Reflections on reflective thinking and practice

Action Inquiry. Action Research. Reflective Thinking. Reflective Practice. Experiential Learning. Neuro Linguistic Programming. Brain-based Learning. Like brands of soap powder, each claiming to wash whiter and brighter, these and numerous other academic packages claim to improve company and individual performance, making them more profitable and productive.

And, like soap powders, all of these packages contain essentially the same ingredients, are marketed assiduously and deal only with a partial aspect of the whole process. This is seen by many people inside and outside of academe as a sad reflection on tertiary education. But it is not. It seems broadly agreed that educational institutions reflect the societies in which they operate.

Those who now bewail the commercialisation of university education imply that there existed in the recent past, or in the past generally, some sort of “golden age” of tertiary learning. But, with notable exceptions, usually outside of the mainstream, schooling, especially at a senior level. exists to serve the economic and social demands of the dominant minority within society.

Mass schooling is, in any event, a fairly recent development, the result of the demands triggered by the industrial revolution. The demands of the perceived dawning of a “white heat of technology” era also saw the freer opening up of tertiary level schooling in Britain to all social classes.

Until the industrial revolution, schooling of any but the most rudimentary kind — if any at all — was available only to the elite, with curricula determined by the dominant group in society such as the Christian Church in Medieval Europe. Then the demand was for conformity with Biblical “truth”. It was a legacy that persisted into the 19th Century and played a part in Darwin delaying the publication of his findings.

However, it is a professed ideal of most universities that they are dedicated to the pursuit of truth and enlightenment. This is epitomised by motto inscribed in stone outside the University of Queensland in Australia: “A Place of Light and Learning.”

In a market-orientated, highly competitive and rapidly globalising world where the commercial imperative dominates, reality is a far cry from this. The demands of commerce and industry are for greater efficiency and productivity, just as the demands on medieval European universities was for Biblical conformity. Today, from a corporate viewpoint, the demand is for improved management techniques and more skilled, motivated and loyal workforces.

Conformity to the demands of the corporate world is also ensured by the fact that modern universities usually have to bid for limited public and increasingly private funding while many departments are under pressure to become “profit centres”. The pressure from the great majority of the consumers of university products, students, is also not for “light and learning”, but for qualifications and specific skills to hopefully guarantee a good job with decent pay. This too, is a reaction to the corporate world.

This is summed up by the complaint by a South African academic publisher that “People are studying for degrees, they are not reading for knowledge”. However, degree courses require a level of knowledge, but usually of a particular and often narrow discipline and the broader philosophical questions relating to the discipline and its application are usually downplayed or even ignored.

The reason for this seems, to me, obvious: such wider knowledge and questioning is of little or no use to employers who require primarily the skills. Employees who “think too much” in that they question the nature of the economy and society may end up questioning the rationale of the economic machine in which they play the role of cogs.

Journalism, journalists and the news media, are not immune from the pressures . News media is, increasingly owned and controlled by large corporations, with consequent — and growing — pressures to at least downplay truth seeking in practice in favour of propaganda for one or other cause. However, because news media (journalism) is expected by its economically necessary audience to report truthfully on realities on the ground, news media that steps too far out of line, foregoing the pursuit of truth for propaganda, may quickly lose the credibility essential for acceptance or even survival.

This is why I have argued that journalism is a special case in terms of media studies. The plethora of techniques and methodologies all packaged in various ways and making claims that by applying them, employees and the companies in which they work can become more efficient and profitable are generally not aimed at discovering underlying realities or truths. Yet seeking after, uncovering and reporting “truths” is the job description of journalism.

It is well summed up by the American journalist T. D. Allman:
“Genuinely objective journalism [is journalism that] not only gets the facts right, it gets the meaning of events right. It is compelling, not only today, but stands the test of time. It is validated not only by ‘reliable sources’, but by the unfolding of history. It is journalism that, ten, twenty, fifty years after the fact still holds up a true and intelligent mirror to events.”

As such, action research/inquiry, reflective/critical/analytical thinking and experiential learning are more a part of the day-to-day working life of any serious journalist than they would be for a person working in other media areas: the where, why and how any specific practice or discipline fits into the overall environment is the essence of journalism.

Professional practice issues for journalists dealing seriously with their work must, therefore, encompass the broader environment. This would include a view about research methodologies, their place and purpose within society.

