Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

“Preflection” is a made up word, cumbersome and ugly, but I’ll use it since I wanted to find a way to set the scene in the Blog for what will be a series of posts about reflection that I intend to make/journal in January.

I recently put forward an abstract for a presentation at a three-day PhD conference in early February at the University of Hull. There are a number of themes that will be covered, all concerned with the process of undertaking a PhD, and one of these is “reflection”.  The overall goal is, I guess, to share experiences and ideas with fellow travellers, as well as pick up some tips from seasoned professionals.  But this idea also held interest for me personally on two levels. One is because the whole topic of reflection links directly to the subject matter of my research, that  understanding Learner Identity is part of Personal Development in Management Education and that identity is constantly formed and reformed by a reflective process of narration or dialogue.  On another level,  the researcher’s inquiry into that process is itself a process of reflection, albeit at one level of abstraction.

In other words, “reflection” is both the thing under study and the way of studying it.

So, why not take the opportunity and experiment on myself? In so doing, I pilot a method and I gain some personal insight into how the PhD process is part of my own Learner Identity at this stage in my career and life.

I’m happy to report that my abstract was one of those accepted. Because in my proposal I suggested that I will present the findings of  “a month-long self-experiment”, I have committed myself to write at least one blog entry per day, and thus explore the territory of past, present and future that I have been piloting with volunteers on the Henley MBA.  Alongside that narrative of remembered events, there is inescapably another; a meta-narrative or ‘reflection-on’ that must define any ‘reflection-in’. .

Anyone reading or coming across these entries is more than encouraged to comment, question or interact in any way they think fit. I am testing the ground for an approach that wants to challenge some of the established norms for personal development, which (I would argue) includes the notions that it is exclusively a private matter.

One of the triggers for all of this is a suspicion on my part that there is a problem with the current use (overstated?) of reflection in Management Education. There is a need to review this and perhaps find a more helpful perspective, theory and model for reflection. This will be tomorrow’s topic.

My sense, though, is that the central question is whether identity is a concept that is individualistic or collective. Or both.