Academic literature on the topic 'Biographical reflective and reflexive practice'

This essay has the purpose of analyzing the development of my vital project as a Physical Educations teacher. It has been designed using the qualitative methodology through a reflexive auto ethnography with the biographical accounts that I had developed for the past 7 years. The categories that structure the results correspond to the stages that according to Romero (2004) are necessary to reach the vital project: “Reconnaissance stage”, “Crystallisation stage”, “Specification stage” and “Fulfilment stage”. The analysis confirms that going through all of these stages has allowed me becoming a reflective, critical and creative person and has eased me reaching my vital project. In addition, the essay shows the professional development that I have experienced along the process and that has allowed me setting up a new innovative physical education based on the Contemporary Art. It concludes with the importance for the teachers to think about their vital project in order to share with their students the importance that using biographical accounts has as instruments to show them the evolution of a teacher's professional practice.

ABSTRACTEncouraging reflective practice in students, i.e. to ensure that our students are "able to observe themselves and to engage in a critical dialogue with themselves in relation to all that they think and do" (Brockbank, 2008) through work done within the classroom, it is the concern reflected in the present paper; and in order to execute this analysis, a series of insights derived from the teaching practice in the Universidad Veracruzana, a public higher education institution in Mexico, are shown, specifically within the Master of Management of Learning program. The biographical narrative method was used for the reconstruction of these experiences, which can recover the favorable actions for the development of the reflective practice in the students who took the course Learning Paradigm and Educational Innovation, the strategy used was the writing of an essay and derived from it was possible to identify some of the indicators that are indispensable for achieving this objective.RESUMENEstimular la práctica reflexiva en el alumno, es decir, lograr que nuestros estudiantes sean “capaces de obser-varse a sí mismos y de emprender un diálogo crítico con ellos mismos en relación con todo lo que piensen y hagan” (Brock-bank, 2008) a través del trabajo que se realiza al interior del aula, es una preocupación que se plasma en el presente escri-to; y para realizar este análisis se muestran una serie de introspecciones derivadas de la práctica docente en una institución de Educación Superior Pública en México, como lo es la Universidad Veracruzana, específicamente al interior del programa de Maestría en Gestión del Aprendizaje. Se utilizó el método biográfico narrativo en la reconstrucción de estas experiencias que permiten recuperar las acciones favorecedoras para el desarrollo de la habilidad reflexiva en los estudiantes que cursa-ron la materia de Paradigma del Aprendizaje y la innovación educativa, la estrategia utilizada fue la redacción de un ensayo y derivada de ella se lograron identificar algunos indicadores que se hacen indispensables para el logro de esta intención. Contacto principal: mytpeve@yahoo.com.mx

No atual cenário educacional verifica-se a criação de cursos de formação de professores, voltados à portadores de diploma de educação superior na modalidade bacharel que pretendam se dedicar a docência. Neste cenário objetiva-se com o presente estudo analisar a influência da formação nestes cursos na prática docente de três de seus discentes. A pesquisa pode ser classificada como qualitativa, básica, descritiva e biográfica. As entrevistas foram analisadas de acordo com os procedimentos de Delory-Momberger (2012, p. 533). Entre os diversos resultados, destaca-se a presença de uma crítica à prática de seus mestres, uma autoformação da prática e visão docente por meio da associação entre teoria e a execução da própria prática profissional e docente, bem como uma influência do curso no modo de constituir-se professor. Compreende-se, partindo da análise dos dados que o curso obteve um impacto positivo na prática vivenciada, reflexiva e crítica de ser professor.Palavras-chave: Educação profissional; Formação de professores; Prática docente. ABSTRACT: In the current educational scenario there is the creation of teacher training courses, aimed at those with a bachelor degree in higher education who wish to dedicate themselves to teaching. In this scenario the objective of this study is to analyze the influence of training in these courses on the teaching practice of three of its students. The research can be classified as qualitative, basic, descriptive and biographical. The interviews were analyzed according to Delory-Momberger's procedures (2012, p. 533). Among the various results, there is the presence of a criticism of the practice of their masters, a self-formation of the teaching practice and vision through the association between theory and the execution of the professional and teaching practice itself, as well as an influence of the course in the way to constitute as a teacher. It is understood from the data analysis that the course had a positive impact on the lived, reflective and critical practice of being a teacher.Keywords: Professional education; Teacher training; Teaching practice.

