5. The Car, the Rain, and Meaningful Conversation

My introduction to social constructionism came early. I was born in Scotland and emigrated with my family to Australia when I was nine. Being transplanted in another country provided an early demonstration of how differently people perceived me and my culture—a beginning and, of course, unarticulated understanding of social construction. At school, for example, I was teased initially for being a “POM.” When I asked what this meant I was told “prisoner of mother England”; when I answered “I’m not English, I’m Scottish,” the teasing stopped immediately. For a nine-year-old this was primarily a relief, but it demonstrated to me that “problems are socially constructed . . . they can be defined in different ways” (Wood and Tully, 2006: 19), and therefore a variety of responses are possible. Stating that I was Scottish clearly meant for those teasing me that the issue of my “otherness” had shifted somehow, which changed their reactions and left me wondering what it all meant.

My social work training provided language for this experience, impressing upon me the importance of context, culture, structure, processes, and the need to ask how else might things be seen. This approach was reinforced by practice with a wide range of communities and issues, mainly in rural Victoria, and also in Bristol, United Kingdom. Much of my practice involved working with those on statutory orders: prisoners and ex-prisoners, young people on some kind of court order, families where children were considered to be at risk. For many of these individuals and families the social perception, often internalized by them, was that they were somehow lacking, or more judgmentally, disadvantaged, inadequate, or delinquent. Prison officers tended to label all prisoners as hopeless, for example; the police had a dismal view of the possibilities of people changing from “bad” to “good.” I was conscious that in building relationships with them, I saw that other social constructions were possible of abilities and resources, as well as of the structural issues that influenced their position. A more complex picture of the world and the place of individuals in it always emerged. Sometimes it was possible to work in a way that enabled people also to see that other perceptions were possible. Having a local football team come and play football with a group of prisoners, for example, changed some views, for football team members of prisoners and for some prisoners of themselves.

When, by chance, I started teaching social work in the mid- to late-1990s at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, I finally came to grips with reading about postmodernism and social constructionist informed practice and recognized this as further naming and illuminating what I thought social work practice was about. It also reinforced some of my previous practice understandings, the sense, for example, that there are many ways to look at anything. Parton and O’Byrne’s (2000) view that “Constructionism cautions us to be ever suspicious of our assumptions about how the world appears and the categories that we use to divide and interpret it” (25) fitted with my experience, as did their comments about the continuing and complex influence of history and culture. Clearly, there are many variations in writing about social constructionism with different emphases, although there is also general agreement that social constructionism affirms that each person is an active agent in creating their own world of meaning (Kondrat, 2002). I found this helpful but also noticed that there seemed to be tension in such writing between those who saw social constructionism as more focused on the micro-level and those articulating what I saw as a key link between social work advocating for a socially just society and the requirement to “encourage, facilitate and legitimate diverse knowledge traditions and forms of expression” (Witkin, 1999: 7). Related to this was the criticism of too extreme a position on postmodernism and social constructionism by those like Ife (1999), who argued that there needs to be some agreed principles in relation to social justice, for example, rather than accepting that everything can be seen as socially determined. Others expressed the concern that Bowers (2005) identifies that a social constructionist approach can foster thinking individually at the cost of a community perspective. Along with social workers and students, I continued to wrestle with exploring and grounding these ideas in social work practice.

This was furthered by working with Jan Fook at the Centre for Professional Development at Latrobe University for four years in the 2000s, running workshops using critical reflection for professionals, mainly in the health and social welfare fields. Critical reflection, as we used it, provided both the necessary background theory, as well as a process enabling workers and/or students to put these and related theories in practice through examining their taken-for-granted assumptions and values in the light of their social context. It was clear that critical reflection is particularly powerful in enabling workers to make links between the individual and society and in connecting changed awareness with changed action underpinned by a social justice perspective (Fook and Gardner, 2007). Critical reflection enabled me to put the ideas of social construction into practice, to unearth the different meanings, assumptions, and values that could be implicit in a practice experience. Critical reflection was also explicit about the need to work from a social justice perspective—while acknowledging that what this might mean would need to be determined in any particular context.

In my current role, I coordinate a social work course at a rural campus of LaTrobe University which has a large urban campus and four rural campuses. I am based in a large provincial city, and continue to run workshops for professionals using critical reflection, both here and elsewhere, and run ongoing supervision groups and also use critical reflection in teaching. Living and working in a rural environment in itself prompts a social constructionist understanding, given that there is a constant interaction between what are perceived as more rural and urban issues and perspectives. My teaching has been primarily in the areas of community work, working with social diversity, and working with individuals, families, and groups. This combination in itself often confronts expectations: the combination of working with individuals as well as communities is a constant reminder to me and to students that it is important to view the world through more than one lens. The subject “social work and social diversity” is also an opportunity for exploring a social constructionist view of the world. In all of these subjects, I encourage students to reflect critically, to endeavor, as much as possible, to move from their own shoes to see the world and the experience of others from different perspectives. Some students engage enthusiastically with this and are also able to imagine how others might perceive them in a variety of ways. Others struggle with it, particularly in naming how the social constructions that other people have might affect how they themselves are perceived—that a Muslim man might not see them as trustworthy, for example, simply because of their gender and culture or that an older woman might feel judged by the assumptions and values of a younger worker. One of the approaches that has been useful in enabling students to practice social constructionism is reflexivity.

