet, despite the importance of
this topic, scholars interested in studying reflection in health
professional education and practice are often isolated from one another;
they are frequently geographically disparate, situated in distinct
disciplines, and they often participate in diverse academic communities.
Although many groups appear to draw on foundational literature from the
field of education, silos of expertise appear to be the norm. Those who
work in the field perceive a widespread need for a scholarly community
that brings interdisciplinary groups together to exchange knowledge and
to think together about pressing issues and key questions for advancing
the field. This conference is a first step in that direction.
Mapping the Landscape
The scholarship of reflection and its
relationship to professional practice and professional knowledge
has advanced significantly in the last 30 years. In particular
the classic work of Donald Schön (1983, 1987) has had a major
influence, causing commentators to identify reflective practice
as the most significant theory of professional education in the
last 20 years (Eraut, 1994). In the emerging field of Health
Professional Education scholars and practitioners have begun to
examine processes of reflection and their relationship to the
preparation and continuing education of health professionals.
The work of nursing scholar Patricia Benner (2001), and of
others (King et al., 2007), has demonstrated that a key
requisite in the development of professional expertise is not,
as one might expect, years of experience, but rather the
capacity to engage in reflection. Indeed, reflection has been
identified as the distinguishing factor in advancing
practitioners from novice to expert levels of expertise. In
addition, reflection is often linked to moral development,
compassion, and ethical practice.
Scholarly
interest in the place of reflection in professional life spans a
variety of contexts from: initial professional preparation, to
ongoing reflection in everyday health care practice, to
continuing professional education programs. A continuum of
reflection (Kinsella, 2004) may be characterized along the lines
of (a) phenomenological reflection that considers the
experiential lifeworlds of practitioners and clients/patients
(b) pragmatic reflection related to the development of
expertise, the use of evidence, and the consideration of
contextual and ethical issues in practice (c) embodied
reflection revealed through intelligent action in health care
practice and the development of tacit professional knowledge and
(d) critically reflective or reflexive approaches which
critically examine policies and practices with the aim of
generating improvements in the organization of health care.
Finally, a plurality of approaches for “engaging reflection” in
health professional education are emerging. These constitute the
organizational framework for this conference.
Conference Sub-themes
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