ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the use of critical reflection as a research method for exploring spirituality in my own clinical social work practice with women survivors of sexual trauma. I critically examined my espoused spiritual assumptions and how they impacted my practice using a reflective dialogue process described by Fook (2002). The model I worked with for the purposes of this study was presented in Fook’s text Social Work: Critical Theory and Practice , and was a precursor to the model developed by Fook and Gardner (2007). My research process involved taking a ‘snapshot’ of my starting assumptions and then tracing how they evolved and shifted through the course of the critical reflection process. According to Schön (1995), ‘knowing in action’ involves observing ourselves ‘doing’ (the practice moment), reflecting on what we notice (critical reflection), providing a description (the transcript), and reflecting on the description (the thematic analysis). This ‘knowing-in-action’ has the potential to generate new knowledge and theory that can be transferred to new situations, reflected on, and further revised. Fook’s (2002) model of critical reflection offered a method for making this tacit process conscious, and introduced an alternative epistemological approach that challenges and reframes traditional ways of knowing and researching by drawing on knowledge that is constructed through everyday experiences.
