ResponsAbility - Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies

ResponsAbility  

Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies 

By Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog 

#6 Episode title: Reflective Practice and Spirituality | Cheryl Hunt

 

00:00:04 Michael N. W. 
Welcome to the Responsibility podcast. My name is Michael Noah Weiss, the host. 

00:00:11 Guro H. H.  
And my name is Guro Hansen Helskog, and I'm the co-host.

00:00:14 Michael N. W. 
Today, we have the pleasure to have Cheryl Hunt as our guest. Cheryl, you have a PhD in education, and you are honorary senior research fellow at the University of Exeter in the UK. At this university you were also the director of the professional doctorates program in the School of Education. Furthermore, you are a founding member, director and trustee of the International Network for the Study of Spirituality and the founding editor and former editor in chief of the Journal for the Study of Spirituality. Additionally, you are co-editor of the book series studies in neuroscience, consciousness, and spirituality, and with that one can say that you have worked, published, and lectured extensively in the fields of adult and community education, critical-reflective practice and professional studies. Welcome Cheryl!

00:01:15 Cheryl H.  
Thank you. 

00:01:17 Michael N. W. 
So, you are one of the few researchers, Cheryl, who investigate the intersection between spirituality and reflective practice, something that both Guro and I are quite interested in. Our first question is based on a quote that you have in one of your books, which is the statement that “reflective practice makes the difference between having 20 years experience, or one year's experience 20 times over”. So, we would like to know what reflective practice is, what its history is, and what reflective practice is for you? 

00:01:55 Cheryl H.  
Well, I like that particular quotation, and I once drew a picture of it. It was a picture of a guy walking along the road with a kind of a wagon attached to his back. And as he went along, he just tossed each experience into it without examining it, just kept on pouring on. And the picture underneath was of a group of people who had actually stopped and unhitched themselves from the wagons. They were looking at what was in their wagons, sharing stories with each other and changing what was in the wagon as a result of their examination, really patterning it before they went on with their journey. And so that's where that comes from. It is like you can just keep going on and on. To use a quotation from neurolinguistic programming: If you always do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got, and I think reflective practice really is an attempt to stop us from getting what we've always got. 
Next you ask about the history of reflective practice, and it kind of depends how far back you want to go. We could go back to ancient Athens, because Socrates was actually encouraging people to ask probing questions about themselves and their role in society, and according to Plato, Socrates is supposed to have said the unexamined life is not worth living. 
I guess the notion of questioning what one knows and how one knows it is often played out in contemporary approaches to education. It underpins John Dewey's work on pragmatism, for example, and plays a role in critical pedagogy. But the notion of reflective practice and the reflective practitioner really stems from the work of Donald Schőn in the 1980s. That was actually a really interesting time, because a lot of work was going on in terms of giving voice to groups and communities who had not really had much influence on the social and political circumstances in which they lived. For example, I was involved in community education at that time, in what was called education for participation. We were setting up courses and workshops for people who for instance wanted to become school governors, all of that with the aim of helping them to understand the workings of the various bureaucratic systems that kind of bound our lives so that they could actively contribute to, and perhaps instigate, some changes in the way that they worked. And at that time, although it sounds as if they should have quite a powerful voice, the voice of professionals was often also overlooked. And I think that is because policymakers in so-called technical, rational societies tend to think that professional practice is simply about the application of academic theories to practice. And that was where Donald Schőn came in. He noticed that when asked to speak about their practice, professionals often talked in terms of what he called espoused theories, the theories that they had learned during their training. From his own experience, Schőn knew that professional practice was a much more messy process than simply the application of theory A to situation B. And he saw the textbook theories as a product of what he called “the high ground of academia”. But as he said, professional practice generally occurs in “the swampy lowlands”, which I think is a lovely term: “in the swampy lowlands of practice”. The situations are confusing messages, incapable of technical solutions, he argued, and he also added that those situations often represent the problems of greatest human concern. So, in those situations, professionals actually have to think on their feet. And while they may draw on academic knowledge, they will almost certainly also draw on other forms of knowledge, such knowledge from similar practice situations in which they've been involved, knowledge that may have been derived from their leisure reading, or from their own communities and cultures, relationships and so on. None of that may be in word form. So, Schőn talked about the artistry that gives a practitioner a feel for what needs to be done. It's not something that they actually say in words. OK, I've got to do XYZ and then something else will happen. They need to have a feel for what may happen in unpredictable situations. And Schőn actually developed that idea from his own leisure pursuit as a jazz musician. He was an accomplished jazz musician, and he argued that when one was playing jazz, one draws on a repertoire of theoretical knowledge of music and how it goes together and so on, but it has to be adapted in each moment in jazz, as the music and the interactions with the other musicians developed. And he used the term theories in use with all those words hyphenated to describe that kind of knowledge of theorizing in the moment, as it were, and he urged practitioners to try to articulate their theories, in order both to challenge and to further develop the theories that were generated in academic contexts. For sure, I think reflective practice is about looking at one's practice and trying to find ways to improve it. But that's not just about improving techniques. It's also about looking at why one has done certain things in a certain way, and at the kind of internal knowledge that gives rise to one's action. 
I have a friend, Stephen Brookfield, who`s work is really helpful in this respect. His work was about 10 years later than Schőn`s, when the field had been developed quite substantially. By then. Brookfield talked about critical reflection, which is underpinned by the notion of making a change, often in terms of social justice, but his model is really useful because he talks about using four different lenses to look at one`s practice. On lens is the students, who have what one is doing appearing in their eyes, and similarly the lens of one's colleagues: How are they actually receiving and perceiving what ones doing? And the third lens is of theoretical literature. So, there are lots and lots of books and theories and so on. And going to those to provide a context and perhaps further insight into the things that one has actually experienced in professional practice oneself, can be incredibly helpful. And the final one, and in many ways perhaps the most important, is looking at what one has done or is doing through the lens of one's own autobiography. So how is the baggage that I've brought with me to this point actually affecting what I do in the practice situation?
I was actually running a reflective practice module in the late 1980s in a master course, and when we started that, we hadn't got a clue quite how much literature there was out there. So, that was quite an interesting development, particularly because we tried to work as a reflective group ourselves as tutors, and to look at what was happening. So just to answer what I think was the end of your question, what reflective practice is for me, I think it is not only been about trying to understand and develop my professional practice as an educator, but more and more it has been about exploring why I think as I do. 