PurposeIn response to the top-down professional development (PD) practice, this study conceptualizes lesson study (LS) as a bottom-up approach to foreign language teacher PD in the Turkish context. Relatedly, the authors seek to empower teachers so that they can engage in reflexive PD and claim voice over their practices.Design/methodology/approachAn LS project including four teachers was implemented at a higher education language centre and conducted as a critical ethnographic study. Using ethnographic research qualitative data collection methods such as field notes, interviews and artefacts, the data were analysed with a thematic analytic approach.FindingsDrawing on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), findings revealed that LS was a meta-activity that allowed teachers to be agents of the PD practices. More significantly, LS empowers teachers to have a situated impact on their development activities in addition to the meta-activity's impact on them.Originality/valueThis study is one of the few that goes beyond the reflective value of LS and gives contextual evidence of how reflexive PD can occur in LS. The reflexive relationship between the agent (participant–teachers) and the process (LS practice) provides a strong implication revealing the transformative impact of bottom-up PD activit(ies).

Critically reflexive practice embraces subjective understandings of reality as a basis for thinking more critically about the impact of our assumptions, values, and actions on others. Such practice is important to management education, because it helps us understand how we constitute our realities and identities in relational ways and how we can develop more collaborative and responsive ways of managing organizations. This article offers three ways of stimulating critically reflexive practice: (a) an exercise to help students think about the socially constructed nature of reality, (b) a map to help situate reflective and reflexive practice, and (c) an outline and examples of critically reflexive journaling.

In the visual domain, more than two decades of work has argued for the existence of dual category learning systems. Thereflectivesystem uses working memory in an explicit fashion to develop and test rules for classifying. Thereflexivesystem operates by implicitly associating perception with actions that lead to reinforcement. Dual-system models posit that in learning natural categories, learners initially use the reflective system and with practice, transfer control to the reflexive system. The role of reflective and reflexive systems in second language (L2) speech learning has not been systematically examined. In the study reported in this paper, monolingual native speakers of American English were trained to categorize Mandarin tones produced by multiple speakers. Our computational modeling approach demonstrates that learners use reflective and reflexive strategies during tone category learning. Successful learners use speaker-dependent, reflective analysis early in training and reflexive strategies by the end of training. Our results demonstrate that dual-learning systems are operative in L2 speech learning. Critically, learner strategies directly relate to individual differences in successful category learning.

This case study explores the effects of addressing observations and reflective skills of 12-student teachers during their teaching practices for infant education in Guadalajara, Spain. The participants had been studying the basics of CLIL methodology and reflexive-teaching during a four-month learning period. Then, they participated in a six-hour workshop in which they were required to observe, participate in, and reflect on the teacher and each other’s on a four-minute teaching practice to assess their presentations following the given guidelines. The results show that students could demonstrate they are on the path of making effective observations and reflections on an observed practice. Keywords: Reflective skills, Spain, effective observations, practice, workshop.

The context of education under scrutiny in this paper is the post-experience practitioner sector, concerning students of ethics in Business Administration at both Masters and Doctoral levels. Responsible leadership is examined as a core theme in business ethics research and education. The paper proposes that responsible leaders require a virtuous mind-set, underpinned by Aristotelian thinking. Responsible leadership and romanticised models of leadership are interwoven in a critique of the technical-rational predominance in leadership and ethics research. The development of reflective practice is tracked from Argyris and Schon’s reflection on and in action to reflexivity. The paper considers the essence of Aristotle’s virtue ethics in proposing an integrative framework of skill and behaviour acquisition in organisational ethical decision-making. Reflective leadership and reflexivity are examined in relation to practitioner learning and the concept of a reflexive practicum explored to provide a praxis dimension to ethics education practice.

