Chapter 10
Reflection and reflexivity
The picture that emerges from Chapters 8 and 9 is of students' experience as simultaneously set in motion and flexibly ‘held’ by the combination of the creative life writing exercises and the experiential, collaborative groups where they share their writing. But my researches reveal that there is another key dimension in students' experience of change, which is the reflective work they engage in, whether through diaries or learning journals, or end-of-course reflective essays and academic papers, with the help of course readings. Indeed, what becomes clear is that there is a central dialogue in Group 2 students' experience between the reflective work and the experiential work. Thus in this chapter I take a closer look at the place of reflection in students' experience of change, both at the course and the programme level, and its role in enhancing reflexivity.
The use of course diaries and learning journals
When Group 2 students were studying, a course diary or journal was recommended for use in Course 1 (Writing for Personal Development) to enable them to record their experience of the course in the moment, thus creating a resource for writing the end-of-course reflective essay. In Course 3 (Writing and Groups) a journal specifically focusing on what students were learning was mandatory, and they were expected to quote from it in the reflective essay (see Chapter 1). As the Course 1 diary was not a formal requirement, not everyone chose to do it. The students who found it most useful were mainly those already in the habit of keeping diaries and journals, such as Maria.
Whilst, as we have seen, Maria doesn't feel ‘held’ by her reading groups in Courses 1 and 2, keeping a journal provides her with a ‘safe space … to gather together fragments of myself, give voice to forgotten, silenced, sometimes conflicting voices’. This gentle gathering together and ‘holding’ of different fragments of her personality helps sustain her in her period of depression before she finds more significant containment in the ‘maternal holding environment’ of Writing and Groups. Her experience of keeping the mandatory learning journal in this latter course is similarly ‘holding’ but, by contrast, more active and intentional, providing a space for psychic movement between different sites of learning. It helps her:
to become more flexible by having to make links between personal feelings, reflection triggered by reading academic texts, and the creative writing process needed to write the home assignments. I see the journal acting like a bridge between the ‘MA’, the writing group and the ‘World’.
Increased psychic movement and flexibility is also indicated in Rhiannon's comments on her Writing and Groups journal: it is ‘a place to record everything and anything of relevance to me, and slowly I began to see a circular almost rhythmic flow of life (my life)’. This greater openness to the flow of experience allows ‘difficult issues [that] might otherwise still be floating around in my head as an incomprehensible and unapproachable muddle [to be] uncover[ed] and resolve[d]’. Here the soft structure of the learning journal not only acts as a container for experience in all its guises, but it also allows a more spontaneous and intuitive shaping and ordering of experience.
For Jill the learning journal is a place for letting go of her public persona and giving expression to a more authentic sense of self, in privacy in the first instance. She notes that her writing here is ‘much more emotional and serious than the [humorous] tone I adopt in my creative writing’, which leads her to wonder whether ‘I shelter behind my humour from public exposure’. Stacey can also try out her less public self in the journal: it provides a place for ‘writing things that I would never show to others but which sometimes form the basis of future creative work’. Here ‘there is no need for the writing to be good or artful, it is held in this space for me to develop as I choose’.
The writing of the learning journal in these examples creates a ‘transitional space’ (Winnicott, 1971) between inner and outer worlds where learners can become aware, in a relaxed and private way, of thoughts and feelings emerging spontaneously out of the different components of their studies and where the learning self can be more fluid and playful (Creme, 2008). It is another form of ‘holding’. But the journal can also be used more consciously and systematically for planning the end-of-course essay, as Claire discovers:
I included all kinds of things: my reflections on the sessions, on the reading, on my writing, on thoughts I had between sessions. I colour coded these thoughts as suggested and it really clicked! It felt very natural to do, not contrived at all, and made writing the paper for term 3 much easier ….
Here, there is more critical distance in the process of reflection, a more conscious and willed approach of drawing out and interrogating ideas and insights from the gathered material. Susanna also finds that the journal leads to a more critical, conscious process of reflection, saying that it ‘has increased the level of consciousness in my writing and participation in the group and, I hope, in my academic writing’. It helps make her learning more explicit.
Embodied–experiential learning in dialogue with critical reflection
The above examples indicate that there are two different kinds of reflection taking place through the course diary or learning journal: on the one hand there is a spontaneous process of becoming aware of thoughts and feelings experienced in the moment and gathering them together in the diary or journal where they are loosely but safely ‘held’; on the other there is a more consciously intentional and retrospective process of developing the material into creative writing or interrogating it for the work for assessment. These sound very much like the two modes of knowing I identified in Chapter 6: embodied–experiential learning and critical reflection.
