British Journal of Social Work (2006) 36, 189206

doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch269 Advance Access publication October 10, 2005

Narrating Significant Experience: Reflective Accounts and the Production of (Self) Knowledge
Carolyn Taylor
Carolyn Taylor is Senior Lecturer in the School of Community, Health Sciences and Social Care, University of Salford. She has published several articles on knowledge practices and judgement making in social work and is author with Sue White of Practising Reflexivity in Health and Welfare: Making Knowledge (Buckingham, Open University Press, 2000). Address for correspondence: Carolyn Taylor, School of Community, Health Sciences and Social Care, University of Salford, Allerton Building, Frederick Road, Salford M6 6PU, UK. E-mail: c.taylor@salford.ac.uk

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Summary
Notwithstanding the rise of evidence-based practice, other tendencies within social work scholarship are also discernible. One of these is the study of the everyday, routine accomplishment of practice, drawing on microsociological methods and techniques. In this article, I apply techniques drawn from narrative and discourse analysis to the study of reflective practice accounts, which hold an important place in social work education. In particular, it is relevant to examine the form that reflective accounts take and the rhetorical and narrative devices deployed within them to accomplish a competent professional identity. My argument is not that such accounts of practice are untruthful, rather I propose that we would do well to move beyond taking texts (and talk) for granted and treating language as merely the medium for expressing inner thoughts and feelings. Social work should take seriously the need to explore its modes of representation and to cultivate a more self-conscious approach to the way professional and client identities are produced in practice. Keywords: Reflective practice, narrative, rhetorical devices, qualitative methods of analysis

Introduction
Within social work policy and practice, much is currently being made of the need for underpinning evidence and knowledge. Supported by central government through various initiatives, the what works? movement continues to

The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The British Association of Social Workers. All rights reserved.

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gather momentum (Macdonald, 2000; Sheldon, 2001). Yet the dominance of evidence-based policy and practice is by no means complete, and other tendencies within social work scholarship are also discernible. One of these can be described as concerning itself not with the application of knowledge to practice in the manner adumbrated by the evidence-based practice movement but with exploring the everyday, routine processes by which social work practice is accomplished. Of particular importance to this kind of study are the ways in which practitioners create caseness and generate knowledge about service users. Thus researchers seek to analyse how social workers accomplish the work of the organization and constitute professional practice. These analyses utilize particular qualitative methods, influenced to a large degree by microsociological approaches such as interactionism, ethnomethodology, conversation, discourse and narrative analysis (for a synopsis and discussion, see Taylor and White, 2000) since these are especially suited to obtaining a critical understanding of practice. Their relevance lies in bringing the researcher closer to practice, focusing on the sites where social work is practised and exploring the various media by which the institutional order is produced and the business of the organization gets done, for example through talk (e.g. with and about clients/service users), text (e.g. case records and reports), the use of social space (e.g. the organization of offices) and the use of other social artefacts (e.g. forms, diaries and, increasingly, information and computer technology). To date, such studies of social work practice have tended to focus on talk and written text and are relatively few in number in comparison with similar studies of other professions, especially law and medicine. Nonetheless, they give a distinctive insight into social work practice (see, for example Hall, 1997; Pithouse, 1998, White, 1999, 2003; Hall et al., 2003). This is because they move us away from evaluating practice against a set of normative standards of good practice or prescribing what ought to be done and what works to exploring what goes on in practice or rather how practice is performed locally and specifically in various health and welfare settings. A further identifying feature of this body of work is in the way that it treats research data. Conventionally, social work and social policy approaches treat talk and written texts as transparent media by which to access the reality beyond the data (Hall, 1997, p. 9), i.e. to tell us what really happens/ed. In contrast, more critical approaches to qualitative data suggest that we perceive them as actively constructing the practice they describe in particular ways for particular audiences. As Hall (1997 p. 11) notes: [s]ocial work accounts [whether written or spoken] describe and justify social work and show professional practice being created through rhetorical and interactional activity. Thus, social work, in a similar way to other institutional orders, can be understood as being held together by communicative practices (Sarangi and Roberts, 1999, p. 1) which are worthy of exploration in their own right. In this paper, I want to supplement this work on the rhetorical and interactional nature of social work practice by subjecting reflective accounts to similar

