Critical Reflection, Spirituality and Professional Practice

Book excerpt: This book explores the concept and facilitation of critical reflection and its implications for professional practice. It draws on the author’s own extensive experience to demonstrate how reflective processes involving metaphor and imagery, as well as critique, can be used not only to understand and articulate key values underpinning professional practice and to generate new theoretical models, but to explore one's own worldview, including the ultimate question: 'Who am I?’. The author incorporates practical examples of reflection-through-writing and other reflective techniques which illustrate how ideas about critical reflection, transformative learning, authenticity and spirituality are intricately entwined within theories and practices of adult learning and professional development. The book highlights the importance of understanding the relationship between personal worldviews, values and professional practice. It draws on the concepts of vocation and professional psychological wellbeing to consider what it means to act authentically as a professional within an audit culture. The book will be invaluable for practitioners, academics and students interested in critical reflection, educational inquiry, autoethnography and the use of the self in and as research, the nature and use of metaphor, and the development of worldviews.