Reflecting on Reflective Practice: Philosophical Critique of Its Ontological Ethics and the Case for Teacher Flourishing

Purpose: This study critiques the disenchantment of contemporary reflective practice from an antique three-dimensional ethics to a shibboleth in professional education comprising an epistemology of decision-making, a techne for production, and even a neoliberal governance technology.

Design/Approach/Methods: Following a Foucauldian analysis of the change of truth and subjectivity in the Greco-Roman, Christianity, and post-Cartesian epochs, this study presents how reflection, once a “care of the self” technology to forge “spiritual corporality,” was overshadowed by the philosophy of “knowing yourself,” eventually being disenchanted into a secularized tool.

Findings: With the aim of re-enchanting reflective practice as Aristotelian virtue-phronesis in teacher education, we appeal to teachers to become students’ in loco parentis as a form of flourishing.

Originality/Value: This study philosophically interrogates reflective practice, which is often uncritically regarded as a self-evidently golden practice in teacher professional development.