Reflexivity is one of the underlying theoretical approaches in critical reflection and provides a tool that enhances understanding of how we both construct our own social understandings and are impacted by the social understandings of others. Iversen, Gergen, and Fairbanks (2005) suggest that a “constructionist critique calls upon us to recognize that we live in conflicting communities of the real and the good, and if we are to go on together, reflexive dialogue is essential” (697). This chapter uses a specific practice experience—a meaningful conversation in the rain—to explore the use of reflexivity in social work. In deconstructing and reconstructing this experience, I am using both the theory and process of critical reflection. This approach to critical reflection is underpinned by several theoretical approaches and conceptual frameworks: reflexivity, as well as postmodernism, reflective practice, and critical social theory. The process involves unearthing implicit assumptions and values in a way that encourages understanding of the connection between the individual’s experience and the social context and is expected to lead to change (Fook and Gardner, 2007). It provides a means to link the social constructionist understanding of individual and social experience with the ability to act as a practitioner.

This particular example illustrates how we make assumptions in our perceptions of individuals and communities and also about how we are perceived. Using reflexivity as a tool can sharpen a social constructionist approach by furthering the articulation of such assumptions, unearthing their personal, professional, and social influences. Parton (2007) suggests that reflexivity is at the core of social constructionism, validating focus on feelings and how these connect to judgments we make. Reflexivity is used in both research and practice as a way of exploring the connection between individuals’ perceptions of themselves and the influence of their social context (Freshwater, 2002). As White (2006) suggests, reflexivity, like social construction, invites social workers to see the world from many perspectives, rather than one dominant narrative, and to be conscious of how language can be used to limit or extend possibilities. For this practice example, reflexivity as a tool was particularly useful in deconstructing differences in perceptions and in reconstructing them to perceive differently.¹

How critical reflection is understood and articulated varies considerably (White, Fook, and Gardner, 2006), with some writers and practitioners talking about reflective practice, critical thinking, or critical reflection as the same and others seeing these as different. I use a definition related to workshops run by Jan Fook and me, in which critical reflection is defined as both a theory and a process involving “the unsettling and examination of fundamental (socially dominant, and often hidden) individually held assumptions about the social world, in order to enable a reworking of these, and associated actions, for changed professional practice” (Fook and Gardner, 2007: 21). These workshops, with participants primarily from health and social care fields, began with the facilitator presenting the underlying theory of critical reflection, then modeling the process using an incident from her own experience including identifying the background or context of the incident, the specific incident, and some beginning thoughts about why it was significant. This modeling process is important partly to indicate how the critical reflection can work, and also to demonstrate that the facilitator is also prepared to be open to the process.

Each participant was then asked to share an experience or incident, generally from their own practice. “Critical” or significant incidents are often used in critical reflection training, both for students and workers in social work and other disciplines (Francis, 1997; Fook and Gardner, 2007). In the process used at the Centre, participants are asked to bring an experience that they see as significant to them, not critical in the sense of traumatic, but rather an experience that they would like to learn from. Overall the aim of working with this incident is to ensure and promote effective practice with workers feeling a greater sense of agency, that is, the ability to act in ways that are congruent with their preferred values and assumptions. The process involves two stages. Stage one involves deconstructing the incident, seeking to understand their own and others’ feelings, thoughts, underlying assumptions and values, and the influence of social context. Generally, this includes understanding that there are more ways that this incident can be perceived: that, in a sense, the person with the incident had a particular social construction of what happened and how that was perceived, but there are other ways of perceiving this. Sometimes the group will brainstorm possibilities to free the person from one set of perceptions. The second stage engages with the new understanding, including possible new assumptions and/or affirmed past assumptions and exploring what this might mean for changed practice.

