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Previous research has stated that there is a lack of insight into the literature about doctoral research that recognises the diverse experiences that come from the life of the researcher. In addition, there is limited research or discussion of an author’s presentation of the ‘self’ or ‘identity’, which inevitably influences the developing narrative within a thesis. This paper highlights how the development of a series of autoethnographies helped the author to reflect on his identity as he started to write up his PhD. The paper provides an analysis of what it might mean to be autoethnographic as a way to reflect on identity. The paper explores some of the autoethnographies from the thesis, highlighting some of the emotional and inspiring ‘epiphanies’ that emerged whilst writing the thesis influenced by discussion with the research participants. The paper will illustrate how autoethnography can be employed as an example of reflective practice to understand identity, highlighting its significance in being used as an example of reflective practice in qualitative research and working with participants. It was found that research can be considered a dynamic process with multiple strands to our identities not being bounded and static, but ever moving and changing. Although autoethnography can lead to narcissist representations, identities inevitably, directly or indirectly, influence the research process. Thus helping to develop a deeper understanding of the researcher’s position and identity in the qualitative research process, and arguably enabling the researcher to understand the research process and participants better. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper underscores the dynamic and complex dimensions of ‘becoming’ an intercultural doctoral student. It employs autobiography as a research method to portray the reshaping of ourselves as doctoral students to help us engage in self-reflexivity on our mediation of academic, personal and cultural identities in international doctoral education. Our self-narratives on how the plurality of our doctoral identities has emerged and how we have mediated these multiple identities show that becoming an intercultural research student is intimately linked to the process of self-empowerment and re-construction of oneself as a flexible and reflexive intercultural learner and human being. The paper concludes by discussing the notion of ‘reciprocal intercultural supervision’ in doctoral education. It highlights the increased need for (Western) supervisors to develop reciprocal interculturality and the capacity for greater agency in their international doctoral students so that both groups can understand each other better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates how personal narrative and reflective practice are used as the basis for an ethnographic account that locates the researcher in the research endeavour. It provides an overview of narrative inquiry as a means of reflective practice. Two narrative approaches - life history/autobiographical narrative and autoethnography - are briefly introduced and evidence is presented of the application of these approaches in a number of discipline areas. This serves to highlight the relative dearth of literature reporting the use of autoethnography in particular in the counselling and psychology fields, either in terms of research or practical applications. After outlining the background of the author's doctoral study, the paper illustrates how autoethnography is employed as an example of reflective practice. Concluding remarks address a reflection of the experience of writing the paper, including reference to criteria for evaluating autoethnographic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the results of an 18 month study of a variety of participants involved in written reflection on their learning, both in classes at two universities in the Southern US or in voluntary focus groups. The purpose of the study was to analyze the effects of including autobiographical tools in written reflection. Participants used three tools from the genre of autobiography as they reflected on their learning inside either course content, internship experiences, experiential learning, or goal-setting. Over 500 samples were gathered, offering a large data set for analysis of what kinds of best practice produce quality reflective writing. Through analysis of the data and student surveys and interviews, results show increased attention to critical thinking and metacognition; expressed flexibility, adaptability, and ability to handle ambiguity; and value in connection to others/empathy-building as a result of incorporating autobiographical tools in reflective prompts. The study indicated that reflections using the same autobiographical tool over the course of several sessions seemed to produce deeper levels of reflection and more engagement with the autobiographical tool. Of the three autobiographical tools used in the study, the tool that seemed most helpful to participants was reflection as storytelling that revealed aspects of the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a comparison between the basic psychological views on reflection of the most eminent authors of the twentieth century: John Dewey, Donald Schon, Lev Vygotsky, Vladimir Lefebvre and Georgii Shchedrovitsky. The paper is specifically designed to bring together understandings of reflection from two different perspectives. The first perspective is that commonly seen as encompassing the Western English speaking cultures (e.g. United Kingdom, North America, Australia, New Zealand), the second is that of the Russian speaking cultures of Eastern Europe. Through a comparison of these two world views it becomes possible to reconsider not only how the conceptual development of reflection can be better understood, but also the value placed upon it as an integral component of quality practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a reflective methodology of the body as a resource for reflective practice based on an analysis of my personal response and experience of autobiographical narrative. It offers an approach in which the movements and markings of the body serve as important sites for collecting additional evidence of the