00:12:05 Guro H. H.  
You mentioned Socrates and his claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, and you also talked about the role of autobiography and the four lenses you can look through when you are investigating your own practice or reflecting upon your own practice. In this respect, in your book on critical reflection on spirituality and professional practice from 2021, you make a point of asking the question Who am I? Why is this question so important? 

00:12:42 Cheryl H.
I think that is largely influenced by Parker Palmer's work. He often talks about how we tend to approach teaching through four questions. The first one is What subject should we teach? That is fairly straightforward, and most people do that. And the next question is How should we teach it? Here we are asking what methods and techniques are required to teach the subject. The third question, he says, is asked much less often than the first two questions, and that is Why, for what purpose and to what ends do we teach? And finally, the question that is very, very rarely asked is Who is the self that teaches? Because all of those decisions about the why and the how and the what actually come out of who this self is. It is often a personal view, and we very rarely look at how that personal view has been developed. And this question Who is this self - who am I? is the basic question that underpins the other three questions. And I think it is an important question, because until we know where who we are, how do we understand our students properly? Palmer Parker says that it is almost like looking at the students through a dark glass. If you don't know who you are, how can you relate to your students? 

00:14:29 Guro H. H.  
In the same book you also demonstrate how reflective processes involving metaphor and imagery, as well as critique, can contribute to this understanding of yourself and your own values and worldviews, and thus also your understanding of this question Who am I? How is this? 

00:14:53 Cheryl H.  
Well, that comes from an another person's work who has been highly influential on my own, and that's John Heron. John Heron has a model of what he calls fourfold knowing, presented as a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid is what he calls experiential knowing It is simply knowledge that we are - a sense of beingness that you cannot share with anyone. The way that we can begin to share with others, is through the next layer of knowing which he calls our presentational knowing and the knowledge which is in what other people call the imaginal realm. It is the realm where music lies, art, drama. If it is in words, it tends to be in poetry or in metaphor. And once that is out there, it's in the shared domain, and we can then begin to speak about it and share our understanding of it in words. His third layer is what he calls propositional knowing, which is where theories, words and concepts lie. This form of knowing is so often privileged, particularly in higher education, and a lot of people think that what lies below that level, the experiences and the presentations, are just irrational knowledge. In a technical, rational society, how you put things into words is kind of key to what happens. And Heron's next layer is the practical. He says that what we do is actually the product of how those things that are happening in the three first layers filter through into practice. 
If you are going to understand your practice, you must actually delve into all those levels. It is not as straightforward process. It goes back and forth from one to the other to the other. But thinking about the levels, I think, is more important in terms of determining “why did I think that” or “why did I do that” or “why did that person annoy me”, and questions of that sort. I'm not sure whether I've answered your question. But that is where my notion of having to go back to find that what is happening at that level of beingness is important. What is it that is at the level of beingness? 