The article considers the example of a country whose educational system has absorbed the ideas of philosophical concepts of critical thinking of I. Kant and M. Lipman. After all, thanks to the dynamic integration processes in the world, we pay attention to reflective models of education, which lead us to the question: What is more relevant today – memorization of information or its critical analysis? The article attempts to investigate the organization of education in Finnish schools through the prism of I. Kant's reflexive model and M. Lipman's reflexive model of educational practice. I. Kant in his work «Critique of Pure Reason» used the concept of reflection in order to explain the specifics of the work of consciousness. He divided the concept of reflection into transcendental and logical. Logical reflection only compares concepts with each other and cannot judge things a priori. Transcendental reflection – the basis for the possibility of objective comparison of ideas with each other. Based on the provisions of Kant's work on reflection as a way of forming new concepts and judgments through the comparison of existing ideas, M. Lipman proposed a reflective model of education, which is devoted to his work «Reflective model of educational practice. The article also analyzes the role of phenomenon-based teaching and learning in the education of critical thinking, which is necessary for the successful life of the individual in the modern information society. The Finnish school shows us that the study of phenomena helps the student not only to understand what is happening, but pushes him to formulate an independent opinion on any issue in life. This creates an approach called «reflective model of education», which was fully discussed by I. Kant in the field of philosophy, and M. Lipman in the field of psychology and pedagogy. The article attempts to argue that the construction of the learning process in the Finnish school has the features of a reflexive paradigm of critical practice, which is its integral feature. The experience of organizing education in a Finnish school can be used in the development of a new Ukrainian school. Key words: reflection, reflective model of educational practice, critical thinking, criteria, judgments, phenomena, phenomenon-oriented learning and teaching.

Doctor of Philosophy
The current study explored the formative processes of twelve student teachers constructing role understandings in the context of their experiences and interactions with people with disabilities. In particular, it examined the participants’ changing notions of self-as-teacher and their unfolding perceptions of an inclusive educator’s role in teaching children with disabilities. The research aimed to investigate personal and professional forms of knowledge linked with the prior subjective life experiences of the student teachers and those arising from their interactions in situated learning experiences in community settings. The contextual framework of the study focused on the development of the student teachers’ unique understandings and awareness of people with disabilities through processes of biographical situated learning. The investigation examined participants’ voluntary out-ofcourse experiences with people with disabilities across three community settings for the ways in which these experiences facilitated the participants’ emerging role understandings. These settings included respite experiences in families’ homes of young children with disabilities receiving early intervention, an after-school recreational program for primary and secondary aged children and adolescents with disabilities, and an independent living centre providing post-school options and activities for adults with disabilities. ii Two groups participated in the current study, each consisted of six student teachers in the Bachelor of Education Course at the Bathurst campus of Charles Sturt University. Group One participants were in the second year compulsory inclusive education subject and Group Two participants were in the third year elective early intervention subject. The investigation examines the nature of reflexive and reflective processes of the student teachers from subjective, conflict realities in an attempt to link community experiences with real-life issues affecting inclusive educational practices. The voluntary community experiences engaged the research participants in multi-faceted interactions with people with disabilities, providing thought-provoking contexts for their reflections on observations, responses and reactions to situations, such as critical incidents. The participants engaged in reflexive and reflective processes in records made in learning journals and in semi-structured interviews conducted throughout the investigation. Results were analysed from a constructivist research paradigm to investigate their emerging role understandings. Prior to this study there had been few practical components in the compulsory undergraduate inclusive education subject which meant that previously student teachers gained theoretical knowledge without the opportunity to apply their learning. Many student teachers had expressed their feelings of anxiety and uneasiness about what they should do and say to a person with a disability. Thus, the community experiences were selected in order to give a specific context for student teachers’ learning and to provide participants with expanded opportunities to consider their professional identity, social awareness and acceptance of people with disabilities. iii An analysis of the data demonstrated the centrality of reflection within a situated teaching and learning framework. Understandings of prior experiences and motivation were shown to interact with the outcomes of the community experiences through an on-going process of reflection and reflexivity. This reconstructing process encouraged learners to reflect on past, present and projected future experiences and reframe actions from multiple perspectives as a way of exploring alternatives within broader contexts. The data reveal the participants’ engagement in the community experiences facilitated their awareness of wider socio-cultural educational issues, while focusing their attention on more appropriate inclusive teaching and learning strategies. The reflective inquiry process of identifying diverse issues led participants to consider other possible alternatives to current community practices for better ways to support their changing perspectives on ideal inclusive classroom practices. The dialogic nature of participants’ on-going deliberations contributed to the construction of their deeper understandings of an inclusive educator’s role. The findings of the study identified external environmental and internal personal factors as contributing biographical influences which shaped the student teachers’ emerging role understandings. The results emphasised the value of contextual influences in promoting desirable personal and professional qualities in student teachers. Importantly, situated learning enhanced participants’ unique interpretations of their prospective roles. As a result of analysing their insights from interactions in community contexts, the student teachers had increased their personal and professional understandings of individuals with disabilities and broadened their perceptions of their roles as inclusive educators. Thus, the study found that encouraging a biographical reflexive and reflective orientation in participants was conducive iv to facilitating changes in their understandings. Overall, the outcomes had benefits for student teachers and teacher educators in finding innovative ways for integrating biographical perspectives into situated teaching and learning approaches. The study showed that contextual influences facilitated deeper understanding of role identity and produced new ideas about the nature of reflexivity and reflection in guiding student teachers’ learning. (Note: Appendices not included in digital version of thesis)

