Reflective practices

Reflection supports the iterative and thoughtful nature of our work as educators and innovators. Below you will find more information on how reflective practices play a crucial role in the implementation of Principled Innovation.

Reflection

Principled Innovation upholds transformative learning, and reflection plays a central role in this process. While reflection has often been looked at in the educational context through reflection-in-action of the teacher as reflective practitioner (Schön, 1983), innovation in organizations can be fostered by moving beyond psychological models of individual growth to examining the larger organizational and social contexts (Gray, 2007). Here, critical reflection – that is an examination of the underlying paradigms and cultural norms that shape our belief systems – plays a central role in transformative learning (Mezirow, 1990, 1997, 1998). Notably for PI, critical reflection through systematic inquiry has been linked to the development of personal and interpersonal awareness and empathy (Van Beveren et al., 2018) and thus has the potential to develop multicultural competencies (Sharma et al., 2011).

Reflective tools

Critical reflection or the examination of taken-for-granted understandings can be achieved through practice, reflective dialogue, and virtue literacy (Lamb, Brant & Brooks, 2021), through supporting collective inquiry for developing moral reasoning and imagination (Cook-Sather & Baker-Doyle, 2017), and through the use of reflective tools including critical incident analysis, storytelling, and reflective journals (Gray, 2007), among others.

Creative tools

Within Principled Innovation, some of the reflective tools used to facilitate reflection and inquiry include a specific set called the Atlas of Creative Tools, developed by choreographer and educator Liz Lerman (2015). As critical reflection involves both cognitive and affective components (Lamb, Brant & Brooks, 2021), it is useful to engage with tools and techniques that can tap into both, and the Atlas does this through embodied practice and facilitated inquiry. These tools help “to make the integral overt, the organic concrete, and the intuitive intentional” (Borstel, 2005, p. 3). In other words, through the use of specific prompts and activities, the tools help us become aware of our intuitive responses, and therefore able to question or transform them as necessary. Through partnering the body and the mind (instead of prioritizing one over the other as we usually do), the tools catalyze reflection (Lerman, 2011, 2018) and have immense potential in critical, decolonial work (Nock, 2023).

Check out our Atlas of Creative Tools page for more information.

Two women admiring a painting in an outdoor gallery

References

Borstel, J. (2005). Liz Lerman Dance Exchange: An aesthetic of inquiry, an ethos of dialogue. In Dialogue in artistic practice: Case studies from animating democracy (pp. 57-91). Americans for the Arts.

Cook-Sather, A., & Baker-Doyle, K. J. (2017). Developing teachers’ capacity for moral reasoning and imagination in teacher education. In D. J. Clandinin and J. Husu (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of research on teacher education (Vol. 2, pp. 354–368). SAGE Reference. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118785317.weom020036

Gray, D. E. (2007). Facilitating management learning: Developing critical reflection through reflective tools. Management Learning, 38(5), 495–517. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507607083204

Lamb, M., Brant, J., & Brooks, E. (2021). How is virtue cultivated? Seven strategies for postgraduate character development. Journal of Character Education, 17(1).

Lerman, L. (2011). Hiking the horizontal: Field notes from a choreographer. Wesleyan University Press.

Lerman, L. (2015). Atlas of Creative Tools: Report and prospectus for the sharing and perpetuation of arts-based tools on a digital platform. [Unpublished report]. Imaging Research Center, UMBC.

Lerman, L. (2018). Dramaturgy as litany. In R. Bowditch, J. Casazza & A. Thornton. (Eds.), Physical dramaturgy: Perspectives from the field (pp. 73-78). Routledge.

Mezirow, J. (1990). How critical reflection triggers transformative learning. In Fostering critical reflection in adulthood: A guide to transformative and emancipatory learning (pp. 1–20). Jossey-Bass Publishers. https://www.colorado.edu/plc/sites/default/files/attached-files/how_critical_reflection_triggers_transfo.pdf

Mezirow, J. (1997). Transformative learning: Theory to practice. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 1997(74), 5–12. https://doi.org/10.1002/ace.7401

Mezirow, J. (1998). On critical reflection. Adult Education Quarterly, 48(3), 185. https://doi.org/10.1177/074171369804800305

Nock, M. (2023). Insights into the Atlas of Creative Tools and how it moves sustainability science toward cognitive justice, or, an interrogation of the traditional dissertation [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Arizona State University.

Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Arena.

Sharma, S., Phillion, J., & Malewski, E. (2011). Examining the practice of critical reflection for developing pre-service teachers’ multicultural competencies: Findings from a study abroad program in Honduras. Issues in Teacher Education, 20(2), 9–22. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ954551

Van Beveren, L., Roets, G., Buysse, A., & Rutten, K. (2018). We all reflect, but why? A systematic review of the purposes of reflection in higher education in social and behavioral sciences. Educational Research Review, 24, 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2018.01.002

Extended Bibliography / More Information