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scrutiny. These accounts, produced by students and qualified practitioners for learning and development purposes, are, in my view, also worthy of inclusion in the study of the behind-the-scenes or backstage work of professionals. Such written accounts of practice are becoming increasingly important in social work education and training (in the UK at least) as a means by which practitioners can achieve competence and demonstrate its accomplishment. However, it is generally assumed that these accounts are straightforward learning tools, a means to give unmediated access to practice and/or to the thoughts and feelings of the individual practitioner. Shared with educators, they can be used to improve professional performance or to assess claims to competence. In contrast, I want to argue that insufficient attention has been paid to the functions that such accounts perform and the form in which they are presented. These are not, in my view, simply neutral descriptions of practice; what gets narrated and how practice is narrated are not driven by the facts of the case but by the imperative to display a competent professional (albeit possibly fallible) identity. In what follows, I set out the place of reflection in social work education and practice and introduce the concept of narrative in more detail before analysing some examples of reflection.

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Reflective social work practice

The relationship between knowledge and professional practice has long been debated. Post-enlightenment approaches to knowledge tend to assume that it is generated externally in an objective and neutral way and then applied to practice in a top-down, deductive manner (Taylor and White, 2000). This rests on the assumption that systematically produced, scientific, generalized and generalizable (propositional) knowledge provides the most solid foundations for practice. From this standpoint, habit, routine and intuition tend to be regarded with some suspicion since they discourage a focus on effectiveness or innovation. Such approaches disdain the ad hoc and arbitrary nature of professional judgement that is not overtly reliant on sound evidence, whereas the reflective practice movement takes the opposite view, celebrating artistry and intuition in practice and suggesting that theorizing is more of a bottom up, inductive process (Napier and Fook, 2000, p. 78). Proponents of reflective practice argue that professional practitioners do not operate in technicalrational mode deductively applying theory to practice. Instead, significant dimensions of theory are implicit in action, demonstrated through practice, and are often beyond conscious articulation (Schn, 1983; Gould, 1996). For these reasons, practice is not amenable to the rational ordering suggested by the technicalrational approach. Complexity, messiness and ambiguity characterize practice situations, and problems are not pre-defined but become articulated in and through practice as professionals attempt to manage messes (Ackoff, 1979). In working with and on behalf of service users, practitioners are thus involved in creating knowledge about practice

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through experience rather than simply applying ready-made knowledge to practice. In this sense, craft knowledge and practice wisdom are more important facets of practice than espoused theory and its application to practice. How then do practitioners access their knowledge? It is suggested that for the experienced practitioner, much of what they do becomes familiar and routine to the point where they just know or operate in a knowing-in-action way (Schn, 1983, 1987). However, the demands of professional practice are such that, when puzzles and surprise situations arise, social workers are stimulated into reflection-in-action, i.e. thinking about their practice in the course of undertaking it (Schn, 1983). They are simultaneously in the action and thinking about it (but see Eraut, 1994 for a critique of this view). Individual practitioners will then choose how much to reflect and modify their behaviour in the face of these new challenges. Given its ad hoc, spontaneous nature, reflecting-in-action , however, is perhaps insufficient to ensure that practitioners exert adequate control over their practice. With experience, practice may easily become habitual and routinized, and the perceived need for reflection may recede. More formalized methods for reflection-on-action (Schn, 1983) are therefore advocated within educational and practice settings in order to place continuing learning and development firmly on the map. These techniques of looking back to previous practice aim to promote the development of practitioners abilities to generate understanding of their practice, their theories of action and the values they espouse. In other words, through this medium, they learn to articulate what and how they have learned from experience and, through this process of reflection or retrospection, to advance their practice in the future. Now it is not my intention to suggest that such reflection is inappropriate. Whilst routine action cannot be avoided if practitioners are to function in busy and demanding work environments, there is also a need for them to retain critical control over their performance and to ensure that deliberation and consultation are embedded in practice (Eraut, 1994). I accept that routine behaviour and intuitive decision making cannot be treated as infallible. However, I want to suggest that, within this endeavour to encourage reflection, insufficient attention is given to the form that reflective accounts take. They seem to be accepted tout court as making accessible the inner thoughts and feelings of individual practitioners or as performing a kind of recuperative role for the individual subject (Atkinson, 1997). In contrast, I want to suggest that memory, time, experience and biography are all constituted through instances of narrating practice. As White and I have argued elsewhere (Taylor and White, 2000, 2001), social work practitioners, educators and academics need to employ a reflexive approach to their knowledge in order to achieve a critical awareness of their own processes and products. Reflection-on-action plays an important part in the constitution of identity as we will see in a subsequent section. First, however, I discuss the narrative turn in health and welfare and suggest how it can illuminate reflective practice.

