Reflective Practice

Reflective Practice in Academic Libraries and UniSQ Library

Rowena McGregor (Liaison Librarian); Kate Derrington (Lead Learning Advisor)

Reflection has a long history in libraries, as evidenced by Maria Grant’s (2007) review of empirical literature.^[1] Grant (2007) argued that analytical reflection in particular provided benefits to libraries and staff as it (a) focused on a single event (b) after the event had occurred, and most importantly (c) linked learning gleaned from the event to future practice. To our minds, this description of analytical reflection reads like a contemporary account of reflective practice.  Library surveys conducted in 2014 in the United Kingdom (Greenhill & Sen, 2014),^[2] and in the United States (Miller, 2020),^[3] confirmed that what we would now call reflective practice continues to provide many personal, professional, and institutional benefits. These benefits include an increase in learning from planned and unplanned events, and the ability to use this learning to improve planning and positively impact the outcomes of future events.

At the University of Southern Queensland, reflective practice is embedded into many professional activities. Reflective practice supports our Evidence Based Practice ethos, providing accessible, qualitative evidence of our activities. For example, all library staff are required to nominate a form of reflection as part of the application for professional development, as reflection following training increases the likelihood that the training will be both meaningful to the participant and impactful to their future professional practice (Thorpe & Howlett, 2020).^[4] Staff reflections can also be used as evidence of institutional commitment to a goal. This is the case of our previous report on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Reflective practice is unlikely to spontaneously arise in a library. Greenhill & Sen (2014) and Miller (2020) claimed that limited time, and lack of confidence and skill meant that professional development and time allocated for reflection were required for libraries and staff to fully benefit from the practice. Sadly, these requirements were often reported to be insufficient in many library environments. Therefore, to support reflective practice at the University of Southern Queensland Library, we use a variety of strategies to counter these potential barriers. Our professional development applications offer a variety of reflective activities as examples, and staff have reflected via personal journal entries and reports to managers; presentations to peers; blog posts; conference presentations; and professional and academic journal articles (Gunton & McGregor, 2022; Thorpe, 2021).^[5][6]

Mindful that our diverse Library staff have varying opportunities to engage in reflection, we recognised a more explicit approach may also be beneficial and enable staff to confidently include reflective practice in their annual professional development goals. Therefore, in 2022 Kate and I provided a range of professional development activities. These consisted of:

1. A themed ‘Evidence Based Practice Newsletter’ on the use of reflective practice in academic libraries. The content included general information on reflection in libraries and provided context for the other opportunities.
2. A workshop offered online discussing the rational for reflective practice and applying Borton’s (1970) model to library-related case studies as practice of implementing reflective thinking.^[7] At the completion of the workshop, staff drafted reflections that they could further develop for their professional development goals if desired.
3. An open invitation to all workshop participants to contribute to a qualitative journal article on the benefits and barriers to reflective practice as experienced by employees of an academic (university) library.

Where to from here / What next?

The final professional development activity supporting reflective activity in the Library is a proposed co-creation of a qualitative journal article for publication. Workshop participants have been invited to contribute vignettes of their experiences of reflection. These vignettes will be in the form of an anonymised summary of a professional reflection plus an account of the impact of the reflective process on their practice. We hope that all of these activities will facilitate reflective practice. The journal article will provide an external motivation for staff and should also demonstrate the intrinsic value of reflective practice.