More reflections on ‘reflective learning’

I contend that there is nothing new in the general concept of reflective practice or reflective learning based on experience involving the senses. That, in fact, much of the more recent crop of theories falling under the heading of reflective practice harks back to an illiberal educational tradition going back 2,000 years and more than to the ideas of more prominent theorists of the more recent past.

In this I find myself in broad agreement with Brenda Cohen who argued in 1969 (in Educational Thought: an introduction) that there are basically two contrasting educational traditions. She places, as an example, Plato on the one hand and Rousseau, Froebel and Dewey on the other.

These two sides, she contends, represent “freedom as opposed to authority, experience as opposed to knowledge, liberal as opposed to ‘therapeutic’ aims in education, specialisation as opposed to integration of studies, and the issue of equality”.

It is also my contention that all thinking is, by its nature, reflective, being the result of present or past stimuli which are reflected upon. All learning therefore involves experience of one or other sort followed by reflection on that experience. Precisely how this occurs and what neurological or other processes may be followed remains an area of debate, except for the many lifestyle and management consultants such as Science for Success ( www.scienceforsuccess.com) which promote marketable certainties where scientific uncertainties exist.

However, the addition of the adjective, “reflective” to the noun, thought, implies thinking of a different or “higher” order. Although there seems to be a considerable muddle in much of the literature, particularly those in the management training area, reflective thinking usually implies experiential learning (ie: learning through practice and reflecting on the practice concurrently and/or subsequently). The crux here is that the thinking be done in an organised, methodical way.

This implies — correctly, I think — that much thinking by perhaps a majority of people, is disorganised, shallow and even, to a degree, random (the “grasshopper mind”). Yet it is evident that organised patterns of thinking and methods of approach to analysis can be learned and that whatever neurological processes that take place to enable thinking can be trained to be more efficient. So there has been, particularly in the last century or more, a concerted attempt by some governments, by military establishments and by industry to discover a single formula — a “one size fits all” — method to coach the electorate, troops or workforce to behave in desired ways.

To a large extent, this approach is based on the tabula rasa (blank slate) idea which Paulo Freire (in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970) called “banking education”. According to this approach, students are largely empty vessels into which knowledge, morals and attitudes have to be deposited.

On a national scale, this form of attempted mass manipulation reached one of its modern apogees in South Africa during the time that the behavioural psychologist Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was prime minister. (see: Unfinished Business – South Africa, apartheid & truth). He established a secret research group and structured the national schooling system in a manner that he hoped would produce an infinitely malleable population. This was a rigidly hierarchical approach which demanded that all reflection be directed towards satisfying the demands of the power elite.

I contend that this approach is merely an extreme version of much of the more sophisticated reflective learning promoted today; that the theories of David Kolb (www.ruby3.dircon.co.uk) and developments (www.fact-archive.com) such as neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) are also narrow in their focus, often, as in the case of Kolb, overly academic, and are designed to serve elitist interests

In the intensely competitive global marketplace and among the national political entities that house its corporations, there is an obvious desire to discover ways and means to create the most efficient and cost-effective workforce possible while assuring, if not political support, at least docility among the electorates.

We should all, always ask about every programme, policy or proposal: who profits? Who, in the final analysis, benefits from this? To do anything less than this is to become a cog in a machine designed and operated by others.

Horses, carts and reflection

I remain deeply concerned about university media courses which seem continually to put carts before horses. Or not even to comprehend that the carts and horses are related in terms of logical advance.

This relates to the fact that students are often told to “forget theory” and to “reflect on your lives etc”. But one cannot reflect in a vacuum. We are all products of our environments; our thinking — our ability to reflect — is based on our backgrounds, and the premises upon which we have built the often contradictory theories by which we live and think.

Our reflections are governed by the theoretical basis on which we function. So it is surely first necessary to ask not what do I think, but why do I think it? Where does this mode of thinking come from? On what premises is it based? And why?

Without such a basis one can indulge in bouts of psycho babble which are, at best, superficial; at worst, deeply confusing and even nonsensical.  This is encouraged by the apparent acceptance of such concepts as intelligence tests and even of emotional intelligence. Surely these are concepts that should be questioned? Especially when there exists no satisfactory definition of what constitutes intelligence. Yet we now have IQ testing broadly accepted (certainly within the media) and the concepts of both emotional and spiritual intelligence touted widely.

Yet the media — and media students — might do better to reflect on the fraudulent origins of the very concept of intelligence testing as it was developed by Cyril Burt. An even more interesting reflection might be on the effect IQ testing (as refined by Stanford & Binet) had on the migration of desperate refugee applicants to the United States in the early decades of the last century. How many people are aware that more than half the refugee applicants from Hungary, Italy and those classified Jewish were rejected because the (English-language based) Stanford-Binet test found them to be “feeble-minded”?

