Confession, in-service training and reflective practices

This article focuses on how confession operates in contemporary discourses on reflective practices. By revisiting and mobilising Foucault’s genealogy of confession in relation to how reflective practices are mobilised in an in-service training programme for health care assistants (HCA) in elderly care, it is argued that the HCAs are shaped as their own confessors. It is further argued that we need to take into account traces from both Stoic and Christian times to fully understand how reflective practices operate and shape subjects. The empirical material consists of interviews with HCAs, their managers, supervisors and teachers in an in-service training programme where the use of reflective practices was a key component. Introduction Reflection as a concept and idea has become a conspicuous part of education and work life. Not least in the wake of the publication of Donald Schöns (1983) book The Reflective Practitioner, published in 1983. Different techniques are mobilised in education and working life to develop so-called reflective practices and thus produce a better learning process, a better work practice, etc. Some researchers have described such mobilisation of reflective practices as disciplinary practices and as part of a neoliberal mode of governing (cf. Dean, 1999; Edwards, 2008; Fejes & Nicoll, 2008; Rose, 1999; Simons & Masschelein, 2008). In this article, such arguments will be developed through a historical perspectivisation based on Foucault’s (2003a, 2003b, 2005) genealogy of confession. By relating such genealogy to an empirical study of a contemporary education-related practice in working life, the aim is to make visible some aspects of how governing operates in the present time. Much research on reflection and reflective practices has been conducted. Their popularity as a concept, idea and practice is not least visible in that there is a scientific journal dedicated to such issues entitled Reflective practice. There is no room here to introduce the numerous publications on reflective practices. However, in brief, we can see how one strand of research on reflective practices focuses on the output of such practices and on how one can improve them, for example, in teachers’ work (cf. Larrivee, 2008; Van Manen, 1995). At the same time, there is a growing body of literature that critically discusses reflection and reflective practices as practices of subjectivity formation (cf. Atkinson, 2004) or as a disciplinary practice, where the writing of Foucault is mobilised, for example, in relation to Schön’s writing (Erlandson, 2005), in relation to professional development (Edwards & Nicoll, 2006), educational guidance (cf. Fejes, 2008a; Usher & Edwards, 2005) or in relation to health care work and nursing (Cloud & Sellars, 2004; Cotton, 2001; Fejes, 2008b). Some of these studies draw on Foucault’s genealogy of confession to problematise reflective practices. One general line of argument is that reflective practices are practices of confession and normalisation related to the Christian confession and its idea of disclosure of the self (Cotton, 2001; Usher & Edwards, 2005). Others critique such arguments and argue that reflective practices have more in com-