To what extent does reflective learning in education meet the needs of learners in a reflexive modern society? The thesis constructs a late-modern case for reflective learning in post-compulsory education. It is argued that reflective learning connects with a key concept in contemporary social theory - that of reflexivity. The arguments are developed through the following key questions. • To what extent does reflective learning in post compulsory education correspond with the needs of learners in late-modernity? • What are the key characteristics of late-modernity? • Can the application of reflective learning by practitioners improve student learning in post-compulsory education? • What are the conclusions for teaching and learning in post-compulsory education that flow from this analysis of social theory and educational practice? Enlightenment and contemporary modernity is explored through a review of literature on social theory and philosophy. The second part of the thesis is concerned with praxis the testing of theory in action. Case studies in action research are used to examine how teachers seek to promote reflective learning in their practice. This exploration of theory and practice is then used to present the overall conclusions and make recommendations for future action. In many ways this thesis revisits the territory and thinking of John Dewey, It seeks to connect educational praxis to the wider social context, but from a late-modern perspective.

This thesis is a story of how I came to construct and illuminate a reflexive narrative as a journey of self-inquiry and transformation towards personal realisation. It shares a view of reflection as lived in being and becoming a reflective nurse educator in higher education. My narrative draws upon, autoethnography, critical social theory and hermeneutic perspectives. Johns (2010) six dialogical movements have been used to give structure to my narrative. Nineteen reflections generate the reflexive narrative in a hermeneutic spiral, as each text informs the other along the journey. Insights become clearer through guidance, dialogue, and engagement with the literature. Early reflections show anxiety, emotional distress and entanglement as I tried to solve student problems. Maternalism influenced my approach to being with distressed and struggling students. Gradually these feelings give way to being available, becoming student kind as an enabling relationship with students. Becoming student kind is framed through my adaptation of the Being Available Template (Johns 2013). It is realised through; listening, presence, caring, empathy, compassion and emotional intelligence. Poise, a self-management practice ensures that personal concerns and tensions do not hinder my relationships with students. Mindfulness expressed as spirituality sustains this process. This path to becoming student kind creates a learning space for student growth and development. In so doing, students are enabled to enter into a nurse patient relationship through being available. I express my empowerment through a dialogical voice, transforming my practice with individual students, in the classroom and beyond. Understanding the tensions within the complexity of university culture influencing nurse education, informs collaboration with colleagues towards a shared vision of nurse education. I turn to reflect on a journey of constructing a reflexive narrative. Five stepping stones for dialogue in advancing guided reflection as a foundation for nurse education are offered. My inquiry weaves a story of reflection as testimony to a fusion of practice and theory. I reveal practice wisdom, informing my day to day work in being available becoming student kind in relationships with students. I explore the contribution to knowledge, my practice and future research, considering the strengths and challenges therein.