Being aware of such situations and the manner in which we might analyse them could say more about us as individuals than any amount of navel gazing and certainly more than could be gained from any number of pop quizzes.

And what about the value systems underlying the “fun” team building exercises that are encouraged in so many tertiary educational environments? There is also often a dichotomy presented between inductive and deductive analysis, a dichotomy which any analyst, let alone journalist, would regard as utterly false.

These increasingly standard approaches seem blindly to accept methodologies and underlying values that more properly belong in the manuals of “motivational” gurus.  Yet any decent tertiary institution should be encouraging greater critical thinking rather than tryng to help students adapt more effectively to a corporate environment which, as Joel Bakan (The Corporation, 2004) argues convincingly, is psychopathic

Chips for a change

PERSONAL/HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: For most of my working life I have been involved with the print media. I remain in this position although a proportion of what I now write is transferred into digital formats and may never appear on the printed page. But I still work primarily through the medium of newspapers and magazines. In other words, traditional print formats.

And the manner in which these are produced and the way in which I and others like me, work, has altered dramatically over the past 30 years in particular. In a relatively short space of time, massive changes have been wrought in an industry that had remained little changed for a century and more. These changes have also had quite profound social as well as organisational effects

At the root of this change is a single technical innovation: the micro chip. Tiny slivers of silicon, each bearing complex integrated circuits, today affect the lives of almost everyone on the planet. From modern cars to mobile telephones, computers and supermarket checkouts to televisions, the chip is everywhere, making for more efficient, faster and cheaper communication, retailing and stock control and facilitating more consistent and lower-cost production of almost everything we need or are persuaded to think we need.

It radically transformed a print media industry that had, with some important technical improvements in the 19th Century, continued to produce in much the same way as when William Caxton brought then modern Gutenberg printing technology to Britain in the latter part of the 15th Century.

Possibly the single major change prior to the arrival of the chip and its associated technological developments came in 1886 with the invention of the Linotype machine. This allowed lines of justified (lined up on the right margin) type (text), made up out of a lead alloy) to be set by a single operator. Thirty years ago, on British national newspapers, lines of type were still set in this way in metal “galleys” (trays) before being locked into pages on a “stone” which, by the 20th Century was a steel table. Newspapers were printed on another 19th Century, innovation, the rotary press which enabled the high speed printing of multiple pages on rolls of paper.

This system of production gave rise to an organisational hierarchy of skills: journalists wrote their “stories” on paper which was passed to editors and sub-editors to be checked, edited and “marked up” with instructions for typesetters to set into metal type. Proof prints were then taken of the galleys of metal type and passed on to proof readers to compare the edited paper with the metal type “proof”. From there, after corrections had been made, the type went to the stone to be composed into pages by compositors before going to the stereo department for cylindrical impressions (“plates”) to be made to fit onto the rollers of the press. Seven specific skills were therefore needed. However, this was still, essentially, the same technology that Caxton brought to London.

UNEVEN DIFFUSION: Computerised typesetting and editing made the Linotype and the process of assembling lead type on a “stone” obsolete and made proof reading departments redundant (especially with the advent of spell check programs). For a brief period, before the development of programs allowing for pages to be designed (“made up”) on screen, compositors, wielding stencil knives, pasted individual items, printed on glued photographic paper onto pages before that task too became redundant.

Much of this new technology was available the end of the 1960s and was adopted in a very uneven manner in different countries over the following 20 years. The fact that there was no common pattern to the spread or diffusion of the technology seems to have had little to do with the need to recapitalise since the savings offered by the new technology meant that such capital expenditure could relatively quickly be recouped.; Instead, the pace and extent of this technological change seems to have been determined by the dominant working cultures into which it was introduced.

For example, elements of computerised technology were introduced to the Times of Zambia in 1969. More advanced systems were in place in New Zealand’s Suburban Newspapers group in the early Seventies while, as late as 1982, the sole change in Britain’s Associated Newspapers (Daily Mail etc) was the colour scheme on the walls of the editorial department. All the major newspaper and magazine groups still used “old” as opposed to “new” technology.

In contrast with countries such as Zambia and New Zealand (and many others), Britain, in print media terms, was technologically backward 25 years ago And when change finally came, it was in direct contrast to the peaceful and broadly welcomed manner seen in Zambia and New Zealand.

