Writing With Invisible Ink: Narrative, confessionalism and reflective practice

Abstract

Reflection on practice through the medium of creative writing offers a narrative mode challenging instrumental approaches to reflection as logico-scientific knowing. However, such creative writing may be dominated by a discourse of personalistic humanism and the personal-confessional genre, with attendant internal contradictions, such as unreflexive accounts of personal 'discovery' and 'growth'. A counterargument is offered drawing on social constructivism. Subjectivities supposedly revealed by personal-confessional modes of writing may be constructed by the genre, as confessional practices producing confessors. Alternative paths to writing critically reflexive praxis are suggested; and aesthetic, erotic and ethical issues arising out of a critique of personal-confessional writing are discussed. Writing is seen as homage to language itself, where language offers the very ambiguity, uniqueness and value conflict that Donald Schon characterises as the 'indeterminate zones of practice' that we must inhabit effectively in establishing practical artistry as the heart of reflective practice.