ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how critical action learning perspectives can be harnessed to produce valuable learning and development through critically reflective practice. Critical action learning approaches not only explore underlying power and control issues, but actively engage in an examination of political and cultural processes affecting organizational life. The process of critical reflection provides language and concepts which help people acknowledge and make sense of feelings they may have long carried, but ignored, for example over tensions or contradictions they experience. The question of who owns the learning, diagnosis of issues or problems and the solutions to these are central to the students learning. Process skills are fundamental to leadership and organization development. Critical reflection as a pedagogical approach emerges on the programme because these dynamics are treated centrally as a site of learning about leading and leadership development.