The term experiential learning is used in many different ways (Fenwick, 2000). Moon identifies some of its key connotations: it is a kind of learning that is not ‘mediated or taught’; it usually involves ‘reflection either deliberately or nondeliberately’; there is usually an ‘active phase’ and a ‘formal intention to learn’ (Moon, 2004: 120). All of these are certainly present in the students' material, but I would add a further element: whilst there is an active phase and an overall intention to learn, the learning process itself involves relaxed, low level intentionality, the ‘listening’ mode that is open to the bodily-felt sense of inner and outer worlds, in Gendlin's terms (see Chapter 8). This allows the carrying forward of whatever arises into words, but in a preliminary, receptive way before a more intentional, top-down processing or interrogation of the material takes place. Thus my understanding of experiential learning connects with ‘embodied learning’, which is described as a process of bringing forth a world via holistic bodily experience (Horn and Wilburn, 2005: 751, quoting Varela et al., 1991; cf. Mathison and Tosey, 2008). It has similarities with Milner's attending with the ‘imaginative body’ (Milner, 1971: 36) and Siegel's ‘receptive awareness’ (Siegel, 2007: 127), and is intrinsic to Boyd and Myers's ‘receptivity’ (1988). It is knowledge derived intuitively from bottom-up rather than top-down, similar to that derived from the creative life writing.
Critical reflection is, of course, Mezirow's term for the process at the heart of transformative learning, where learners ‘critically reflect on [their] own assumptions as well as those of others’ (Mezirow, 2000: 25). However, what I have in mind is more than just ‘premise reflection’ (Mezirow, 1991), and critical not just in the sense of ‘ideology critique’ (Brookfield, 2000), although it might involve that; rather it is a highly focused and intentional (critical) mode of attention to material gathered via the embodied–experiential mode, which aims at clear, reasoned articulation and understanding, often with the help of seminar discussion and conceptualisations derived from course texts. This is Milner's sharply pointed ‘thinking mode’ (Milner, 1971).
Students' essays show them moving back and forth between embodied–experiential learning and critical reflection, bringing tacit, bodily-felt meanings into the light where they can be explored more consciously, and then re-embodying what they have found into more holistic understandings. This is most clearly visible in the essays for Writing and Groups where students discuss their learning through critically reflecting on their own and the group's experience as recorded in their learning journal, drawing also on the creative writing done during the course and conceptual understandings derived from course texts. Claudia's is a particularly good example. Reflecting on her embodied experience of the group that she has recorded in her journal, she notices that she has distanced herself from the other students right up to the final session. She ‘desperately want[s] to be seen’ by the group and really appreciates that: ‘Everyone seemed to really attend when someone was sharing their piece, especially the facilitator’. But at the same time she is ‘very afraid of exposure’. This conflict is at work from the start when she reveals more of herself in her creative writing than is comfortable and then ‘[feels] terrible, as though I just took all my clothes off in a public place’, causing her to withdraw. In her isolation she projects her strong tendency to selfcriticism onto fellow students, becoming acutely ‘self-conscious as I judged my work to be not as good as theirs and that they were “proper writers” whereas I was just an amateur’. Then her anger at the tutor emerges (see Chapter 9). Whilst she understands, through reflections in her journal, that the anger and sense of being judged adversely by the group are, at least in part, the result of being ‘angry and disappointed’ at herself, this does not relieve her anxiety, and she toys with dropping out.
It is only when writing the home assignment on ‘This is where I risk, what I risk’ that Claudia is able to distance herself sufficiently from her own struggles and look at her relationship with the group differently. Unable to confront the exercise head-on, she imagines herself as a sea anemone on a coral reef: ‘The life of the anemone is difficult. In each moment she must be alert to the changing conditions, choosing always whether to open herself up and risk being vulnerable or close herself in and run the risk of starvation’. Mostly the anemone ‘camoufl ages [herself] in browns and greens like the darkest, dankest, foul-smelling seaweed’. But whilst this protects her, it also deprives her of food, sunlight and the stroke of passing fish, all of which she needs to survive. Aching to be part of the rich life of the reef, ‘she begins to unfurl her tentacles’ revealing her rainbow colours. Now she can draw plankton and algae deep inside her, the clown fish can ‘cavort in and out of her colourful skirts’ bringing her companionship. But she also realises that opening-up is not just about what she can get from the reef; rather it has a ‘positive effect … on her environment’ and that the other creatures have longed for her to open up and be an active part of their ‘underwater world’. This extended metaphor enables Claudia to recognise that:
my contribution in the group could have had a very positive effect and that the group had indeed wanted me to join them in their ‘underwater world’ because my personal struggle blocked the group as a whole, not just my own process.