daily practices that shape our lives. The paper extends and develops the notion of reassembling 'artifacts' from Watson and Wilcox (2000), in order to expand the possibilities for enlarging methods of reflection. Two forms of artifact are presented: visual illustration and movement vignette. Re-collecting and reading these artifacts, allows the personal history stored in the body, as well as the body's contemporaneous knowledge to become more accessible for examination, dialogue and reflection. In a dialectic relationship with narrative writing, an example is presented of this reflective model that mines one's impulses for motion and stillness, movement and marking. Drawing upon the researcher's larger concerns, the paper concludes with a critical discussion of autobiographical inquiry and sexuality, heterocentric value systems, and reflective practitioners' ability to exhume the 'taken for granted' oppressions suffered in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflective practice is an integral part of preparing for doctoral candidacy and the successful completion of one's dissertation. In this article, reflective practice was utilized as a useful tool in documenting the dissertation process of 'taming the beast'. Reflecting-on and reflection-in-action were vital to designing and defending the dissertation successfully. The purpose of this article is to present a personal narrative of a rigorous, coherent and credible qualitative dissertation research through the eyes of a doctoral candidate. The author found that reflective practice required deliberate, consistent and purposeful action by the reflective practitioner. To sustain reflective practice contextual anchors were used to build and scaffold meanings. Meanings researchers and participants attach to the collection, analysis, interpretation and the data presentations are important to qualitative research. The author concludes that successful dissertations are original, accurately researched, well-documented, thought provoking and show depth of reflective practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research studied accountability pressures faced by five school administrators, and explored collaborative autobiography as a way for administrators to reflect on and address those pressures. The administrators cycled back and forth between reflective writing and group dialogue as they contemplated accountability pressures, their life histories in relationship to the pressures, and their preferred future. The participants reported that the process helped them to better understand accountability pressures and develop strategies for negotiating those pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Masks & mirrors represent the evolution of a reflective arts-informed approach to research used in three contexts of inquiry including autobiographical reflection, performance and representation of data. Masks symbolize the social nature of human life and mirrors represent the importance of reflection. Together they hold a tension, a fine balance, between disguise/fiction and truth/reality. Masks represent the ephemeral truth of a moment in time that may become archetypal and that frequently connote ambiguity: what is true now may not be tomorrow. Mirrors, on the other hand, always reflect what surrounds them and while their reflective abilities do not change, what they reflect changes according to the context surrounding them. Just as one's autobiography is continuously revised, so is the process of interdisciplinary collaboration; mask-making is revealed as a process that elicits ambiguity and tentativeness yet which also opens deeper insights about the reality of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do students engage in reflective practice in teaching-learning situations when they have been told that first person writing is not scholarly and that expressions of their thinking are merely opinions? Thinking narratively, three students and a nurse-teacher critically reflect on identity and knowledge construction emergent through the pattern of knowing that is personal. Exemplars from a Knowledge & Inquiry course show that learning and transformation are, at least in part, internal processes that require activities to foster self-awareness for working within relationships. Teachers in diverse disciplines are invited to consider how it matters socially that professional education embraces personal transformation through reflecting on and reconstructing experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how autobiographical narrative about everyday activities can stimulate critical reflection. A re-interpretation of Schon's stages of reflective practice is used to explore some examples from autobiographical writing about the everyday practice of carrying a bag to illustrate literary devices which enable self-interrogation and internal dialogue. Such writing can mimic the dialogue with a peer or coach to generate new perspectives and sometimes change in habitual practice. Implications of using both reflection on everyday life and creative autobiography for the development of professionals are finally discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of one academic year, two researchers combined research methods of reflexive inquiry and memory-work to understand the situated learning during their teen years in terms of its influence on their not taking up cigarette smoking. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and the influence of the social gospel were central to the Ontario farm community in which Dorothy grew up in the 1960s. Angie grew up in small town Nova Scotia during the 1990s, exposed to parental smoking and the social marketing of the health hazards of smoking. The researchers draw on the critical incident questionnaire (Brookfield, 1995) as a way to remember 'nodal moments' in their smoking/non-smoking autobiographies. Their autobiographies serve as embodied reflexive texts and triggers to engage in dialogue on the deeper social meaning of not taking up smoking as teenagers. They conclude that traces of the social gospel remain as an influence in Angie's teen years, and that Dorothy was exposed to anti-smoking social marketing in the 1960s even before it had this name. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]