Critical Reflection: More Than Nuts and Bolts

Chiu, Lai Fong. (2006). Action Research, 4(2), 183-203.

"Emancipation and transformation are the twin goals of Participatory Action Research" (p. 184). Chiu writes that the notion of critical reflection has been taken for granted in PAR and lacks a genuine review on what constitutes critical reflection.

Chiu draws the contemporary concept of reflection from Shön (1983, 1996), who conceptualized conscious and unconscious practices of reflection. According to him, reflection-in-action is ‘tacit and spontaneous and often delivered without taking thought’ (Schön, 1987, p. 3) and reflection-on-action is a retrospective intellectual activity that 'requires verbalisation and symbolisation’ (p. 5). He asserted that one gains knowledge through the two kinds of reflection.

Specifically, concerning giving voices to the oppressed through narrating life experience, Chiu rightly argues that hearing the voices is intellectually unsatisfactory unless it addresses the process of generating such voices and revealing identities to unsettle exiting power relations. In particular, in pointing out a dilemma of presenting participants' experience in the researcher's own term, which makes the researcher suppress her own experience, Chiu contends that it is the very interactions between researchers and participants that may explain the process of changes that occur during the research. Hereby she calls for a researcher's self-reflexivity.

Chiu contends that reflection is underdeveloped in PAR and critical reflection, in particular, has been taken for granted. She argues that reflection in PAR is multi-perspectival--first, second and third person--as the forms of knowing are diverse--experiential, presentational, propositional and practical. Among these forms, experiential knowing is the foundation of all the other forms, she notes. Interweaving the two sets of conceptual framework, Chiu develops experiential reflection, presentational reflection, critical reflection, and practical reflection and discuss each reflection from first, second and third person perspective.

According to Chiu, reflection is crucial to different forms of knowledge creation. In particular, critical reflection enables people to generate propositional knowledge, such as analysis, conceptualization, inference, and synthesis, mediated by intellectual processes. In the first person, critical reflection is concerned with the reflexivity of the researcher, that is, "turning the researcher’s gaze back onto themselves and examining the hidden assumptions that structure their research" (p. 195; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). In the second person, critical reflection deals with power relations between participants and between participants and researchers and examines ways in which the relations are structured and supported in society. In the third person, critical reflection refers to the facilitation of collective critical reflection among participants.

Practical reflection, on the other hand, is important to create transformative knowledge.

Through her quest for different forms of reflection by attending to different ways of knowing, Chiu proposes a conceptual framework of critical reflexivity: self-reflexivity, relational-reflexivity, and collective reflexivity, which all are concerted to generate propositional knowing.

In her conclusion, she argues that her approach to reflection, first-, second-, and third-person perspective is useful to improve practices of PAR as these multi-perspectival reflection is in tune with the multi-dimensional knowing that PAR practitioners assert. First-person reflection [self-reflexivity] improves PAR practices. Reflexivity from the second-person perspective [relational-reflexivity] attends to conversations and interconnectedness with others, whereas reflexivity from the third person calls for social and political analysis that contributes to social change.