For thing five, we are enjoined to think about reflective practice. I feel a little like Molière's M.Jourdain who, in Le bourgeois gentilhomme, discovers that he has been talking prose all his life, 'Par ma foi, il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j’en susse rien, et je vous suis le plus obligé du monde de m’avoir appris cela'.
I think that every good professional has reflected on what they do, ever since the days of Hippocrates. The contemporary vogue for reflection can be traced back to Schön; I think that Schön and his disciples were codifying, in what I find an over-schematic way, existing professional traditions.
I have, for some years now, practiced a writer's exercise which requires me, first thing in the morning, to write, without interruption and without correcting myself, for thirty minutes, or until I have covered three sides of A4. The point of this exercise is to make the act of writing less difficult by forcing me to put words, any words, on a page at the start of the day. However, it of course does more, it brings to the surface things that have been on my mind. I find the results of these exercises, which I keep but never show to anyone, usually have two distinct parts to them, past and future, in which I reflect on the previous day, and wonder what the day ahead holds. Sometimes I write these in Word on my PowerBook; sometimes I write longhand with a Pelikan fountain pen. There is an interesting difference between the results.
This practice seems to help me at work; it even, very occasionally , throws up things that I might use in what I might call by the dread words of creative writing. Over longer time scales, the act of trying to summarise the lessons learnt in particular jobs or spheres of professional activity.
More generally, reflection, of itself, is only a part. I never agreed with Hamlet's advice to the players. Whether in art, science or librarianship the point is not to hold a mirror up to nature, but to act on what one learns from the reflection to make something new.
I have been doing some real reflection since 5 pm on Wednesday, on Umbrella 2011. These must form a post in their own right.