00:17:55 Michael N. W. 
Cheryl, in that respect, I would like to come to another question because you also draw on the concept of vocation and of professional-psychological well-being to reflect upon what it means to act authentically in professional practice. Can you go a bit into what you mean by authenticity, or to act authentically in professional practice? 

00:18:18 Cheryl H.  
That again, goes back to Parker Palmer, who says we need to ask the question “is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?” He sets that question in the context of vocation, because, he says, vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear, and he uses the word, I think, not simply in relation to professions that are traditionally labeled vocations like teaching or nursing and so on, but in more general terms of one's life's purpose. He also says that we are more like plants full of tropisms that draw us towards certain experiences. If we can learn to read our own responses to our own experiences, a text we're writing unconsciously every day we spend on Earth, we will receive the guidance we need to live more authentic lives. So, I think he is talking about authenticity in terms of understanding exactly who you are and what it is that pulls you towards certain things and pushes you away from others, because the more you can understand that, the more you can track a path that speaks to your authentic self. 

00:20:03 Guro H. H.  
Is there a relationship between authenticity and spirituality, as you see it? 

00:20:10 Cheryl H.  
Yes, I think there is, and in order to explain that, I kind of need to go back to Heron`s model. I've actually drawn Heron's pyramid with a box around it, so all those ways of knowing that I described, 1) the beingness, 2) the imagery 3) the words and 4) the practice, are all things that happen within let's call it the material world. But Heron actually talks about there being something beyond the material world. He actually refers to it as “the void”, and he says that the void enters the material world via the agency of each individual. In other words, for him, we each embody an aspect of the void which other people have called God, Consciousness, Spirit, Brahman, Allah, all names for that something beyond the material world which many of the faith traditions see permeating the material world. I myself prefer the word “spirit” for the void. And I've now come to see spirituality as a process of embodying that spirit, and that this process actually takes us through all those different ways of knowing. And if one listens to the calling, as Palmer says, it will take us in various directions to fulfill the calling.
I see vocation as something that is very closely related to understanding that process of calling. And I think it can be understood in secular terms. You do not need to believe in the void, the spirit, God or something beyond, because at that level of beingness, I think it is something that we share. It is a shared sense of being. I think everybody must have it simply by being alive.
I did at one time talk about transcendental spirituality and transpersonal spirituality. The problem is that many people do not see anything beyond, do not acknowledge this collective and shared humanity as the root of everything. And if we don't acknowledge our collective humanity, then things fall apart. Unfortunately, we are seeing this all over the world at the moment. 

00:23:14 Michael N. W. 
As far as I understood you, now you were giving an account of a secularized way of conceptualizing spirituality, and that such a secularized concept of spirituality or idea of spirituality also includes some kind of meaning making. Can we take a closer look on the relation between meaning making and spirituality? What is the relation between spirituality and meaning making? 

00:23:45 Cheryl H.  
I think meaning making is also a process, and actually that how we make meaning has an effect on what we do in the world. So for me, it is all tied up with that bottom layer, if you like, of Heron`s work - that sense of beingness. We need to try to understand our beingness, and to make meaning of what it means to be alive, and of why are we here. That question – why we are here- is one of the key meaning making questions as far as I am concerned. And I think it is it is tied up with the process or whatever we call it, of finding our pathway, whether we call it a spiritual process or whether we call it a meaning making process. We are actually falling foul of words, because the thing is something that happens. What label we put on it perhaps doesn't matter too much. And you know, spirituality is a contested word, and it has conjured up all sorts of things to different people for a very long time. Obviously, it has been associated with religion, and been seen as a part of religion. I would actually see it the opposite way, and see religion as a product of spirituality rather than the other way around. So, to go back to the model, I think spirituality is a process which takes us through life, and as we try to express the sense of beingness and move into that imaginal world, that is where I think religions come.
So, spirituality comes first. It is the drive from the sense of beingness, nad then at the presentational level, that is where the stories of our cultures and civilizations occur. And they are often all stories. They are in pictures, they have certain people associated with them, and those pictures and images and stories get taken into the propositional layer, which is where the religious doctrines and our laws come from. So, it is all bubbling up from that sense of beingness, and the religions themselves give rise to words and concepts, which themselves give rise to particular actions, and so forth.