The underlying theory of critical reflection provides important prompts in exploring an incident. As well as reflexivity, the theory underlying or influencing critical reflection includes reflective practice, postmodernism, and critical social theory. These are not completely independent, but each has a particular contribution to a critically reflective approach. Briefly, reflective practice encourages awareness of the practitioner’s own theory base: the ideas they have generated about their practice, the assumptions made about what works and what doesn’t. Compared to critical reflection, there is not necessarily a focus on the influence of the social context related to critical social theory. A reflective practitioner also seeks to understand where their “espoused theory” is not congruent with their “theory in practice,” that is, what they say or think they believe is not the same as how they act (Schon, 1983). Postmodern thinking prompts awareness of dichotomous thinking, that is, seeing the world in pairs of opposites: worker/client, able/not able, white/non-white. This type of thinking creates an artificial and simplistic division that implies that one is better than the other, and fosters seeing a particular person as part of a group that is “other” than the worker (Fook, 2002). Connected to this is the understanding of how social constructs are created: the need to see that each person has a multiplicity of roles and perspectives, is complex rather than one-dimensional, and that any situation can be seen in a variety of ways. Rolfe, Freshwater, and Jasper (2001) call this “reflective skepticism” which “protects us from accepting ‘universal truths’ or that there is only ever one explanation for an event or one way of looking at it” (73). Social constructionists (and postmodernists) would be more likely to talk about the influence of dominant discourses: the main ways of thinking in the mainstream culture.

These ways of thinking also connect to the use of critical social theory, which often (though not always) differentiates between what writers mean by reflective practice and critical reflection: Critical reflection includes the centrality of understanding how social structures influence people’s lives, partly through them “taking on board” or internalizing the norms of the society they live in (Allan, Pease, and Briskman, 2003). A man who is laid-off at 50, for example, may internalize the view expressed in his society that middle-aged men are no longer useful. Some current social constructionist writing articulates a similar view, suggesting the worker’s role is “to help the client deconstruct oppressive cultural discourses and reinterpret experience from alternative perspectives” (Wood and Tully, 2006: 44). Critical social theory also advocates a social justice approach (Brookfield, 2005), which may not be as clear in some definitions of social constructionism (White, 2008), though others make this connection clear in talking about critical social constructionism (Roche, 2007); for example, the expectation that common principles relating to social justice and human rights should underlie practice and guide decision making about abusive behavior.

In this chapter, I explore my experience of using reflexivity to deconstruct a practice experience with a small group at a Transforming Social Work Conference.² I am partly doing this as an example of how I practice with reflexivity, which encourages awareness of the influence of personal experience within particular relationships and how this might influence perceptions of self and others (Taylor and White, 2000). Social work practitioners, like researchers, “do not simply observe in a neutral fashion. . . they construct versions of cases, and, in this sense, make knowledge about patients and service users” (Taylor, 2006: 75). Understanding reflexivity means that we can’t say that we separate out the personal and professional, but rather that we understand how our personal selves affect us as professionals. While there are varying definitions of reflexivity, Freshwater (2002) suggests “one cannot avoid the fact that it essentially involves the subjective self, and the ability of the self to turn back on itself” (229) which Johns (2002) talks about as the “reflexive spiral of being and becoming” (51). It is important to see that reflexivity is “the ability to recognize that all aspects of ourselves and our contexts influence the way we research (or create knowledge)” (Fook and Gardner, 2007: 31). We can think about our ideas or awareness about what is happening being influenced by what is embodied or physical, social, emotional, and intellectual, and by our reactions. These will be explored in relation to the following incident.

I was working as a social worker in the regional office of a large government department with responsibility for family, youth, and children’s services. While the language of the time was different, this included responsibility for “child protection,” working with families where children were perceived to be at risk. The town in which the regional office was based had a significant indigenous Aboriginal population with their own Cooperative Health Service. The department managed two indigenous family group homes, employed an indigenous welfare officer, and had formed a “welfare committee” to act as a forum for liaison and service development with the indigenous community. When I started work with the department, the previous liaison person had left and the committee hadn’t met for months. The indigenous community requested that a new liaison worker be appointed and the committee started up again. I volunteered, based on a commitment to working with what was clearly the least privileged group in town and valuing the place of the indigenous community. However, it seemed that the committee’s initial interest soon died—people were inconsistent about coming to meetings and seemed to be reluctant to agree to “do” anything.

I had gone to a committee meeting on a rainy afternoon. We were to meet at a different place from usual, and when I got there, the building was locked and there was no one around. I went back to my car, and for some reason, decided just to wait. After a while, a woman from the indigenous community (who I will call Felicity), who was part of the group, arrived. We checked again on the building, and still no one was there. Since it was still raining, drizzling gently, she suggested that we wait in my car and see what happened. As we sat, Felicity told me the story of her family.³ Her mother, Rose, was one of the “Stolen Generation,”⁴ taken from her family who lived in an isolated rural community, when she was eight, initially to be educated in an orphanage, then later sent to Sydney, a major city, to work as a maid. Her family didn’t know where she had been taken and weren’t able to find out. Rose had little money and didn’t try to find her family for many years partly from a feeling of shame about what had happened. She married at eighteen to a non-indigenous man with whom she had two children. He was abusive to her and she left him, taking the children, when she was twenty-three. She was thirty when she reconnected with her family. By then, her own mother, Felicity’s grandmother, had died, from Felicity’s perspective, at least partly from grief. The impact of both the separation from her family and the death of her mother continued to affect Felicity’s mother and so the family. Her mother had periods of severe depression, although being reunited with her family had been and continued to be a healing experience.

