When Reflection is Not Enough: Disrupting Reflection and Moving towards More Socially Just Practice

Overview: This presentation demonstrates the limitations of reflection in developing a socially just clinical social work practice. In our simulation-based study, thirty-six participants engaged in two 30-minute simulations each followed by 45-minute reflective dialogues. Findings support the need to augment individual reflection and move towards active observation in conversation with others.Proposal text:

Background: Our team conducted a simulated-based research (SBR) study to explore clinical social workers’ encounters with uncertainty and the strategies they used to navigate it. Participants engaged in 1.5 hours of reflective dialogue with a researcher, including observing elements of their video-recorded simulation. What became apparent to the researchers and participants was that participant reflections of their clinical practice were sometimes misaligned with the practice that was being observed. Given that reflection is a core concept in social work education (Blakemore et al., 2018; Ferguson, 2018) and that critical reflection is proposed as a key strategy to reduce the harms of inequality and to secure social justice (Fook, 2015; Watts, 2019), we approached our data sets with two questions: 1)What are the limitations of reflective practice to support clinical practice, in particular, to build a more just approach to clinical practice? And 2) What pedagogical strategies can we use to help students deploy reflective and critical reflective strategies with more caution and understanding of their potential and limits?

Methods: Guided by a social constructivist epistemology (Witkin, 2012), we utilized SBR methodology (Asakura et al., 2021). Participants engaged in two, 30-minute online simulations. One with a 33-year-old immigrant mother struggling to keep up with daily responsibilities while navigating many COVID-related school interruptions. The other with a 21-year-old Black student struggling with stress related to the pandemic, and the pressures of balancing university, relationships, and his part-time job.

Following each simulation, participants (n= 36) engaged in a 45-minute reflective dialogue with a member of the research team. Three participant groups were included: current MSW students (n = 12), recent graduates (n = 12), and experienced practitioners (n = 12). Data were collected between October 2021- February 2022.

Data were inductively analyzed using grounded theory coding methods (Charmaz et al., 2021). This analysis included a three-pronged process that allowed the researchers to do a close review, and initial and focused coding of each layer of the data including the (1) video-recorded simulations, (2) audio-recorded semi-structured reflective dialogues, and (3) a re-contextualizing of the two data sets together.

Results and

Conclusion: Our findings confirm that reflection, while valuable in giving practitioners an opportunity to think through the various external and internal relations that shape client interactions, also has some limitations in clinical learning. The data demonstrates that practitioners’ memories of client interactions can be distorted, particularly around their reflections of how they navigated difference, power, race, social justice, and the therapeutic relationship.

Findings support the need to augment reflection from an individual activity to one carried out through collaboration. We also raise questions around critical reflection as an effective strategy for developing critical, anti-colonial and anti-racist practice, as it is often posited to be. Building on concerns raised by scholars such as Smith (2013), this research provides empirical evidence on the limits of critical reflection as a tool to disrupt harm and professional privilege in practice.