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The narrative turn

Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told . . . We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of past actions . . . (Brooks, 1984 p. 3).

It has become something of a truism that we grasp our lives in narrative. Stories and narrativization, it is said, give intelligibility and coherence to the jumbled disorder of everyday experience (Polkinghorne, 1987; Plummer, 2001). Narrative enables us to make sense of, to pattern the events of our lives. How the term narrative is defined, however, is the subject of different definition and interpretation: from one perspective, narrative and story are regarded as (virtually) synonymous, both are tales that are told (Polkinghorne, 1987); some make a clear distinction between story (the events) and narrative (the recounting of the story, see Abbott, 2002); for others, narrative encompasses a wide variety of genres including painting and film, as well as spoken or written tales (Barthes, 1982). Whilst I cannot explore these different perspectives in any depth or detail here, it is worthwhile focusing attention on a key distinction between autonomous and interactional approaches to the analysis of narratives. In the former, narratives are interrogated for their deep structure which is said to exist independently of any of the storys surface manifestations when actualized (Chatman, 1981). In the latter approach, the usefulness of the distinction between story and discourse is questioned. For example, Smith (1981) argues that narratives should be seen as acts or rather as social transactions. Approaching narrative in this way, she argues, is fruitful because:
it encourages us to notice and explore certain aspects of narrative that tend to remain obscure or elusive when we conceive of it as primarily as a kind of text or structure or any other form of detached and decontextualized entity. For it suggests . . . that every telling is produced and experienced under certain social conditions and constraints and that it always involves two parties, an audience as well as narrator . . . (Smith, 1981, p. 228229).

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In other words, it is useful to conceive of narrative as dialogical (even when the hearer or reader is at some remove from the act of recounting) and as constructed in accordance with a particular set of purposes and interests. It is this interactional approach that I intend to adopt here, attending to the performative aspects of narrative rather than its formal properties. Interest in narrative has gained considerable ground within the social sciences in recent decades as qualitative methods and interpretivist perspectives, which perhaps hark back to earlier sociological preoccupations with the life, have gained widespread acceptance (Atkinson, 1997). Within health and welfare, these trends are also apparent: several works, albeit from different perspectives, have encouraged a focus on the contribution that stories and narrative can make to our understanding of medical experience, both lay and

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professional (see, for example, Kleinman, 1988; Hunter, 1991; Frank, 1995; Greenhalgh and Hurwitz, 1998), and this is now being extended to nursing (Bowles, 1995; Poirier and Ayres, 1997: Parker and Wiltshire, 2003) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, social work (Pithouse and Atkinson, 1987; Hall, 1997). Despite this growing interest in narrative within health and welfare by both researchers and practitioners, reflective practice has somehow remained immune from its influence. Reflective accounts of practice are generally taken as giving unmediated access to the subjective world of the practitioner; they are treated as merely after-the-fact accounts of experience (Mattingly, 1998, p. 2) that make practice accessible to the reader. In much of the reflective practice literature, attention is primarily given to extolling the virtues of reflective practice and describing how-to-do reflective practice, so much so that the form that reflective accounts take and the conventions they use appear to be regarded as incidental. Against this, I want to argue here that it is somewhat nave to view reflective accounts as what really happened in any given situation. They are not neutral descriptions of some out-there reality (Potter, 1996). Rather, we should acknowledge that narrators select, order and report events in particular ways for particular effects. This is a point well made by sociologists and literary theorists among others:
When we tell a story, there tends to be a shift in the register of our voices, enclosing and setting off the narrative almost in the manner of the traditional once upon a time and they lived happily ever after: narrative demarcates, encloses, establishes limits, orders. And . . . it may be useful and valuable to think about the kinds of ordering it uses and creates, about the figures of design it makes (Brooks, 1984, p. 4).

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It is these kinds of orderings and the figures of design used that I want to examine here.