00:26:26 Guro H. H.  
What would be the role of spirituality in professional practice? 

00:26:31 Cheryl H.  
Well, I think that it is again about looking at my beingness and how that relates to the beingness of my students, clients, whatever it might be. 
You know, in the 1980s and 90s when I first started looking at this, there were very few places where you could actually talk about spirituality as something in its own right, seeing it as something that had not simply to do with religion. But there were conversations coming up in all sorts of places, in nursing, mental health, palliative care, and there has always been a conversation at the back of education about spirituality, often in terms of spiritual care and so forth. I think nurses were kind of talking to nurses about it, and educators were talking to educators about it, and it was all happening in kind of separate silos. And what you referred to as The International Network for the Study of Spirituality actually began as the British Association for the Study of Spirituality. It was an attempt to try to bring together those conversations that were happening in all sorts of professional contexts about spirituality, spiritual care, and how we relate to one another. And I think we're now at a point, nearly 25 years later, where those conversations are joining up. And I think there are a lot of professionals who do see spirituality as part of what they do, even if you express that simply in terms of how do I relate to the people that I'm working with? 

00:28:19 Guro H. H.  
A little bit earlier you said that there is a lack of spirituality in the world today, because we see everything that is going on as material. Can you say some more about that?

00:28:33 Cheryl H.  
One of the things that has always fascinated me, is worldviews, and how people come to their particular worldview. And they are all created by these different ways of knowing. And I do not know how you try and bring these different worldviews together, because if your worldview is totally about gaining power or money or whatever, and you don't look any deeper than that, then it sets up a certain set of actions. And they just continue to play out. So, I think at the moment we are probably not encouraging people to question very deeply. I mean, I have certainly seen that in education things like critical thinking have tended to disappear from the curriculum. And in universities, I don't know whether it's the same where you are, but in the UK the so-called Cancel Culture is pretty rife. And what is that? That is about simply cutting off anything that I do not agree with. Rather than engaging in dialogues that will enable you to see through somebody else's eyes to understand their worldview the way that they, the way that they see things, you cut them off. And the more you cut off that kind of dialogue, the more difficult it becomes to try and reconcile these very different worldviews. That is where I think we are at the moment, and it is hard to know what to do about it.
I am sure there must be a way. There used to be futurists in the 1970s who talked about the need for a breakdown before there was a breakthrough to another way of seeing and being in the world. A couple of times we might have be close to that, but I think it feels closer to it now than ever in my lifetime, and you know that worries me. But when I get thoroughly depressed by watching the television and the news from around the world, I remember that there are many groups all over the place who are talking about spiritual matters, who are trying to look at things and do things in a different way. I am just hoping that all of that is going to bubble through. It will join up and bubble through at some stage. That is my hope. 

00:31:26 Michael N. W. 
Well, Cheryl, we already took a look into the connection between meaning making and spirituality. A scholars who investigated that closely was Victor Frankl, especially in his book Man`s search for meaning. Here he says that “Human existence is spiritual existence”, and on the same page we also find him writing that “Being human is being responsible, existentially responsible, responsible for one's own existence”. Now, with all what we discussed so far, I would like to ask you if reflective practice is not only a way to approach our spirituality and our personal meaning making, but also our responsibility, our existential responsibility? And here I mean our responsibility both as professional practitioners as well as a human being in general. 