I felt profoundly moved and humbled by the story and by Felicity’s openness in sharing it with me. Although she was calm, she too was obviously moved by the retelling of her story. We both ended up with tears in our eyes.

The critical reflection process encourages the person with the incident to explore the significance of what it means for them. What are the feelings, the emotions, and what is influencing them? What are the underlying assumptions and values expressed here? Where were Felicity and I each coming from? What brought about this experience? What was the influence of our social context for each of us? And what did I learn from it? What would I want to change in my practice as a result?

Reflexivity is central to understanding the dynamic between Felicity and I and in understanding how my perceptions of myself and the indigenous community were blocking our working together. Reflexivity encourages awareness of how persons perceive themselves, as well as how they perceive others. In this example, I had initially perceived myself as an aware and enthusiastic worker—a social worker with understanding of indigenous issues and the conflicts, partly related to the history of colonization in Australia, that existed between indigenous and non-indigenous cultures. As an immigrant, I had experienced what it felt like to be considered “other”—such as the example used at the beginning of this chapter. As an adolescent, I observed the way that overseas students were seen in my school and how easy it was to be labeled different in a way that made it very hard to move beyond certain expectations. I had worked in a different community in Victoria with indigenous families and experienced some of the damage of indigenous children being placed with non-indigenous foster families and being adopted by non-indigenous families. I thought my energy and passion for this work would be an advantage. My perception was that the indigenous community would be interested in working with the department—partly because they had requested the committee start again—and my related assumption was that we would be able to “get on with things” quickly.

The next step in reflexivity is to be conscious of how you may be being perceived and how different this may be from your perceptions of yourself. This requires moving out of your own shoes into the shoes of the other and a willingness to look at yourself through another’s eyes—as much as you are able. It is important to recognize that how you look, what you physically embody to others, can be significant. Doing this in retrospect, it was immediately clear that I epitomized a number of challenges in terms of acceptance by the community. For a start, I was relatively young—early thirties, female, clearly white, also social work–trained and so of the profession and from the department currently and historically responsible for removing children. I was the embodiment of “the people who take your kids away” both physically and socially.

Initially I distanced myself emotionally from these connections. As a social worker, I hadn’t ever removed indigenous children except when requested by their families. I didn’t identify myself with the white patriarchal and racist attitudes of the Stolen Generations. What Felicity’s telling of her story did, though, was to enable me to see that in the eyes of the indigenous community, I am connected and that they are right to make that connection. Felicity told this story in a calm, matter-of-fact way; she didn’t, it seemed, have an agenda of engendering guilt. Nevertheless, I felt ashamed; I understood from her story that I needed to make both connections and comparisons. I needed to come to grips with the connection between my current work for the department and my privileged and more powerful existence in Australian society, which continued to have, in many ways, the attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for the Stolen Generations to happen. I also needed to compare the possibilities for a white person in Australia with those of indigenous people both in the past and the present—that is, to recognize how the system continues to perpetuate the inequities and injustices of the past.

Understanding the interactional aspects of reflexivity would have helped me understand that our perceptions are inevitably influenced by history, as well as the current social context. Felicity’s knowledge of the Stolen Generations and the history and social values that allowed that to happen were critical factors in her attitude toward me. I needed to recognize that “knowledge is also interactional—it is shaped by historical and structural contexts, and is made in a dynamic and political process. In this sense, what counts as knowledge is not a purely objective phenomenon, but is a result of a number of factors. It is normally forged through the broader social processes at play” (Fook and Gardner, 2007, 30). In a sense, what Felicity may have been doing was assessing how much I had internalized the prevailing social attitudes and how open I was to different perspectives.

Reflexivity prompts looking again at perceptions in the light of new perspectives or understandings. My perceptions were shifted by the conversation: I experienced Felicity’s telling of her story as new knowledge that changed my awareness. Another way of putting this would be to say that my subjective understanding shifted from my previous cultural and personal history to taking on board a new experience; I perceived both Felicity and myself differently. This reinforces the social constructionist view that we can’t understand a person in the abstract, but need to learn from the person’s own perspective (Johnson and Munch, 2009). A social situation is best understood by eliciting the unique experiences of the people who are in that situation. Given the interactive nature of subjectivity, the Transforming Social Work group asked: What might Felicity’s sense have been of this conversation? What did she hope for? Or did she have an intuitive sense of timing?⁵

Reflective practice prompts asking what your own particular assumptions are, as well as exploring what the assumptions of others might be. Others will have their own reactions and assumptions that provide another window of reflexivity. For example, in discussing this incident in the group, participants interpreted the car and its potential symbolism very differently, one seeing it as becoming a “sacred space” and another as a symbol of power. From a postmodern point of view, both are possible. From my perspective, the car did become like a sacred space—a place for telling a story that was both personal and emblematic of cultural experience. The feeling of it being profound was that I felt connected at a deep level to an excruciating part of Felicity’s own as well as her family’s and her community’s experience. Making such deep connections is part of what both Felicity and I would have called a spiritual experience, a sense of relatedness at a level beyond the usual, and a transcendence of our individual selves to connection across boundaries.

