Content area
Full text
Introduction
Advocates of learning and development (L&D) argue for multiple methods to develop competencies and capabilities in organisations (Garavan, 1991; Mayo, 2003; Boydell and Leary, 2003; Swanson and Holton, 2009; Nansubuga et al., 2015). Amongst others, they promote training, mentoring, coaching, facilitation and 360-degree feedback at the individual level. The review suggests that few papers promote the reflection and reflective practices as development and professional growth methods for the L&D professionals.
The literature review indicates that most papers were conceptual-type papers dealing with issues such as epistemology of practice (Raelin, 2007), critical reflection, reflexivity and conversation turns (Swan, 2008) and case study-type papers (Sambrook and Stewart, 2008; Francis and Cowan, 2008) examining issues such as fostering an action-reflection dynamic amongst student practitioners developing critical reflection in professional focused doctorate-facilitator perspectives (Rigg and Trehan, 2008). Investigating critical reflection in the workplace is just difficult! The research-type papers were still rare apart from Stewart et al.’s (2008) research on postgraduate education to support organisational change that is “reflection on reflection”. Besides, none of these studies focused on L&D professionals. Furthermore, the review-type papers did not focus on L&D professionals. Table 1 critically evaluates these literatures, and we draw out the implications for our study.
This study examines the reflective journey of an L&D professional over three months and we sent out a pre-set, semi-structured interview schedule to capture her reflection on her career journey and how she uses reflection to promote her career and the L&D function, which is still considered as a “mere” training in her context. In doing so, we pose the following research question:
In what ways does reflective practice improve this learning and development professional’s growth and the learning and development function?
Schön (1983, pp. 61–78) has written extensively on the relationship between reflection and professionalism. He maintains that:
A professional practitioner is a specialist who encounters certain types of situations again and again […] He develops a repertoire of expectations. He learns what to look for […] As long as his practice is stable, in the sense that it brings him the same types of cases, he becomes less and less subject to surprise […] As practice becomes more repetitive and routine […] the practitioner may miss important opportunities...