‘I COMPLY BUT DEEPLY RESENT BEING ASKED TO DO SO’: Ethical considerations of assessing students’ reflective writing

Ethical decision-making and integrity are often listed among university graduate attributes, considered crucial components of professional practice, and are often assessed through ‘critical reflection’ assignments. This chapter critically examines the appropriateness and ethicality of the widespread academic practice of assessing students’ reflective writing in higher education. The LCT concepts of ‘clusters’ and ‘constellations’, which explore how certain kinds of meanings are grouped together, are used to analyze business reflective journals and evaluate whether they can be claimed to be ‘empowering’ and ‘emancipatory’ and enabling critical reflection as a process. The findings of this research suggest that reflective assignments could be seen as contributing to deficit discourses rather than challenging the status quo and allowing ‘freedom of expression’ as well as limiting rather than empowering students’ agency. The chapter will conclude with a discussion of the need to critically reflect about the practice of assessing critical reflection in tertiary settings. We suggest that decolonizing critical reflection is necessary in order to design reflective tasks that enable rather than constrain students’ learning to become self-reflective practitioners.