The loss of children would be painful in any culture, but this kind of loss was also significant at other levels. What was made explicit was that indigenous culture was not acceptable, that children would be “better” if they were educated in different ways. The strength of this message and its implications are hard to leave behind, especially when implicit and explicit in Australian culture. At this time, too, in the 1980s, the implications were more consequential than currently, implicit in the policy and procedures of the department. The understanding of what is meant by family, for example, continued to be narrowly defined and to miss the different meaning for indigenous communities.

Again this connects to another aspect of reflexivity: “understanding that the knowledge or information we obtain or take in about a particular situation is at least partly determined by the kinds of tools and process we use to determine it” (Fook and Gardner, 2007, 29). Part of what I needed to recognize was that my perception of what was happening was influenced by what I and my department saw as legitimate knowledge. It wasn’t possible, for example, to understand a different view of family because the language of family and the processes, questions, and tools of assessment all assumed a particular definition. This could also be extended to how progress was seen in working with the community. What was defined socially in the department and the broader community as success would be something like working on defined goals with clear outcomes: meetings held, minutes, activities. There was no room for seeing progress as improved relationships or understandings. I also needed to see that my behavior—my desire for meetings that worked according to a more conventional model—was also influenced by social and organizational expectations and didn’t fit with indigenous culture. Once I became clear about this, I let go of such expectations relatively easily and simply prepared to work in ways that suited this particular community culture.

Working with reflexivity also means acknowledging the place of emotion and emotional reactions. I was clearly moved by Felicity’s story, and my emotional reaction was important to her. My reaction to her story—the emotional impact of it being clear in my tears, as well as my expression, my responses, maybe simply my willingness to listen and to “be” with her, also changed her perception. It seemed that I became more worthy of trust and gained legitimacy because I was moved; I took her story on board and was impacted by it. It is impossible to know, of course, how much this was influenced by the circumstances; if we hadn’t met in this way, would Felicity have created another way for this to happen? Was there some change in attitude in me implicit in my willingness just to wait, rather than saying if no one is coming, I’d better return to work?

An important connection in critical reflection is between reflexivity and critical social theory. This connection is an important part of the learning and movement from understanding to changed attitudes and actions. Recognizing the shame involved for me in the incident could have been disabling, although that was not, I believe, Felicity’s intention. However, the critical in critical reflection prompts making links to a broader social understanding. It also encourages movement from insight to action—stage two of the critical reflection process. In this example, Felicity’s perception of me may have already been changing; perhaps that is why she was prepared to tell her story. What then were the implications for change? Clearly nothing had changed at an intellectual level—I didn’t have new knowledge. Subjectively, a significant change occurred: I understood the experience of the Aboriginal community differently, from a cognitive level, but more importantly from a deeper and more emotional level. This, in turn, led to a new way of working, based on deeper respect for the community’s culture and approach to change. This meant more willingness to sit with people, simply to be rather than do, to wait until relationships were established in a way that meant it was possible to start to act on agreed projects. Significantly, once we had established a relationship of mutual understanding, change beyond what I had imagined was achieved.

First, it suggests that we need to recognize that how we perceive ourselves as workers is not necessarily how others perceive us. We may embody a series of assumptions for others by the way we look or through the organization we represent. This is not necessarily something we can or should do anything about; what is important is to recognize what that means about the work needing to be done to understand the resulting reactions. I couldn’t do anything about how I looked; I was there because I was a social worker working for the department. But I could have better imagined what these might represent for others and accepted that it was going to take time to be seen as more of a whole person. I could also have made explicit this tension, which might also have shifted perceptions and changed the subjective interactions between us—though this might have had the risk of being too confronting. This is often a challenge for workers: How do we move beyond what our organization or profession is seen to represent? Being aware of this at least means that as a worker you are prepared to allow time for a more positive relationship to develop, less likely to react to a negative projection.

Second, and perhaps more difficult to accept, is that the other person may be right that we represent a particular perspective more than we have been able to acknowledge. We need to be aware of the assumptions we are making in our perceptions of others, to understand the extent of our own “conditioning” or internalizing of social norms and values, and to be constantly watchful in order to have some degree of confidence that we don’t continue to express them unwittingly. In using reflexivity, we are reminded to acknowledge the influence of history, as well as culture, in forming our assumptions and values about how things are and “should be.” This applied to me not only in thinking about the influence of history but also in wanting to impose my usual “doing” style on the community. It can also apply to how much we have absorbed the norms or expectations of the organization. New staff often usefully shock those who have come to take much of the organization’s ways for granted by questioning “how things are done around here.”

