Reflective practice: where now?

Nurse Educ Pract. 2002 Mar;2(1):21-9. doi: 10.1054/nepr.2002.0047.

Abstract

Reflective practice was originally conceived as a radical critique of technical rationality, and was based on the premise that knowledge generated by practitioners reflecting on their own experiences is of at least equal value to knowledge derived by ac ademics from empirical research. However, experiential knowledge from reflection-on-action now finds itself at the bottom of the hierarchy of evidence on which to base practice, and reflection has become just another technical tool. In this paper, I argu e that reflective practitioners must step outside of the dominant paradigm of evidence-based practice in order to reassert the importance of experiential knowledge, and suggest seven tenets for establishing a new reflective paradigm.