00:32:24 Cheryl H.  
Yes, I think it is. I think we do have a collective responsibility for one another there. There used to be a saying we were made of star stuff, and that we actually are all part of the universe, a part of what many people think of as a universal consciousness. And if we don't examine our own life, to go back to Socrates, how can we ever determine a way forward that is appropriate for all of us? 
And because of, as I mentioned just now, this sort of fragmented fragmentation of world views that is around at the moment, we need to find some way of actually living together on this planet, and keeping the planet going as well. I mean, that is, you know, another key issue for a lot of people. I think we all are part of the same system, and if we don't play our part in it, then other parts of the system are going to break down.
I think part of my thinking around spirituality is associated with James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, because when I first started trying to explore spirituality, I didn't have that word. He was talking about interconnectedness, which is obviously very clear in the Gaia hypothesis. I think the fact that it seemed to catch the public imagination, because Lovelock had brought together this beautiful image of the Earth Goddess with modern scientific theory, it did feel like that was going to be an opportunity for another way of looking, being and doing. But obviously, I would not say it`s moment has passed, but we have obviously sort of regressed somewhat in terms of recognizing what our own responsibilities should be. 

00:34:33 Guro H. H.  
Well, in relation to this, and in addition to being an author yourself, you are also the editor of the Journal for the Study of Spirituality. And we wonder: How can spirituality be studied and research? 

00:34:47 Cheryl H.  
Right. That's quite a big question. How long have we got? I've actually just stepped down last year as the chief editor. I founded the journal, and I am still involved as an executive editor. But that is one of the reasons why the journal was set up: To actually look at those very questions of how spirituality can be studied and researched. And I think one of the things that I have seen developing, are research methods that would not have been accepted 25 years ago. When I first started doing autoethnographic work, that was completely frowned upon. It wasn't seen as proper research. If I had gone out and asked a dozen people the very same questions I was asking myself, it would have been OK. That would have been research. But to explore questions by going inwards just was not accepted. I think now it is and there are many, many more ways of addressing the sort of inner workings and what we understand by spirituality, and I recommend to read the articles in the journal. Generally, it has lots of articles in it which do address those questions. 

00:36:10 Guro H. H.  
One thing is how spirituality can be researched. Another thing is how it can be taught or rather facilitated. We would thus also like to ask you about how do you facilitate spiritual practice, so to speak, or rather reflective practice, which includes spiritual growth?

00:36:35 Cheryl H.  
I think that perhaps goes back to being authentic, actually working with people on a person to person basis. So one needs to be clear about what one is attempting to facilitate. If it's a PhD thesis, for example, then the task needs to be kept in mind. But the way in which one does it can be spiritual in the sense of making real connections rather than imposing and Using ideas or directions on someone. An actual meeting of persons is, I think, crucial to that, and back in, I think it was about 2006, I ran a seminar series, which I think was entitled “Researching spirituality in lifelong learning”. We had a core group of people involved in that, and we acted as a reflective group. While this series was going on, and at the end of it, one of the questions we raised was “have we been researching spiritually as well as researching about spirituality?” 
One of the striking things about that series was the feedback we got from people. I've never had feedback where people have kind of written almost a diary entry in response to what had happened to them. Someone actually reflected on a meeting on a railway station with someone. This person who had treated her very rudely. And she would normally have, you know, reacted in the same way. But she said, “I kind of carried something with me from our sessions, and I just met him as a person, and it changed the whole encounter”. 
So, I think doing something spiritually, in a spiritual way, kind of models what spirituality is about. I mean, you can teach about spirituality in terms of different views of it, how it is approached through faith traditions, how it can be approached - different methodological ways and so forth, but unless you are actually doing it, unless you are actually being with that person and recognizing their personhood, I think you might as well not bother. 

00:39:06 Michael N. W. 
Yeah, I think, Cheryl, that this is a good final remark or final word. Our episode, our conversation, is now coming to the end. Thank you very much for joining us today. It was a really, really inspiring and insightful talk. We would also like to thank our listeners and we hope that they will join us in one of our other episodes and with that I can only say together with Guro: Thank you very much and goodbye!

References:

Brookfield, S. D. (1995). Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass.

Heron, J. (1996) Co-operative Inquiry: Research into the Human Condition. London: Sage.

Hunt, C. (2021) Critical Reflection, Spirituality and Professional Practice. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer Nature.

Palmer, P. (1998) The Courage to Teach. Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Palmer, P. (2000) Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action.
New York: HarperCollins/Basic Books.

Websites:

International Network for the Study of Spirituality (INSS): https://spiritualitystudiesnetwork.org/

Journal for the Study of Spirituality (JSS): https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/yjss20/current