Unmasking online reflective practices in higher education
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Date
29/06/2012Author
Ross, Jennifer
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Abstract
Online reflective practices that are high-stakes – summatively assessed, or used as
evidence for progression or membership in a professional body – are increasingly
prevalent in higher education, especially in professional and vocational programmes.
A combination of factors is influencing their emergence: an e-learning agenda that
promises efficiency and ubiquity; a proliferation of employability, transferable skills
and personal development planning policies; a culture of surveillance which prizes
visibility and transparency; and teacher preference for what are seen as
empowering pedagogies.
This thesis analyses qualitative interview data to explore how students and teachers
negotiate issues of audience, performance and authenticity in their high-stakes online
reflective practices. Using mask metaphors, and taking a post-structuralist
and specifically Foucauldian perspective, the work examines themes of performance,
trace, disguise, protection, discipline and transformation. The central argument is that
the effects of both compulsory reflection, and writing online, destabilise and
ultimately challenge the humanist ideals on which reflective practices are based:
those of a ‘true self’ which can be revealed, understood, recorded, improved or
liberated through the process of writing about thoughts and experiences.
Rather than revealing and developing the ‘true self’, reflecting online and for
assessment produces fragmented, performing, cautious, strategic selves. As a result,
it offers an opportunity to work critically with an awareness of audience, genres of
writing and shifting subjectivity. This is rarely, if ever, explicitly the goal of such
practices. Instead, online reflective practices are imported wholesale from their
offline counterparts without acknowledgement of the difference that being online
makes, and issues of power in high-stakes reflection are disguised or ignored.
Discourses of authentic self-knowledge, personal and professional development, and
transformative learning are not appropriate to the nature of high-stakes online
reflection. The combination creates passivity, anxiety and calculation, it normalises
surveillance, and it produces rituals of confession and compliance. More critical
approaches to high-stakes online reflection, which take into account
addressivity, experimentation and digitality, are proposed.