Initial teacher education is constantly in the spotlight regarding its quality and its effectiveness. The literature contains many claims from those who believe that it is ineffectual. The notion of the reflective practitioner was introduced and embraced as an antidote to these claims, and as an approach to break the influence of technocratic beliefs and expectations which pre-service teachers bring with them to their initial teacher education. Typically reflection targets the practicum experience. However, this study focuses specifically on the contribution of course work to the development of a reflective beginning teacher. This qualitative study invited pre-service teachers to provide insight into their initial teacher education experience: initially within a Teaching of Science methods paper, and then some 18 months later at the conclusion of their three year Bachelor of Education (Teaching) professional preparation. A critical reflexive interpretive methodology which sought authenticity within its meaning-making process developed from an initial consideration of self-study research methodology. Of particular importance was that the enquiry was authentic, participants' voices were valued and recognition was given to the implications embedded within the context within which the study occurred. Methods of data collection included in phase one were: a pre-course questionnaire, a Gestalt-like activity, and pre-service teachers' email reflections based on Hoban's (2000a) categories of learning influences, and meta-reflections from the Teaching of Science paper. The journal I kept during this phase was also drawn upon as data. Phase two data collection included a vignette, and a three part final questionnaire to which 40 pre-service teachers and nine teacher educators responded. The findings suggest that pre-service teachers' understanding of the nature of education is critical to the way in which they experience the course work within initial teacher education. This understanding shapes their perception and consideration lens through which course work is experienced. On entrance to initial teacher education this lens is described, for many pre-service teachers, as technocratic. Education is seen as a commodity, something to acquire, teaching is telling and initial teacher education is dependent on the teacher educator providing the necessary tools and techniques so the beginning teacher can do the right thing. This study suggests that such a stance toward educational experiences is a hindrance mechanism when teacher educators seek transformative teaching, learning, and reflexivity. However, when that view of education is as a process of growth and transformation toward a valued 'way of being', the perspective and consideration lens is described as professional. Rather than focusing on what a teacher does, the focus is on whom the teacher is and how this influences the teaching and learning process. Teacher educators and the institution which is the context within which course work occurs also demonstrate a mixture of technocratic and professional lenses. Important factors within initial teacher education which contribute to transformation from technocratic to professional lens include relational and pedagogical connectedness. These factors lead to valuing, ownership and justification of learning where assessment tasks are tools for personal development and where critical consideration of multiple perspectives has an important role. Relational connectedness (to self, peers, and teacher educators) is important for developing a safe, but challenging, dialogical space in which paradoxes, challenges and pre-service teachers' vulnerable sense of disorientation may be engaged. Pedagogical connectedness relates to the fit between what the teacher educator says and does. For example, a powerful approach to learning is where the pre-service teachers learn to be reflexive, by being reflexive. The study indicates the importance of institutional congruency so that what is espoused is experienced through language, assessment, teaching approaches and contextual culture. However, pre-service teachers' perception and consideration lens determines the degree to which course work is transformational. Where a technocratic lens is dominant, reflection becomes a task to be completed. Where a professional lens is dominant, reflection becomes an iterative process for improving practice by becoming professionally self aware through identifying assumptions in decisions and responses within the learning/teaching relationship, and judging those assumptions for their appropriateness in the light of a developing and critiqued personally owned educational vision.