Third, we need to give ourselves over to the experience of the other as much as we are able to. This means being able to loosen the assumptions and values, our own history, so that we can as much as possible see through another lens. We also need to recognize the assumptions we are making individually and collectively and how these may or may not be relevant. For example, in the group, I was asked about whose car we sat in, the assumption being that if it was my car, I would have more power and if it was Felicity’s she would have more power. In fact she suggested we get into my car, so in a sense she had the power of suggesting what we did, rather than whose car being the determinant of greater power.

Fourth, we need to acknowledge the complexities of power. In many ways, I was perceived as being more powerful in this situation. I was from the agency that had power over the community in terms of control over relevant resources and decisions that impacted the lives of many in the community. I also had the implicit power of being white and so part of the dominating culture, and of being a professional seeking to work in what was seen by my organization as a professional way. However, clearly the community could also exert power by simply not being prepared to “work with me.” Exploring reflexively encouraged me to think about how power was operating in this situation and how to seek to relinquish power in seeking ways to work together, such as by waiting to hear the community’s alternative ideas about how things could be done and by working from their priorities rather than mine.

Finally, reflexivity prompts recognizing the place of emotion. Accepting the feeling of shame meant recognizing how the current community and the department I worked for perpetuated the experience of the Stolen Generations. This created a preparedness to listen to the experience and wisdom of the indigenous community and over time see that their way had much more to offer, to be learned from—for ways of working with not only the indigenous community but also the non-indigenous community.

One of the key implications of using reflexivity for me is the value of actively learning from experience and applying this learning to practice. In this example, the learning is from three angles: my learning about my own social constructs, my perspectives, and reactions about my own experience; learning from Felicity and her family’s experience, their different constructs and perceptions; and learning from the experience in the car. My practice of critical reflection for myself and with other people has suggested that using a particular experience for learning is powerful. Writers who explore learning from experience and using reflection for practice vary in advocating learning from your own experience compared to learning from other people’s experience.

Part of what worked for me here was being able to explore an experience in depth, rather than looking at experience in general. For example, I could have raised here the difficulties of engaging with the indigenous community, which would probably have led to a wider discussion and most likely a theoretical discussion about such issues in general. Because I raised this scenario as a particular example of a general issue, it was possible to explore it in greater depth, seeking to understand the specific assumptions and values underlying what was happening. We could look at the specific social constructions that each person in the incident had projected onto the others. Connected to this, and again part of learning from experience, is the emotional content of the example. I chose it or it had come to mind because it had left me feeling moved and humbled and also puzzled about why this had felt like such a pivotal moment. Ideally, I would move to a position where “To be reflexive is to have an ongoing conversation about experience while simultaneously living in the moment” (Hertz, 1997: viii).

The value of practicing critical reflection in a group is also illustrated here. In this example, the group I presented to was able to take me to a new level of understanding through their questions and responses. They asked reflective and reflexive questions, helped identify feelings, thoughts, and perceptions, helped deconstruct and reconstruct, and made links to the social context. It can be hard to do this on your own given that our assumptions and perceptions can be so deeply submerged. Bolton (2001) advocates the use of “a critical group (or co-mentor) to encourage the searching out of material (professional, political, and social texts) from as wide a sphere as possible” (55). However, the group demonstrated the complexity of the participants’ own perceptions—the need for all group members to be aware of their own assumptions and constructs. When I talked about being in the car with Felicity, others had strong responses of their own: one expected that I would feel “trapped,” another that the car would be a “contemplative space with cleansing rain.” The latter was closer to my sense of it as a safe, open space. While both were helpful to react to, this demonstrated the complexity of working in a group and managing everyone’s reflexivity.

Using reflexivity also highlighted where my assumptions about practice were inappropriate. Clearly at an interpersonal and group level, my behavior needed to change. I needed to recognize the importance of being with as well as doing with, allowing things to happen at the community’s pace, and a more contemplative way of working and of valuing silence. As Parton and O’Byrne (2000) write from a constructionist perspective: “Relational reflexivity leads to joining with people in creating the service they want, and worker and user having a joint say in how their relationship is going or needs to go” (77). It was also important for me to see that the assumptions I and the department had about families and family life were culturally determined and didn’t fit the indigenous community’s experience. Over time, this recognition contributed to changed policy about services both for the indigenous community and non-indigenous families. The indigenous community’s valuing of broader family networks rather than a narrow nuclear family definition, for example, contributed to better family practice in general.

