CASE STUDY

Case Study

Case Study

I am a night shift worker and an adult learner. In the day time I run a car dealership business and take care of a disabled child.

The Adult learning carries a considerable and varied agenda (Phillips & Pugh, 2000). It can be seen in many ways: as the pursuit of research that contributes to human knowledge; as another academic qualification to be conquered in order that the `full set'can be acquired; as the starting point in a formal academic career and/or as a career-enhancing strategy; as an acknowledgement of `cleverness'and, more profoundly, as a validation of the self. It is the latter that can be linked naturally, with another aspect of the Adult learning that is sometimes not stressed, as a reflective learning experience.

The website of Curtin University, Australia (2000) asks the pertinent question about reflective learning and practice: `Is it just what people do in the shower?'All of us think about what has happened today to reach some conclusion about how that experience should affect or influence what we do and how we do it in the future.

However, its advocates would claim that reflective practice is more than that informal consideration of how we have dealt with today's events or crises or happenings. Reflective practice `is the integration of thought and action with reflection'(Imel, 1989). Such integration causes there to be something going on that is more rigorous and demanding than a `relaxed mulling over' in warm water.

While there is a debate about whether a hierarchy of thinking exists, and if so, the exact delineation of that stratification, there is a general agreement (Taggart & Wilson, 1998) `on three modes or levels of reflective thinking: technical, contextual and dialectical'. Van Manen (1977) talks of a technical rationality that seeks precedence and information from past experiences that concentrates on the actuality of behaviour, content and skill. Essentially, the technical is doing. He goes on to see the second level of reflection in terms of the context. In a sense, the relatively unproblematic nature of the technical gives way to the problems and issues arising from belief and value systems of the practitioner or protagonist. Here, as Taggart and Wilson (1998) point out, there is a necessity to make comparisons and choices, and in this, decision-making will be based on knowledge and value commitments, in which professional (and perhaps, personal) principles are validated. Van Manen's (1977) third level of reflectivity, critically addresses issues dialectically, in which ethical or socio-political or moral issues are confronted and examined. At this level, according to Taggart and Wilson (1998, p. 5), practitioners consider issues of this kind, but any personal bias is eliminated as `the ability to make defensible choices and view an event with open-mindedness is also indicative of reflecting at a dialectical level'.

Even if this model is used cautiously, it is clear that at three levels or certainly all three modes of thinking are present in any Adult learning project. Technical thinking is to the fore in the operationalisation ...