The journal entries she quotes in the essay show her engaging in a difficult dialogue with herself:
Why do I do this to myself? I have paid for this course, and was delighted to be offered a place, because it was something I genuinely wanted to do. Why do I sabotage my own happiness by then not allowing myself to fully participate?
In the final session she is able to recognise:
a deep sadness that I hadn't got to know any of the group members and hadn't dedicated myself to the work of the course, always fitting the reading and writing exercises in at the last minute and seeing them as a chore rather than as something I had chosen to do.
What Claudia learns from writing the paper is ‘the damage I can do to myself when I push uncomfortable feelings in the shadow rather than express them’. The ‘shadow’ here is Jung's concept (see Chapter 9), which Claudia uses to explore the rebellious part of her personality from childhood and which re-emerges strongly in this course. In fact she did try expressing this part of herself when she confronted the tutor – quite legitimately it seems (see Chapter 9) – about her inconsistent participation in the exercises, but at that point she was not yet able to trust and manage it, and it went underground again. Yet her later reflections on the course for the research project, where she notes that she has ‘become more authentic and real in my responses even when it is uncomfortable’,1 indicate that there has been progress towards this.
What we see here, then, is a series of soft structures for ‘holding’ the dialogue between embodied–experiential learning and critical reflection. The learning journal provides a space for Claudia's felt experience of conflict between closeness and distance in her relationship with the writing group to be gathered and processed as it happens. The creative life writing exercise enables her to reflect on her experience obliquely through the metaphor of the coral reef, which captures both her individuality as a learner and her place in the organic whole of the group – this is an example of how the creative life writing exercises can be used as a form of intentional reflection on current dilemmas. Jung's concept of the shadow, interpreted in her own way, gives conceptual shape to the underlying psychic structures at work in her conflict, and the end-of-course essay provides a vehicle for critical reflection on all the other components. In critical realist terms Claudia's learning here emerges out of the ‘layered’ or ‘laminar’ nature of the learning environment (Brown, 2009), with the learning group, the journal, the creative writing, and the essay constituting a series of nested layers that both challenge her to greater openness and insight but also ‘hold’ her in that process.
A framework for thinking feelings
The possibility of engaging in a dialogue between embodied–experiential learning and critical reflection, then, is built into the structure of Writing and Groups, but it also becomes visible as a key feature of the MA as a whole. As outlined in Chapter 1, Course 1 (Writing for Personal Development) is primarily an experiential course, with creative life writing exercises providing opportunities for embodied–experiential learning. However, some literary and theoretical readings are introduced alongside practice, to enable students to start bringing creative writing and personal development together conceptually through seminar discussion. The end of course essay, which requires students to reflect critically on what they have learned about themselves and their writing practice from the combination of writing exercises, conceptual material, and experiential group work, provides a structured space for bringing these different components together, with the course diary available for capturing experience in the here and now. Course 2 (Creative Writing and the Self) reverses this pattern, privileging student- and tutor-led discussion of key concepts over experiential practice, although creative writing arising out of this material and sharing it in small reading groups remains as a means of connecting the two.2 The academic paper requires students to demonstrate their understanding of one or more of the conceptual frameworks they have engaged with during the course and their relevance for creative writing and personal development.
Courses 1 and 2 constitute the core of the programme, designed to ground students in the experiential and conceptual approach of the MA. In the remaining three courses the experiential work and critical reflection go hand-in-hand, with those students taking the practice-based courses being required to reflect critically on their writing practice via conceptual material (as in Writing Practice and the creative writing option of Independent Study) and specifically with the aid of a learning journal in Writing and Groups. The only exceptions are Projects: Practical and Theoretical and the research option of Independent Study where students undertake a piece of qualitative or text-based research, although some students also use these to reflect critically on practice.3
This interweaving of embodied–experiential learning and critical reflection across the programme is clearly visible in the case studies. As we have seen in Simon's story (Chapter 3), the opening up to a more bodily-felt space for the imagination, which he experiences through creative life writing and small group work in Course 1, is at first distressing, although the trust he develops in his reading group generates a degree of ‘holding’ for this. At the same time the conceptual material – particularly Chatman's visual representation of multiple textual agents in a narrative – provides additional psychic structuring through the different ‘selves’ and others that he now sees inhabiting his writing practice. This continues in Course 2, where the ideas of Bakhtin and Bruner enable him to ‘erect a three dimensional mental framework or scaffolding on which the narratives, events, metaphors and biographical fictions of my life can be spread out and examined’. That the mental scaffolding is ‘three dimensional’ indicates that his strong visual imagination is enabling him to embody the conceptual material and to start moulding it creatively in his own way.
