Olejar Books

This Handbook brings together reasons why and how to engage in reflective inquiry. It presents an existing body of practice and research, knowledge for understanding and engaging in reflective inquiry. The task for this Handbook is to advance the domain significantly by placing present-day trends in historical and theoretical contexts and identifying what professionals need to be educated for and for what they may be at risk if they are not. One needed goal is to clarify the ways people interrogate their professional practice, the puzzles they encounter, and how they gather and evaluate evidence that can help them act on their experiences and create and articulate meanings of them. It is time for a fuller, more capacious review of this important body of knowledge so that it may inform and help further delineate the discipline and the education of professionals. It is this challenge that a group of accomplished authors take up in this Handbook. Here we bring together essential perspectives of practitioners, researchers and theoreticians who are working or have worked to bring clarity and definition to the endeavor. The goal is to make this work available in a ready reference text so that teachers and researchers of professionals may have a surer hold on the work they seek to achieve in contributing to a still emerging discipline and the growth and development of professionals. This Handbook pulls together a body of research and of knowledge of a domain of knowing, reflective inquiry, and explores how it is construed as an intellectual framework, a set of conceptual tools, that can shape actions, practices, and understandings across a range of professions and as an epistemological perspective, provide a way of looking at knowing and how we know. This Handbook is meant to be a resource for professional educators and other academics from several professions currently engaging in reflective practices or interested in doing so, as well as adult educators, counselors and psychologists concerned with adult learning.