voice reflects how practitioners learn to speak with the authoritative voices of others. They conceive themselves as capable of receiving, even reproducing knowledge from the all‐knowing external authorities but not capable of creating knowledge of their own. So if I ask a practitioner, ‘why do you practice like that? They are likely to reproduce knowledge from an external authority that has been unquestioned. If I ask, ‘how else could you respond in tune with your vision of practice?’ You might struggle to think laterally because you have never been enabled to think for yourself. Reflection opens up received knowing for its validity to inform.
The Subjective Voice
The subjective voice breaks through the received voice. It gives vent to self‐expression. Its learning mode is one of inward listening and watching, valuing, and accepting one’s own voice as a source of knowing. As Belenky et al. (1986, p. 85) note:
subjective knowing is the precursor to reflective and critical thought. During the period of subjective knowing, women lay down procedures for systematically learning and analysing experience. But what seems distinctive in these women is that their strategies for knowing grow out of their very embeddedness in human relationships and the alertness of everyday life.
The subjective voice is the gateway to self‐inquiry. The practitioner has an opinion. They begin to question received knowledge, no longer accepting on face value what they have been told as to their thoughts, beliefs, and actions. As one of Belenky et al.’s respondents noted (p. 85) ‘I keep discovering things inside myself. I am seeing myself all the time in a different light’. Such words reflect an awakening of self. Life suddenly becomes interesting with the focus on the self. Such practitioners are curious and open to new experiences. They are ripe for reflection.
Subjectivist women value what they see and hear around them and begin to feel a need to understand the people with whom they live and who impinge on their lives. Though they may be emotionally isolated from others at this point in their histories, they begin to actively analyse their past and current interactions with others. The idea that practitioners might be isolated is intriguing. Does the received voice mode of being deny expression of opinion and feelings, and hence isolate the practitioner from others? It seems likely. However, the subjective voice is tentative, vulnerable in its uncertainty and hence may need to be guided in a community of like‐minded people. It may be confusing because it is competing with received voices. As such, it is easy to discount one’s own subjective voice as being unsubstantiated, even ridiculed by more ‘knowing’ others. Listening to yourself, it may seem to be an uncanny stranger on display (Cixous 1996). Reflection opens a space for expression and development of the subjective voice and the means to confront the authoritative voice that has dominated the way they had previously viewed themselves and their practice.
The Procedural Voice
The procedural voice has two divergent ways of knowing: connected and separate knowing. Connected knowing is gained by listening and understanding to the experiences of others known through empathy and reflection. Separate knowing is gained through critiquing extant sources of knowledge for its validity to inform. It is an abstract knowing that seeks to understand things in terms of logic and analysis. Both sources of knowing are significant for the reflective practitioner. The left side of the brain fosters rational logical thinking, whereas the connected voice is related to the right brain that fosters creativity, imagination, perception, curiosity, intuition, spirit and wholeness. Pink (2005, p. 22) considers the left hemisphere analyses the details; the right hemisphere synthesises the big picture. Within a technical rational dominated culture that characterises healthcare education and organisation, there is emphasis on developing the left brain. As such, people go around lopsided. The right brain becomes the dark side of the hill neglected with its attributes atrophied. Yet these right brain qualities are essential for professional artistry. The lopsided mind leans heavily towards the masculine, favouring reason over intuition, justice over care, outcomes over process, science over art. Perhaps the feminine must be privileged to find balance? I wonder – do patriarchal patterns of practice privilege masculine values and demean feminine values?
Schön posited two types of knowledge – technical rationality (research‐based theory) and professional artistry (knowing in action). He equates technical rationality as the hard high ground and professional artistry as the swampy lowlands. He argues that professional artistry is the more significant form of knowing because it is the knowing used by practitioners to navigate the largely indeterminate and complex swampy lowlands of everyday practice. The fact is that the practitioner lives in the swampy lowlands and yet can draw on the high hard ground knowledge as appropriate to inform practice. In doing so, they develop their constructed voice.
The Constructed Voice
The constructed voice is the synthesis of connected and separate ways of knowing. It is a fusion between the left and right sides of the brain so that the mind is fully fertilised and uses all its faculties (Woolf 1945). Practitioners with constructed voice speak with an informed and authentic voice. They are able to think and voice outside normal frames of reference, shifting previously abstract frames into personal frames. Through developing the constructed voice, the practitioner puts extant sources of knowledge in its place, no longer succumbing to ‘the belief that the “soft stuff” such as feelings and beliefs and support, are not quite as substantive as the hard data from laboratory reports and sophisticated monitoring’ (Visinstainer 1986, p. 37).
Hardy used voice as a metaphor for her transformation through reflection (Johns and Hardy 2005) is a powerful endorsement of guided reflection. She writes:
By using Belenky et al.’s (1986) idea of voice, I feel I have become more empowered to practice more in tune with my values than previously. Before, I felt I needed to be in control and hence reduced the person to a patient to be controlled. Paradoxically, by letting go of the need to control I am more in control of myself as a person. As a consequence, I am less anxious and more creative, more able to realise desirable practice. When I speak with colleagues, I speak with a more knowledgeable, empathic and passionate voice!. (p. 96)
Having a constructed voice does not mean it is heard or listened to by those who claim authority to make decisions. Belenky et al. (1986, p. 146) with a salutary voice note:
Even among women who feel they have found their voice, problems with voice abound. Some women told us, in anger and frustration, how frequently they felt unheard and unheeded. In our society, which values the word of male authority, constructivist women are no more immune to the feeling of being silenced than any other group of women.
As such, the development of the assertive voice is vital aspect of reflection through such approaches as the assertive action ladder.2
Transformation and Reflexivity
Reflexivity is the practitioner ‘looking back’ to plot their transformation towards realising their vision of desirable practice. Such transformation is evidenced through a chain of experiences whereby one link of the chain leaves a thread that is picked up and developed by the next link (Dewey 1933). This movement is set against an analysis of forces that have constrained realisation. The idea of reflexivity takes the practitioner beyond viewing reflection as a single experience into viewing it as a continuous evolving process of self‐inquiry towards self‐realisation however that is expressed in one’s vision. In doing so, the practitioner constructs a reflexive narrative that may form the basis for assignments, dissertations, and doctoral theses within educational and research programmes.
An Encouraging Note
From the above exploration of reflection, learning can be viewed as moving