Pour favoriser la réflexion sur la pratique professionnelle, nous avons proposé à des futurs enseignants en stage d'utiliser un journal de bord au départ de consignes semi-structurées. Notre intention est d'identifier les traces de réflexion dans les journaux de bord et de différencier son utilisation par trois caractéristiques individuelles: l'anxiété, la perception d'efficacité personnelle et le rapport à l'écrit du futur enseignant. Notre thèse développe dans la partie théorique le premier chapitre sur le journal de bord parmi les dispositifs de formation favorisant la réflexion sur la pratique, le deuxième chapitre sur la notion de réflexion sur la pratique et plus particulièrement sur le modèle métacognitif de réflexion de McAlpine et ses collègues (1999, 2001) et le troisième chapitre sur les trois variables individuelles mesurées. La partie empirique développe la méthodologie utilisée, à savoir que cette recherche exploiratoire, visant l'induction d'hypothèses, décrit les trois étapes de la démarche d'analyse de contenus des journaux de bord(recueil, exploitation et transformation des données qualitatives avec traitement quantitatif)en lien avec les questions de recherche et explique la construction et la validation des trois quesitonnaires mesurant les caractéristiques individuelles. Cette partie s'achève par le chapitre des résultats et des discussions. Parmi les 96 futurs enseignants, 45 d'entre eux ont réalisé leur journal de bord. Différents contenus ont été identifiés dont de la réflexion sur la pratique. A partir du modèle de McAlpine et al., nous avons essentiellement trouvé des passages de description de l'action et des passages d'évaluation de l'action. Une typologie des journaux de bord et de la réflexion a été obtenue par une analyse en clusters. Au moyen de corrélations de Kendall, nous avons pu observé une relation positive entre le rapport à l'écrit de l'enseignant et l'appropriation du journal de bord et une relation négative entre la perception d'efficacité personnelle et le composant d'évaluation de l'action. Aucune relation n'a été obtenue avec la variable d'anxiété. POur conclure, de nouvelles hypothèses de recherche ont été formulées ainsi que les apports et les limites de cette recherche.

No
This article reflects on the debates about Evidence Based Practice and suggests a new approach to implementing a more reflexive and research aware social work practice in professional teams. We show that there has been a substantial focus on the responsibility of individual professionals for using best evidence to guide their practice and on the organisation to provide an environment and policies suited to EBP. We argue that there is a need to balance this by an increased focus on the professional and team culture in which social work takes place. We draw on the literature on organisational change and social work research to suggest a new direction for encouraging greater reflexivity and developing a more open participative approach to the use of evidence to shape new practices in social work at the local level.

Jacobus Kloppers, an eminent composer, organist, pedagogue, and scholar, significantly contributed to musicological and organ teaching in South Africa and Canada and, in the latter context, art music, and liturgical composition. A Passage of Nostalgia – The Life and Work of Jacobus Kloppers, as a symbolic gesture, constitute recognition of his work both in South Africa and Canada. This publication is unique in that, apart from relevant disciplinary perspectives, biographical and autobiographical narrative, and anecdote, all constitute a necessary means through which the authors illuminate Kloppers’ compositional process and its creative outcomes. In this regard, Kloppers generously dedicated his time to the project to make information on his life and work available, often in complex ways. This retrospective input supports the work offered as an authentic, self-reflective recounting of a life of dedicated service in music. The construct of nostalgia as an overarching theme to this volume on some level denotes Kloppers’ position of cultural and religious ‘insidedness’ and ‘outsidedness’. However, apart from representing a return to a lost and challenging past, the composer’s creative work affirms his individuality, sense of artistic self, and propensity for spiritual acceptance and tolerance. Moreover, nostalgia in his oeuvre takes on importance as a rhetorical artistic practice by which continuity is as central as discontinuity.

This chapter emphasises the role diaries assume in being a useful repository for the practice of critical reflexive thinking; providing an important space for those engaged in conflict based field research to manage expectation, deal with emotion and highlight experience. Based on research conducted in the West Bank, Occupied Palestinian Territories, the chapter reveals how meticulously maintained research diaries provided the emotional space needed to continuously evaluate the impact that such research was having upon personal wellbeing as well as the direction of the research as a whole. In the absence of commonly availed of familiar support networks, the research diary, in a conflict setting acts as a cathartic tool in providing the mental and emotional space to document fears and anxieties impacting upon the individual researcher.