In his research project for Course 4 (Projects: Practical and Theoretical) his embodied understanding of the conceptual material from previous courses enables him to move away from his sense of himself as unconnected fragments to formulate a metaphor for self as a rope made up of a multitude of strands twisted together and constantly undergoing change whilst giving an outward impression of uniformity. The conceptual framework of stability and fluidity implicit in this metaphor, together with increased trust in his writing process derived from the collaborative group work, subsequently facilitates a more reflexive collaboration in his creative process between his managing ‘author’ self and his more unruly ‘writer’ self, resulting in the spontaneous creative pieces he writes for Independent Study. The emergence in one of these pieces (‘Pencil’) of an extended metaphor for the reflexive relationship between stability and fluidity suggests that this conceptual framework has now become embodied.
A similar trajectory is visible in Maria's story (Chapter 4). The experiential work of Course 1 cracks open psychic space, more painfully than for Simon, as Maria does not feel sufficiently ‘held’ by her reading group and becomes depressed although, as we have seen above, the journal does provide a degree of ‘holding’. In Course 2, Kristeva's conceptualisation of the psyche as constantly in process between the bodily-felt Semiotic realm and the language-based Symbolic realm helps Maria to understand her sense of being split between her French and English identities, and exploring this in the critical paper makes her feel more contained and integrated. In her Course 3 option (Writing and Groups) she finds ‘experiential grounding’ for this conceptual understanding through experiencing the all-female group as Kristeva's ‘chora’ or maternal holding environment that facilitates psychic movement between the Semiotic and Symbolic realms. Again the learning journal is an important means of ‘holding’. Feeling more contained internally and ‘held’ externally, she is able, in Course 4 (Contexts for Practice), to start experimenting with capturing her fragmented self-experience in a connected series of writing fragments. This culminates, through the combination of creative writing and reflection in Independent Study, in the creation of a multi-voiced personal narrative held together by the transcendent image of herself as a storyteller who ‘holds’ the space for stories to be told. Thus the sense of containment, which begins to develop through the journal and the internalisation of Kristeva's conceptual framework, and then through its experiential consolidation in Writing and Groups, becomes objectified in the creative writing in the form of a self-narrator who contains the more relational space of the self.
Both these examples demonstrate a clear movement from embodied–experiential learning, which brings uncomfortable fragmentation of the psyche into view, to the unpacking of that experience through critical reflection, and then the re-embodying of the new learning into a more holistic sense of self as writer or learner, which can tolerate and begin to manage psychic multiplicity. However, whilst these different dimensions can be separated out, once set in motion embodied-experiential learning and critical reflection quickly come together into a dynamic recursive process of thinking feelings.
The primacy of bodily experience4
From the above examples it is clear that in the dialogue between embodied-experiential learning and critical reflection the former precedes the latter, although the two quickly come together into a dynamic bodily or bottom-up process. Some students refer to this explicitly. Miranda finds that: ‘as soon as I experience a feeling … I am reading some literature that helps me understand and assimilate the feeling’. The verb ‘assimilate’, with its first dictionary meaning of ‘taking in and using as nourishment – to absorb into the system’ (Merriam-Webster), implies that the dynamic relationship between bodily experience and critical reflection moves from intuitive awareness of the experience to a more conscious understanding and back to embodied, and presumably less conscious, meaning-making. In Ruth's reflections on writing her novel for Independent Study the dynamic relationship between bodily-felt experience and critical reflection is just beginning to develop, although the conscious nature of it presents some difficulties:
I began to recognise a feeling of the ‘felt self’ in my writing, when it was coming from a more authentic sense of place. This was difficult to keep up sometimes, but I learnt to identify when it was there, and not to keep on writing when it had gone. This was a progression from Projects: Practical and Theoretical, when I looked into the notion of the felt self, and how to access it.
