Positionality, Reflexivity, and Taking Time to Pause: Thoughts on Professional Practice

When contemplating my focus for this blog post, I read back through the past blog contributions from my fellow Graduate Student Network colleagues. Each brought a rich and nuanced perspective on the field of community engagement from disparate corners of the world. Whether asserting the inclusion of non-U.S. voices, feminist praxis, or artistic expression in our field, each contributor deepened my knowledge of and appreciation for diverse approaches to the practice and scholarship of community engagement.

Now that it was my turn, I questioned what unique insights I had to offer. Like many mid-career professionals in the community engagement field, I am more accustomed to curating and facilitating reflective spaces for my students than taking the time to reflect on my own practice. The speed of life and my identities as a parent, spouse, full-time professional, Ed.D student, and community volunteer often fills each day to the brim. When I haven’t paused to catch my breath for a while, Annie Dillard’s words come to mind: “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” For this post, I offer up and attempt to answer the following question: how can reflexivity deepen awareness of our own positionalities and inform our professional practices in ways that advance equity?

To answer this question for myself, I must start by acknowledging my identity as a white, middle class, educated, cis-gender woman who holds a U.S. passport and is currently able-bodied. In the nonprofit and higher education roles I’ve held in the last 25 years, the ubiquity of white women has enabled me to inhabit professional spaces in an unassuming, seemingly neutral way. In the first decade of my career, I worked in experiential education on the U.S.-Mexico border, designing experiences that helped U.S. citizens understand and take action against the detrimental effects of U.S. political and economic policy. It wasn’t until I’d pivoted to the higher education community engagement field that I began to recognize whiteness as a concept and a currency (Blaisdell, 2016) that allowed me to critique my country’s foreign policy and militarized borders from a social location of choice and comfort. 

In higher education community engagement, borders are at times more opaque than ones that require a passport to cross, but similarly pernicious. When I arrived at my current professional role 7 years ago, I quickly recognized the importance of the long-term community partnerships and critical facilitation frameworks that undergirded our service-learning programs. Particularly coming from a predominantly white institution in the suburbs engaging with communities of color in our neighboring metro area, I knew that much of my work would involve engaging students in complex questions of power and oppression before, during, and after their service-learning experiences. What a privilege, challenge, and responsibility it has been, over these years, to facilitate reflective spaces with various tiers of students and student leaders. In the process, I have tried to keep Mitchell, et. al.,’s critique of service-learning as a “pedagogy of whiteness” (2012) as a constant reminder. Even as we introduce critically-informed pedagogies and frameworks into our community-engaged learning programs, in what ways are those frameworks (and I) assuming a student positionality that looks like my own? 

When I began a doctoral program to explore these questions in a deeper way, I learned about the concept of reflexivity. To paraphrase Corlett and Mavin (2019), whereas reflection is retrospective, reflexivity is an ongoing process of monitoring one's reflective processes and integrating evolving understandings of oneself in relation to one's research and participants. In my data collection and analysis, reflexivity has been interwoven throughout through the scaffolded assignments of my Ed.D program. In professional practice, I find that I need to be much more intentional about practicing reflexivity. Two concepts, also from Corlett and Mavin (2018) have been impactful in realizing this intention:

1. Reflexivity as a collective practice. Being able to dialogue with colleagues, students, and others inside and outside my institution has held me accountable and deepened my engagement with ideas that I couldn’t fully appreciate on my own. Before I knew of the concept of reflexivity, the power of this collective practice crystalized for me in 2020, when I participated in an anti-racist book club for community engagement practitioners at Jesuit universities. We read Service Learning as a Political Act in Education: Bicultural Foundations for a Decolonizing Pedagogy (Hernandez, 2018). As the COVID lockdown started and the nation entered a time of racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd, our zoom community grappled with the many ways in which service-learning could fortify existing hierarchies instead of advancing justice. I can trace back the discussions with this group as the most impactful moments of my professional learning in this field.  

2. The role of discomfort in reflexivity. I often think about the impact of white supremacy culture in all aspects of identity that I mentioned at the outset of this blog post (professional, student, family member, community member), particularly the characteristic regarding the right to comfort (Jones & Okun, 2001). Engaging with uncomfortable topics such as whiteness in service-learning programs is not easy, but is necessary if our work truly is to advance equity and build capacity for the next generation of leaders to do so even more boldly.

Connecting with practitioner scholars in IARSCLE and the GradSN who are dedicated to reflexive practice and equity has been gratifying. Although we each bring our unique positionalities and cultural contexts, the commitment to taking time to pause and consider complex and uncomfortable questions, on both individual and collective levels, will continue to be important in deepening and strengthening our international network and centering equity in our local practices.

Blaisdell, B. (2016). Schools as racial spaces: understanding and resisting structural racism, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29(2), 248-272

Corlett, S., & Mavin, S. (2018). Reflexivity and researcher positionality. The SAGE handbook of qualitative business and management research methods, 377-399.

Dillard, A. (1988). The Writing Life. Tikkun 31(3)

Hernandez, K. (2017). Service learning as a political act in education: Bicultural foundations for a decolonizing pedagogy. Routledge.

Jones, K., & Okun, T. (2001). White supremacy culture. Dismantling racism: A workbook for social change groups, 28-35.

Mitchell, T. D., Donahue, D. M., & Young-Law, C. (2012). Service learning as a pedagogy of Whiteness. Equity & Excellence in Education, 45(4), 612-629.

Heather Craigie is the Associate Director of John Carroll University’s Center for Service-Learning and Social Action. She is an Ed.D student at Northeastern University, where her dissertation research focuses on critical consciousness development through community-engaged leadership positions. She and her family live in Shaker Heights, Ohio.