Reflective practice is a learned conscious process, bringing us to examine our beliefs, attitudes and behaviour in a professional context. In his book The Reflective Practitioner (1983), Schön talks about a kind of knowing that is tacit and intrinsic to action: “In our spontaneous, intuitive choices our knowing is tacit, implicit in our pattern of acquisition; our knowing is in our action” (p. 49).
As a bilingual reflective practioner, I use translanguaging as a research method to reflect-in-action and on-action. I immerse myself in the data (writing in my first language) and I distance myself from data (writing in my second language). I then cross-reference the two sets of writing, looking for tacit, implicit pattters of beliefs about a given topic. I often gain unexpected insights in the process.
We often adhere to a set of beliefs tacitly inherited, and never questioned in childhood. These may be embedded within the particular sub-culture/s we were raised in, and we may consequently come across different sub-cultures, with different belief systems. Bilingual speakers may be immersed and operate between several belief systems associated with the languages they use.
Pavlenko’s (2014) research on emotion and multilingualism sheds fascinating light onto this territory. Regardless of how many languages we speak, awareness of our belief systems is an important condition for becoming a reflective practitioner.
For more on translanguaging and bilingual reflective practice, read an extract of Chapter 5 of my book Embodying Language in Action, below.
For more on translanguaging as a qualitative research method, see Reflection-in-action in cross-language qualitative research, as published in the Qualitative Research Journal, 2015, 15(1).