Here the concept appears to come first, through Ruth's engagement with Gendlin's concept of ‘felt sense’ in her academic paper for Course 4. But as she has been engaging deeply with her feelings through the creative writing exercises in earlier courses, when she becomes consciously aware of her ‘felt self’ in her writing in Independent Study she is in all likelihood naming something she has already started experiencing at a deeper, less conscious level. By becoming more aware of it and giving it a name, she is able consciously to practice using it as a way into her writing. That, in the writing of the novel, she is able to start giving fictional shape to her painful obsession with her former boyfriend (see Chapter 7), indicates again that, whilst this process goes through a fully conscious stage, it is gradually becoming embodied into lower level consciousness where it becomes an intuitive part of the creative process.
The potential tension between embodied-experiential learning and critical reflection is also visible in Harriet's experience. Theoretical material from Course 2 on the bodily-felt self facilitates conceptual understanding of a psychic mechanism she discovered intuitively during a previous creative writing course of ‘shut-ting-off some controlling bit of my mind and going straight into some other place and writing from that and trusting what I write …’. She had noticed that: ‘if I went for a swim in the morning and then came back and did my [writing] exercise it would come’. But at that time ‘I hadn't got the underpinning, whereas now I know after Damasio etc. why it is that that works. So it means I can do it more consciously’.
Making an intuitive process conscious can, of course, inhibit it, at least in the short term, as it increases the potential for cognitive control, which is a danger for strongly intellectual Harriet: ‘I like having the theoretical underpinning, which gives me, well it gives me arguments I suppose, but it also allows me to justify myself that I am doing what's right. I feel it is a healthy thing to do’. However, there is an indication in her more relaxed sense of where she will go next with her writing that understanding the mechanism intellectually gives her greater confidence and trust in the writing process: ‘I haven't got definite plans, I've just got sort of feelings really, intuitions if you like, directions I want to go, so I'm just sort of pursuing things at the moment and hoping things will sort out’. Here conscious critical reflection does not seem to be inhibiting the writing process, rather it is again becoming assimilated into the less conscious context of her writing practice.
Whilst these examples show an awareness of distinct stages of bodily experiencing and conceptualising and their re-embodiment, Lucy who engages with the MA in a more intuitive way (see Chapter 2), becomes aware only of the consequences of embodying the dialogue: ‘one of the things that the theory and writing together has helped me with is knowing when things are OK and not OK for me and my identity, for my sense of who I am …’. Here the two sides of the process have become integrated into an intuitive, bodily way of knowing.5
Developing reflexivity through the learning process
Students' learning, then, could be described as becoming more aware of what their experience of writing or learning or being in relation feels like, through the experiential work of engaging in creative life writing, sharing it in the collaborative groups, and recording it in course diaries or learning journals, then reflecting critically on this experience for the end-of-course essays and papers with the aid of course readings, and then allowing the new knowledge to become embodied into intuitive writing, learning, or interpersonal processes. As the examples show, this happens more consciously for some than for others. Also whilst learning from bodily-felt experience and critical reflection might start off being separate and potentially in conflict in some instances, there is evidence that they are becoming assimilated into a dynamic process. This sounds very much like McGilchrist's ‘reciprocity’ between the brain's hemispheres.
As discussed in Chapter 6, the hemispheres give rise to two different ways of seeing the world: the right rendering a holistic, bodily, and largely unconscious engagement with the world, and the left a narrowly focused, fragmenting, analytic, and largely conscious engagement with what it receives from the right. For optimal functioning there needs to be constant collaboration between the two, for whilst the right hemisphere sees things whole, it cannot describe them; and whilst the left hemisphere can powerfully analyse parts of the whole, its analyses on their own are devoid of felt life and cannot generate personal meaning. For creative thinking to occur, there needs to be a fluid, recursive flow from the right hemisphere's embodied engagement with experience to the left hemisphere's unpacking of that experience, and then the re-embodying of it by the right hemisphere, which brings ‘a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole’ (McGilchrist, 2009: 176–206). This is precisely what we see happening in the above examples. The potential tension between the two modes, also visible in some of the examples, is intelligible in light of the intrinsic conflict between the hemispheres' different world views and their need to inhibit each other for optimal functioning (ibid.: 208). So for some people there is a need to practice the working together of the two modes consciously and with intent or, as I have called it, practising reflexivity.