The first major — and ultimately successful — attempt to introduce computerised newspaper production to national newspapers in Britain was in 1984 by News International (The Times, Sunday Times) at the Wapping, London premises where the titles are still published today. The move triggered fierce opposition, a major strike and numerous clashes between opponents of “Fortress Wapping” which was surrounded by a steel paling fence and coils of razor wire.

DIFFERING CULTURES. While the work carried out was similar, the working cultures in the print media in the three countries mentioned was different.

1. Zambia: the majority of the skilled staff were expatriates, working on two-year contracts; they welcomed learning new skills which might make them more marketable when they moved on.

2. New Zealand: Until the 1980s, the country faced a situation of over employment, with, as a consequence, an extremely high degree of labour mobility and wage rates that were fairly equal across the board. With plenty of work available at the time, the loss of some skills caused very little concern.

3. Britain: The British print industry was developed by craftsmen who, like other skilled workers of the time, formed themselves into guilds to preserve the “secrets” of their trade. Out of these guilds developed the modern trade unions as the print media expanded and ownership of bigger, more efficient and expensive machinery fell into fewer hands. Although there was an element of Ludditism in the resistance to the change to the electronic age, most of the trade union opposition concerned jobs, retraining and the manner in which the change would be introduced.

Such negotiation, let alone any agreement on the preservation of jobs (even for limited periods) or the retraining of print workers made redundant, would be a cost to the newspaper owners, one that owners in Zambia and New Zealand did not have to face. With the new technology it was possible to produce newspapers with an almost skeleton staff, provided a number of journalists (whose jobs did not appear threatened) and the operators of the presses (whose jobs also seemed secure) would co-operate.

Financial inducements were offered. These made these two jobs marginally more expensive, but this additional cost was more than covered by the loss of five former tasks in the jobs hierarchy.

LOOKING AHEAD: Even at the time of Wapping — and before — there were concerns expressed among some journalists that the development and expansion of not only production technology, but also the internet, could impact adversely on wages and conditions of work as well as on the sort of content contained in the print and other public media.

The technology gave media owners the opportunity to free up expensive office space by offering journalists and even production (editing, page make up) staff to work from home or from less expensive satellite offices. This fragmented the former work unit, with many workers seldom coming into contact with their peers. This has apparently facilitated the spread of individual and often short-term contracts of employment.

The editing function in such a situation is often more narrowly focussed and less subject to constraints by the initial providers of material for publication.  The chip has been instrumental in this change and it is one that canot be reversed.

Brief note on a philosophy of journalism

Is there a generally accepted philosophy of journalism? Is one necessary?

These are two questions I think are vital for all media practitioners. I will argue that such a philosophy, from which flows the moral principles – the ethics- of the craft, is essential, especially in the current world context. I think that it should underlie all media practice, even if only to distinguish between the propagandist functions of public relations and advertising and what is usually presented as the “objective” craft of journalism. I would include under the heading of journalism all media which attempts, via news reports, human interest or other features, to portray or analyse the human condition and broader reality.

Although universities such as Woolongong in Australia now offer Phd (Journalism) courses, it seems to me that the comment made in 1989 by University of Miami philosopher Kenneth Goodman probably holds true: “Few journalists know or care much about philosophy as about government, crime or other journalistic staples.” Yet, if only for the sake of consistency, how these “staples” are dealt with should require a philosophical underpinning. It should provide the rule of thumb by which “good” or “bad” journalism may be judged.

Concepts such as truth, objectivity and balance all require definition within the journalistic milieu. As does language. Adjectival usage and specific nouns, for example, often reveal the (usually subconscious) bias of the practitioner or the perhaps more considered bias of the editor/proprietor through the demands for “house style”.

A simple example is the use of “terrorist” on one hand and “freedom fighter” on the other when the more neutral – and accurate – guerrilla or irregular forces would do.

Media manipulation and pressures on journalists to conform to ideological or policy demands have been with us ever since the development of a mass media. But they have arguably never been as great as now. Particularly in regions such as Africa there is — for a variety of reasons that should be explored — pressure is on local journalists to produce “positive” reflections of their societies as part of assisting in “development”.

At the same time there is the greatest ever concentration of media ownership internationally. The effects of this have been fairly well documented, but should be revisited and analysed.

Anyway, this struck me as a possibly appropriate starting point since it deals with research, theory and the critical analysis of creative change. It would lead logically to my africanewsfeatures.com project.