Much of my current practice is teaching social work students. This experience reinforces the value of working from what they know, their own experiences, concerns, and questions in small group work. Other writers have also encouraged students to practice reflexivity using their own experience in journaling or other forms of writing (Bolton, 2001; Le Gallais, 2008). Teaching also indicates the value for students and professionals of hearing from other people’s experience. Some writers would suggest, for example, that for students, it might be more appropriate to start with hearing about and reacting to others’ experiences (Lehmann, 2006). Rather than perpetuating a dichotomy here, it is more realistic to think that both can work. So what seem to be the important elements?

Clearly in this example, I was already connected to the issue of working with the indigenous community; I was motivated and interested in wanting to understand what was happening in this particular example. Students may not be as connected to a particular issue, but are generally motivated to understand when they can see a connection to their future practice. Experiences in the classroom then need to be explicitly related either to the students’ own interests or to their future practice, or ideally both. This could apply to learning the process of reflecting or understanding a specific issue, such as the perspective of a client or consumer. This fits with my experience of using critical reflection to encourage students to explore issues of social diversity. Students were asked to share an incident that illustrated an example of discomfort with an aspect of social difference, then to work with this incident first to understand more deeply where they were coming from and then to explore implications for practice, including the development of principles and processes in working constructively with this social difference. Initially, students found it hard to see how exploring a probably embarrassing issue of their own would help with practice. However, once I had modeled the process and the connections became explicit, they became more enthusiastic about the task.

Academic teaching is often seen as purely an intellectual exercise and one that is about objective knowledge. A reflexive approach generates a different attitude to knowledge: more as “an experience,” rather than something “once and for all acquired and possessed” (Forbes, 2008: 449). My experience here demonstrates how practitioners constantly face opportunities for new knowledge. This reinforces the need for reflexivity to be part of ongoing learning in practice in a way that involves the whole person—the emotions or feelings, as well as the mind, the capacity to see the implications of the social and the physical. Training social work practitioners clearly needs to involve recognizing feelings and personal reactions and their impact on the practitioner, as well as the client, community, colleagues, and organizations. Thinking reflexively also generates ideas about how the physical environment will impact learning. Teaching environments are often not ideal for encouraging sharing at depth, the usual rows of desks reinforce the authority of the teacher and academic knowledge. While it is important not to be put off by an environment that can’t be changed, it is also important to be proactive about seeking spaces conducive to this kind of learning.

Using this incident has demonstrated the value of being aware of our own assumptions, our perceptions of ourselves and others: we must have the capacity to consider the complexity of the part we play in our reactions with others. The interaction with Felicity shows the power of engaging with deeper levels of understanding how we have been and continue to be shaped by our own experiences and constructions and the social context in which we live. The incident also demonstrates the potential value for the practice of working reflexively, enabling the creation of new and more meaningful knowledge of self and others with the recognition that such knowledge will continue to evolve.

I have partly chosen to use this incident because it illustrates a particular way of working with a social constructionist approach: a way of identifying both where I am coming from and what the differing perspectives of the others involved might be where prevailing cultural values are clearly influential. This is very typical of much of my current work and provides a way of reflecting on practice within a critical framework. The particular incident highlights the need for a critically informed approach to social constructionism: the ability to name the social context and what meaning that has for those involved. A critical perspective is also vital for highlighting where there are issues of power and implications for social justice. Without a critical approach, the danger in this example is that I might continue to perpetuate the injustices already experienced by Felicity and her family, seeing our perceptions of each other as only individual rather than reflecting the influence of broader social issues, collective history, and culture. Bowers’ (2005) views about the validity of cultural knowledge and history are relevant here: the need to acknowledge that there is a shared understanding of history and of cultural knowledge, as well as individual socially constructed perspectives. The indigenous community’s knowledge of the importance of what in Western culture would be called extended family is vital here, as well as understanding that those who are indigenous would vary in how they felt and what they thought about this knowledge and how they wanted to use it. Holding these different perspectives together in a creative tension is more useful than a more modernist approach of valuing one or the other.

The incident also illustrates both the value and the challenge of using a social constructionist perspective in managing the complexities of working in organizations. Workers need to understand that each person in the organization will have their own understanding or sense of meaning of a particular situation. Clearly, how I was perceived outside the organization was influenced by how the department I worked for was viewed. Within the department, I also had to contend with the differing social perceptions of the indigenous community, from almost exclusively non-indigenous staff, often with limited understanding of indigenous issues. Having a social constructionist understanding can encourage naming of these different perceptions in a way that enables different kinds of discussions: simply acknowledging, for example, that there are many points of view. In this particular incident, naming such differences, including cultural differences, led, over time, to changes in perception and to changes in policies and programs. The Department recognized that it had a very narrow Western view of how to define families and that the indigenous community had a significantly different view. This had clear connections to policy: If the extended family was the “real” family as opposed to the Western nuclear family, children could well move from family member to family member without this being experienced as disruption in the way it might be defined in Western culture.

