Building Reflexive Practice in Graduate Education

Questions about the capability of the education system are quite common. Critical commentary has ranged from curriculum to faculty to teaching strategies to relevance. We have come to recognize several national challenges—namely, that education systems at all levels are in need of redesign and that our future generation of leaders must be given greater opportunities to be engaged at earlier points in their learning. There is emerging consensus on these simple but difficult issues. If we skip ahead to acceptance of the need for complexity in thought and action (a large skip for some), we move to the point of considering when and how to introduce this style of thinking about and responding to problems. In this chapter, I will present several modest attempts to introduce reflexive practice in graduate programs directed at mid-career professionals from a variety of fields. We begin with the necessity in the education field, nicely stated by Russell Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin:1 A basic requirement of moving into a new age is creative thinking. But schools stifle creativity, particularly in children, by insisting that they conform to standards of behavior and belief, and by teaching them to respond to questions with answers that are expected of them. Answers that are expected cannot be creative, precisely because they are expected. Creative answers are necessarily surprising, unexpected. The current American educational system can be characterized as having students memorize known (expected) answers to predetermined questions. In an effort to please their teachers, students memorize predigested material selected by their teachers or others, material that fails to inform students about the changing nature of society and what the changes mean. Parents often reinforce the conservative efforts of teachers.