This chapter is constructed as a reflective professional narrative coming from the context of public and private continuing professional development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The authors start the text by making explicit their involvement and alignment with the rationale of Exploratory Practice, within the broader horizon of language Teacher Development (Allwright, 2001). The text establishes a theoretical dialogue with Reflective Practice, Action Research and Exploratory Action Research, considering them as recent trends in teacher education and other possible modes of Practitioner Research (Allwright & Hanks, 2009). The authors expand on Exploratory Practice as a paradigm that foregrounds inclusivity, ethics and criticality. Examples of Potentially Exploitable Pedagogic/Professional Activities (PEPAs) and Potentially Exploitable Reflexive Activities (PERAs) will be shared by showing that they result from integrating the ‘work for understanding' with regular pedagogic activities or broader educational practice.

The contemporary demands of the education environment today require that teachers refine their reflective thinking skills and shift towards the deeper critical thinking skills inherent in reflexive thinking. Reflexivity is a deeper level of critical thinking that assumes a degree of metacognition and “knowing-in-action” (Schon, 1983, p. 50). Metacognition is a critical tool in helping individuals become more aware of their deeply seeded biases and tacit assumptions about the way the world works. Through a phenomenological analysis of four individual case studies, this study found that student feedback was a key catalyst for building reflexivity skills. Specifically, the study details the key ways by which feedback prompted novice teachers to metacognitively think through their knowing-in-action and ultimately improve their teaching practice. The research details important implications in three areas: 1) practice, 2) theory, and 3) future research.

Teacher training processes must incorporate a reflective dimension as a strategy for professional development. The pursuit of a professional identity and the need to give personal meaning to theoretical principles grounds the emergence of young teachers' reflection. In this chapter, multimodal narrative (MN) is presented as a tool to support reflexive approaches in the development of teachers' professional knowledge. The data collected about the perspectives of student teachers and supervisors who experienced the use of MN show the interest of these actors about the tool and about the processes of its use. This chapter presents and discusses constraints identified throughout the pilot study of using a MN in teacher training that the authors developed. It also presents a proposal for the use of MN in the context of initiation of the professional practice that includes an adapted version of the MN tool and a phased process of its use.

This chapter discusses the various practical, epistemological and methodological issues of importance when a historical scholar with limited digital skills wants to take a step towards learning how to conduct digital analyses. As a feminist historian, the author combines this approach with a discussion of the relation of feminist research and digital humanities. In line with practice in feminist research, she uses a self-reflexive approach and asks how the increase in the understanding of digital methods influences research questions in feminist history. Do digital humanities tools transform the work as feminist historians? How can digital analyses develop the field of gender history in general and the history of feminism in particular? Can a scholar who has limited technological skills engage with an informed and critical discussion with digitised materials? In doing this the chapter provides an inside reflective history of the making of digital history.

This chapter explores the relationship between victimhood and agency, and the unhelpful binary ways in which it has often been conceptualised within child sexual exploitation (CSE) discourse and practice to date. It observes how adherence to dichotomous conceptualisations of those experiencing CSE, and associated narrow understandings of CSE victimhood, have served to diminish our responses to particular populations and particular manifestations of harm; namely those typified by any degree of observable agency on the part of the child. Here, reframing young people's experiences of CSE through the lens of structuration theory offers a much-needed way to move us beyond the observable simplistic binary conceptualisations of victimhood versus agency. It helps us to better understand and respond to the widely variable and complex dynamics and contexts of CSE. Specifically, reconceptualising young people as ‘reflexive agents’ operating within a ‘structure of constraint’ offers us a means of concurrently recognising the range of biographical and contextual factors at play in any given situation, and allows us to move beyond exclusionary ‘idealised’ victim-based patterns of identification and response.