Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry launched at UCC
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Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry launched at UCC
08.11.2010

The Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry: Mapping a Way of Knowing for Professional Reflective Inquiry (Springer 2010), edited by Nona Lyons, UCC Visiting Research Scholar, was launched at UCC on November 5th 2010.

Professor Nona Lyons, Editor explains:
“Primarily the Handbook is a review of how people today in a range of professions are being educated to think, especially to be reflective about their own professional work. Recent world-wide catastrophes in several professions have raised questions about the education of professionals. Their practices have revealed to observers deep concerns about professional education and the sense that present practices are mis-managed, short-changing both the profession as well as the professional.”

What is being critiqued?
There is especially concern for how the ethical is or is not a part of professional learning and professional development across a career. In the past, professionals were seen as the guardians of doing what is right or just, but that is no longer true.  There have been omissions in thinking critically as well as in acting to address ills of bad practice that seemed blatant.

What is being recommended?
Observers and researchers, including this author and researchers of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in a recent study of the professions have converged on reflection and ethical education. What is being called for is ethical education steeped not simply in legal issues—similar to how lawyers are trained through the case method, but rather steeped in the issues arising from the actual life experiences of the individuals involved. More intense clinical experience is being suggested so that people are immersed in the complexities of actual life situations.

How does the Handbook address these issues?
The Handbook documents what is going on today in the education of professionals particularly addressing those professions which profess to support reflective practice:  teaching, teacher education, the law, medicine, nursing, social work, occupational therapy, adult education and probation services.

UCC authors include: Tony Ryan, Martina Kelly, Anne Rath, Carmel Halton, Maria Dempsey and Marian Murphy.

Picture L-R:  Dr Carmel Halton, Department of Applied Social Studies, UCC with Professor Nona Lyons.

 



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