This picture of reflexivity as involving a fluid, recursive flow between right hemisphere embodied-experiential learning and left hemisphere critical reflection finds considerable resonance in Yorks and Kasl's understanding of transformative change as taking place through ‘multiple ways of knowing’. Drawing on the work of Heron (1992), they identify four different ways of knowing: experiential (affective), presentational (imaginal or expressive), propositional (conceptual), and practical. Combining this ‘whole-person epistemology’ with insights from transformative learning, they construct a ‘pathway to knowing’ that moves from ‘tacit and subconscious forms of knowing’ to ‘expressive ways of knowing’, and only then to ‘critical reflection’ (Yorks and Kasl, 2006: 60–1), with interpersonal learning-within-relationship and intrapersonal whole-person learning taking place in parallel, as in Figure 10.1.
I find this a very helpful model, but in light of my bio-psychosocial conceptual framework I would suggest developing it as in Figure 10.2:
Level 1 – Pre-reflective Bodily Self-awareness – is Damasio's core consciousness with a sense of self. It is the ‘source of thoughts’ (Petitmengin, 2007) emerging out of the body's constant relationship with internal and external environments via bodily processes including, most significantly, the emotions, which provides a sense of ongoingness and a holistic sense of bodily agency. It is the primary level of engagement with reality as mediated by the body. Whilst Yorks and Kasl refer to ‘tacit and subconscious forms of knowing’, the centrality of this dimension of the whole is not sufficiently articulated in their model.
Level 2 – Embodied-experiential Learning – is reflective awareness of Level 1 at low level consciousness and with low level intentionality. It is right hemisphere knowing, in the form of moments of bodily-felt awareness emerging as bodily cognition (Johnson, 2007) and being ‘carried forward’ (Gendlin, 1991) into spoken or written words or aesthetic images. This may happen via individual or
Figure 10.2 Cycle of transformation.
group learning activities. I prefer the term ‘embodied-experiential knowing’ to Yorks and Kasl's ‘expressive knowing’, as the latter implies active expression of the emotions rather than the more organic emergence of ‘felt sense’ from pre-reflective bodily self-awareness, although this will often give rise to emotional expression. The threshold between Levels 1 and 2 can be thought of as the ‘liminal space’ (Green, 2012) or the ‘growing edge’ (Berger, 2004).
Level 3 – Critical Reflection – is left hemisphere attention to, and processing of, what emerges from Level 2. It takes place at the level of extended consciousness and with high intentionality. It involves critical reflection undertaken either individually or through group learning. Reflexivity emerges spontaneously when there is reciprocity between Levels 2 and 3, or between right and left hemispheres, i.e. when the autobiographical ‘I’ of the left hemisphere is flexible enough to retract and become part of the frame for the engagement with core consciousness. This often needs to be ‘practised’ consciously in order for reflexivity to become a more automatic and less conscious psychic process.
Level 4 – Agentic, Reflexive Core State – emerges out of the psychic stability and flexibility that is the consequence of reciprocity between levels 2 and 3. It involves an increased sense of agency and trust in bodily processes for learning and being and increased ability to think creatively and independently. The reflexive core state facilitates constant openness to memory and pre-reflective bodily self-awareness of the engagement with the world at Level 1, thus keeping the dynamic system of the psyche both grounded and open to change. This echoes Kegan's idea of the ‘self-transforming mind’ (Kegan, 2000). It is a picture of circular causality (Lewis, 2005), where negative feedback from individual and group learning activities keeps the system constantly in motion and open to change, as opposed to the positive feedback of vicious circles that reinforces stuckness (hyperreflexivity) (Chapter 7).
Applying the above schema to the work of the CWPD programme, I suggest that what I have called the semiotic creative writing exercises and the work of the experiential, collaborative groups, as well as the more embodied use of learning journals and diaries, connect Levels 1 and 2, bringing greater openness to, and awareness of, pre-reflective bodily self-awareness and carrying this new knowledge forward. The dialogic creative writing exercises connect Levels 2 and 3, as do the reflective essays and learning journals in their more intentional usage. All of these, however, are closer to Level 2 than 3, with the academic papers, seminars, and discussion groups closer to Level 3. Creative life writing can also be used nearer to Level 3 as an intentional reflective tool for exploring conceptual material or self-experience, as in the example of Claudia. The cycle is kept in motion by negative feedback, in the form of disorienting dilemmas provided by the creative life writing, the group work, and material from course readings, but the inherent structures in these curricular and pedagogical tools simultaneously provide a degree of ‘holding’, as do other more overarching elements in the learning environment, such as the relationship with tutors and the convener, and the sense of being part of a community of learners. As the arrows indicate, the cycle of transformation is by no means uni-directional. Indeed it is a much messier, less ordered process than might appear from the diagram. Jill's comment on it was that in her experience it was more like a spiral, ‘a DNA helix wrapping continuously around us, with us being at different stages of the model all at the same time’. This captures effectively what I was trying to convey.
