Rethinking reflective education: What would Dewey have done?

SummaryReflective practice has largely failed to live up to its promise of offering a radical critique of technical rationality and of ushering in a new philosophy of nursing practice and education. I argue in this paper that the failure lies not with the idea of reflective practice itself, but with the way in which it has been misunderstood, misinterpreted and misapplied by managers, theorists, educators and practitioners over the past two decades. I suggest that if reflective practice is to offer a credible alternative to the current technical–rational evidence-based approach to nursing, then it needs to rediscover its radical origins in the work of John Dewey and Donald Schön. In particular, nurses need to look beyond their current fixation with reflection-on-action and engage fully with Schön's notion of the reflective practitioner who reflects in action through on-the-spot experimentation and hypothesis testing. Finally, the implications of this radical approach to reflective practice are developed in relation to the practice of nursing, education and scholarship, where they are applied to the challenge of resolving what Rittel and Webber refer to as ‘wicked problems’.