Making Room for New Traditions: Encouraging Critical Reflective Professional Practice for Tertiary Education Management

We argue that a critical reflective professional practice is a necessary skill for tertiary education managers working in the knowledge-intensive enterprises of the tertiary education sector today. This is because a critical reflective professional practice is a useful sensemaking frame with which to address complexities and contestations of our everyday work. Indeed, Baker and Kolb (1993) regard such ‘inside-out’ perspectives as being highly “effective in valuing diversity and plurality in organisations” (p 26).A critical reflective practice offers a way to surface pressures and a way to examine our assumptions, as well as those of others and our organisation, about the way we do our work. In examining our professional practice and the conditions of our work it is possible to uncover limitations and possibilities, become less prone to complacency or rigidity in our thoughts and actions, and develop a greater awareness of different perspectives and possibilities through engagement with this practice. This is all the more necessary when we add accelerating rates of change, uncertainty, ambiguity and as well as highly politicised and contested spaces to the mix.