Changing such views took time and education: This meant valuing the cultural knowledge and history of the indigenous community and their ability to communicate, and teaching it to departmental workers. A critically informed social constructionist view encouraged me to maintain an attitude that it was important to persevere.

One of the challenges of coming from a perspective that says there are many points of view is that this is not necessarily valued by organizations experiencing pressure to be outcome focused or “evidence-based” according to narrow funding guidelines. However, there does seem to be increasing interest in other ways of thinking that are congruent with social constructionism such as the idea of the learning organization or organizational learning, essentially the view that “learning incorporates the broad dynamics of adaptation, change and environmental alignment of organizations, takes place across multiple levels within an organization, and involves the construction and reconstruction of meaning and world views within the organization” (Gould, 2004: 1). Such an approach, which is also aligned with reflective practice or critical reflection, allows for different ways of perceiving organizational life and life outside the organization.

The use of critical reflection in supervision is a means of fostering such organizational learning. Much of my current practice of working with organizations is in running monthly supervision groups and in training those in health and welfare organizations to use critical reflection in their practice and supervision. One of the current tensions for many workers, reflecting the expectations for their organizations, is the pressure to work in a more task-oriented, outcome-focused way (Gardner, 2006). Supervision in such settings can also be very task focused, with individual workers having little emotional support or opportunity to explore the complexity of their experience. This can, in turn, lead to a sense of disillusionment and low rates of retention in such agencies as child protection (Gibbs, 2002). Fostering the use of critical reflection in supervision enables workers to have a safe space within which to explore and identify the social constructions they and their clients may be making: to look reflexively and critically at their and others’ assumptions and values. Workers are able to do the kind of work demonstrated in my incident above, which enables them to both work more effectively with their clients and also to work strategically within their organization to seek change. Although such work can be challenging in one sense—it’s easier to think there is a solution that will fit all—ultimately working in a way that reflects fundamental values is more rewarding for workers.

My experience suggests that the processes of critically reflecting can help social workers identify social constructions in a way that also recognizes their implicit values and the influence of social context. Practice is never value free, and critically informed social constructionism encourages recognition and naming of what is implicit in the prevailing culture that can perpetuate injustice for individuals and communities, as well as affirming the importance of working in a socially just way. What that means in a particular context will vary, and as the incident used here demonstrates, requires those involved to be prepared to unearth assumptions, values, and perspectives in a way that means new, socially just possibilities emerge.

1. What I mean by deconstruction here is looking for the underlying meaning in both what I and others say and what we would do. Often, of course, there are many meanings, many ways of constructing what is happening at emotional, physical, and social levels. The language used also needs to be examined carefully: Do we mean the same things in the words and phrases we use and the ways we use them. Deconstruction is also used here as the first stage of exploring a particular experience: seeking to understand at deeper levels the constructs, assumptions, and meanings of what is happening. Once this is understood, it is possible to move to a second stage of reconstructing: exploring how the same incident can be perceived differently—and how understanding the incident more deeply might mean that future perceptions of similar experiences would be differently constructed.

2. I am conscious that in writing about this experience I have benefitted from exploring it as part of a critically reflective process. I had previously used this example in some critical reflection workshops, particularly those focusing on social difference. This experience emerged again at a Transforming Social Work Conference conducted by the Global Partnership for Transformative Social Work (www.gptsw.net) in a group exploring reflexivity in critical reflection. The group decided to use the example to experience a critical reflection process in action. I will concentrate on the findings from this experience and would like to acknowledge the group’s contribution.

The forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families was official government policy from 1909 to 1969. However, the practice took place both before and after this period. Governments, churches, and welfare bodies all took part. The removal policy was managed by the Aborigines Protection Board (APB). The APB was a government board established in 1909 with the power to remove children without parental consent and without a court order.

Under the White Australia and assimilation policies, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were “not of full blood” were encouraged to become assimilated into the broader society so that eventually there would be no more indigenous people left. At the time indigenous people were seen as an inferior race. Children were taken from Aboriginal parents so they could be brought up “white” and taught to reject their Aboriginality.

The lack of understanding and respect for Aboriginal people also meant that many people who supported child removal believed that they were doing the “right thing.” Some people believed that Aboriginal people lived poor and unrewarding lives, and that institutions would provide a positive environment in which Aboriginal people could better themselves. The dominant racist views in the society and government also meant that people believed that Aboriginal people were bad parents and that Aboriginal woman did not look after their children.

No one knows how many children were taken, as most records have been lost or destroyed. Many parents whose children were taken never saw them again, and siblings who were taken were deliberately separated from each other. Today many Aboriginal people still do not know who their relatives are or have been unable to track them down. The generations of children who were taken from their families became known as the Stolen Generations. The practice of removing children continued up until the late 1960s meaning today there are Aboriginal people as young as their late thirties and forties who are members of the Stolen Generations.