The Reflective Practice Guide: An interdisciplinary approach to critical reflection - Barbara Bassot 2015

Preface

For a number of years I have been privileged to teach a large number of students on programmes designed to prepare people for a role in the helping professions. My own professional area of career development and guidance is relatively small compared to others, such as nursing, teaching and social work. As a result, literature on reflective practice specifically related to my field was fairly sparse. In my early days of teaching I found that I had to look to a number of other academic disciplines and draw on their literature in order to ensure that my students were not hindered in the development of their knowledge and skills in this vital area. It became very clear to me that there was a wealth of rich material that we could learn from.

The Reflective Practice Guide is the culmination of many years of teaching. I wrote it in order to bring together a body of literature from a range of professions and have also included some work of my own. While books written for specific professions will always be very valuable, our knowledge will be limited if we never look outside of our own particular academic boundaries. I trust that this book will enrich your practice as you draw on the knowledge and experience of professionals and academics from a variety of disciplines, and that ultimately it will enable you to give your clients the support they need and deserve.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my family, friends and colleagues for their invaluable support whilst writing this book. In particular, I would like to thank Marc Bassot for his careful proof reading and Martin Bassot for his excellent work on the diagrams. I would also like to thank Mary Andall-Stanbury, Dawn Tickner, Jane Westergaard and Karen Williams for their advice on the case studies. Finally, I would like to thank all my current and former students, as without them I would not have been inspired to write this book.

Figure 6.3 is reproduced with kind permission from the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, Oxford Brookes University.