Examining Faculty Reflective Practice: A Call for Critical Awareness and Institutional Support

ABSTRACT

This interview-based study explores the nature of reflective practice among postsecondary faculty by examining the types of teaching-related data faculty use during their reflection, their reflective practice process, and the contextual factors that influence that process. Our findings indicate faculty drew on both numeric and non-numeric data forms to engage in reflective practice which complicates the current imagination of “data” within the Data-Driven Decision Making (DDDM) movement. Our findings also showed three distinct types of faculty reflection - instrumental, structural-critical, and social-critical - which demonstrate the varied functions and forms reflection can take. Finally, we demonstrate that although faculty consistently engaged in reflective practice, the outcomes of this reflection were severely limited by both individual bias and institutional constraints. Thus, while we recognize the current budgetary struggles many universities are facing, we argue that in order to better serve postsecondary students, particularly those from historically underrepresented groups, more institutional support is needed. Specifically, we argue postsecondary institutions play a significant role in facilitating critical examination by providing faculty the necessary space, time, and guidance to engage in critical reflection as well as the appropriate institutional mechanisms to voice concerns and enact change.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical reflection
• data-driven decision making
• equity in higher education
• institutional reform
• reflective practice

Notes

1. We use the terms faculty and postsecondary educators to refer to all people who hold undergraduate teaching positions—whether full- or part-time, in a tenure track or not—in postsecondary institutions.

2. The first author was the principal investigator and lead researcher; the second author was not part of the data collection team.

3. All school and instructor names are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.

4. Although relatively low, this response rate is not unusual for qualitative field studies requiring self-selection and is consistent with previous research on the topic of faculty data use (e.g., Hora et al., 2017).

5. The percentage of instructors not on the tenure track represented in the study (38%) was similar to the proportion of contingent faculty at participating institutions where such data were available (i.e., 28%, 37%, and 47%).