Many of the problems for Group 2 students can be understood as a consequence of the stiffness or ‘stickiness’ between Levels 2 and 3 when Level 3 becomes the dominant, hyperreflexive (defensive) mode of cognition (see Chapter 7), which results in an imbalance between psychic freedom and control. The more reciprocal functioning between these levels and the shift towards Level 4 happens for students in different ways and at different stages of the programme, as we have seen, but for quite a few of those in Group 2 it only starts to become a more intuitive, spontaneous process in the two terms of Independent Study. Jill, for example, describes her more reflexive state as having ‘two senses of yourself. I don't find I'm analysing while I'm doing, but quite quickly now I can analyse afterwards, whereas I wouldn't have done that before’. This demonstrates her ability, as she says elsewhere, ‘to trust myself and my instincts’. In fact students' ability to trust the process of writing, which is a key theme in their reflections on their learning at the end of the two years, seems to be a key component of Level 4. This implies that they are much better able to tolerate the ‘not knowing’ intrinsic to the creative process between Levels 1 and 2, which means that reflexivity can function more intuitively. This development comes in part, as tutor Sarah suggests, from having to sustain a piece of critical-creative writing over two terms in Independent Study, that is, working intensively across Levels 1–3 in one piece of work, but the opening-up to a more bodily-felt learning process in previous terms has prepared the ground, as we see in Megan's reflections on the place of Independent Study in her learning:
I managed to look more in depth at myself and my writing, but in a much more subjective way. This term and the first term seemed to teach me the most. Or it may be that this last term has brought all the learning together in a more complete form?
That it is the first and last terms from which she has learned most provides a picture of the programme as starting with opening-up and finishing with consolidation. This mirrors the process of differentiation and integration intrinsic to the dynamic system of the psyche. That her learning feels ‘much more subjective’ implies that her sense of self in the learning process is now more tangible, so that the results of her analyses and conceptualising make sense to her in a more experiential, holistic way. The spontaneous emergence of holistic and reflexive images in the creative writing during this final stage, as evidenced in the case studies and visible in other students too, also supports this.
My aim in this chapter was to understand better the contribution to students' shift to a more reflexive self-experience of the different kinds of reflective work they engage in during their studies. What I have found is that, by virtue of its role in both experiential-embodied and critically reflective forms of learning, it is the only curricular tool to span Levels 1 to 3 in my model and could therefore be seen as a crucial connector between all the other elements in the transformative cycle. This suggests that it is a more ‘macroscopic’ than ‘underlying’ dimension of the learning environment (Bhaskar and Danermark, 2006), potentially ‘holding’ the whole learning process, whilst also, in its critical guise, keeping it open and alive (cf. Taylor, 2006). This is in line with some Group 2 students' view that it would have been beneficial to keep learning journals in all courses. It also supports Mezirow's view of the importance of reflection in transformative learning, although, as we have seen, it is not just reflection in its critical guise, and ultimately critical reflection is secondary to the experiential work.
Notes
1 This is an example of how the research creates another level of reflection (see Introduction).
2 Some Group 2 students found Course 2 rather overloaded with theory and, whilst they found it interesting and relevant, particularly later when they had had time to process it more thoroughly, many of them said that it was not possible to maintain their writing practice meaningfully during this course. A better balance between theory and practice would have improved this course.
3 Most MA students took the creative writing option in Independent Study. In the earlier Diploma all students undertook a research project, the creative writing option not then being available, although again some used the research project to reflect critically on their writing practice.
4 This echoes Margaret Archer's argument for the ‘primacy of practice’, by which she means the primacy of bodily engagement with the material environment out of which emerges the ‘sense of self’ with its ‘continuity of consciousness’ (Archer, 2000). As I said in Chapter 6, I see the bodily-felt sense of self as innate but developed through the relationship with the material environment and other people.
5 This links with Taylor's (2001) discussion of transformative learning taking place out of conscious awareness.