Abstract:
This paper discusses how a study of reflective practice was designed to increase the likelihood of moving teachers to more critical reflection. The design facilitates a 2 stage guided pathway. Stage 1 helps teachers establish their institutional status quo in visual-verbal form. Stage 2 is more subversive in that it encourages teachers to challenge their perceived realities. This paper demonstrates how the research design was operationalised by one student teacher (Thad) and an interviewer. First, Thad is 'heard', in sound clips juxtaposed with image clips of the pages of a self-authored picture book, explaining his plans for a non-hegemonic approach to student higher order thinking. Second, Thad and the interviewer co-construct an alternative or negotiated reading of his (first) personal reading, but the student teacher refrains from questioning in a resistant manner the institutional constraints. The paper argues that the interviewer could have recognised more visual-verbal gaps and silences in the dialogue and manipulated those textual spaces to help the student teacher become more critically reflexive. Finally, post-interview, the analyst discusses a fragment of the picture book, demonstrating how to exploit more fully the critical reflection methodology.