Narrating practice and performing identity

In reflective narratives, practitioners are not only figuring (Latimer, 1997) clients and service users, they are also figuring their own identities. In arguing thus, I am suggesting that identity is not something that service users or social workers possess unproblematically and simply bring into their encounters with each other. They are not a matter of simple description. In contrast, I am operating from the stance that identity is closely connected to issues of representation; how we represent ourselves and others is something to be worked at, performed in specific instances, be they face to face encounters with clients, behind the scenes talk or written representations of practice. In other words, identity is not a collection of fixed and static attributes that we posses, rather we make our identities in the course of our everyday lives in interaction with others. Within a work environment, we strive to pass as a competent practitioner in a similar way to Latimers registered general nurse (RGN):

Narrating Significant Experience 195 An RGN has to perform in ways to pass (and I mean that in both senses) as an RGN. To hold on to that identity, she must go on passing for a nurse, an RGN, or she risks having her identity questioned, or at worst, being struck off . . . but what constitutes the identity to be passed, and the criteria or marks that will pass, are themselves contested, to be figured and reconfigured locally and specifically (Latimer, 1999, p. 187).

Identity, it is sugested, is produced in various ways, through language, materials and social artefacts (Strathern, 1991). Reflective accounts are one, but by no means the only, means to produce identity within the arenas of qualifying education and training and continuing professional development. In essence, the practitioner is performing two closely connected identities, one as competent and caring professional and the other as competent reflector so that they perform a composite identity as a reflective practitioner (Schn, 1983). I want to look a little more closely at this production of identity in what follows.

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Forms of reflection-on-action
It was noted earlier that narrative can fruitfully be regarded as dialogical, involving a relationship between narrator and an audience. This point is particularly apposite in respect of reflective accounts which are typically solicited by educators, supervisors and even researchers who may well exert considerable control over the format. Although reflection may take an unstructured form and the reflector may be given a free rein to choose the style and format, increasingly, more structured or guided forms of (verbal and written) reflection are being promoted by educators. These range from fairly simple formats such as Gibbs reflective cycle (Gibbs, 1988) and the what? so what? now what? questioning technique (Borton, 1970 cited in Rolfe et al., 2001) to schedules involving a more intricate series of questions (Johns, 1994, 2000). Critical incidents are also used as a technique for eliciting a practitioners specific experience in a given situation. In their study of qualifying and qualified social workers, for example, Fook et al. (2000) adopted the criteria proposed by Benner (1984) as being particularly suited to the sorts of unstructured situations and problems encountered by social workers. An incident chosen for reflection could be critical in the sense of being especially difficult, demanding or influential, it might be one that had gone well or badly, or simply be a typical example of everyday practice (Fook et al., 2000, p. 251). In this study, participating students/workers were asked to describe the incident, its context and significance, as well as their thoughts and feelings about it (Fook et al., 2000, p. 253) using the following questions as prompts:

The context of the incident (e.g. your role in the agency at the time, the time of day, etc.) A detailed description of what happened Why the incident was critical to you?

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What were your concerns at the time? What were you thinking about as it was taking place? What were you feeling during and after the incident? What, if anything, you found most demanding about the situation? (Fook et al., 2000, p. 253).

For the purpose of this paper, I will analyse two critical incidents from the study of Fook et al. (2000) as this is a published source and therefore accessible to readers. Although the accounts are produced in an Australian context, the details are such that they will be entirely familiar to practitioners and educators internationally.

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Narrating experience: performing competent practice

Exemplar 1: a graduating social work student
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 I was placed at a centre that treated people with alcohol and drug problems. I was in a counselling session and the person I was counselling kept going on about a particular issue. He wanted to sue another agency for assault. I was getting really involved in it all. Instead of remaining as a neutral third person, I became really absorbed in the injustice of it all and in doing that I played the part of rescuer and him victim. It took me three sessions to work it out. He used it as a decoy from looking at the real issues in his life. The incident was critical because it really showed my inexperience I suppose. I was concerned for the injustice he had inexperienced in the welfare system. I was also concerned that I was acting quite inappropriately by becoming overly involved in the issue and losing sight of the individual clients needs. As it was taking place I was thinking that I had lost the whole counselling sessionthe sense of purpose within the session and my ability to have some structure to the session. Kadushin would have been having nightmares. I felt angry during the actual session about the particular service in question. I also felt like I was struggling to make head or tails out of everything, plus conscious of

17 the skills I werent (sic) implementing during that session . . . The session was 18 all over the place, really messy (Fook et al., 2000. p. 51). Andrew Pithouse (1998) describes social work as an invisible trade. In part he does so in acknowledgement of the fact that many of the encounters between practitioners and clients take place behind closed doors, away from the scrutiny of managers, supervisors or practice teachers. When practitioners

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do retrieve and analyse their occupational processes, they make choices about what to make available or visible to those who supervise them. They decide how they render their practice in retrospective accounts, whether they gloss over mistakes and ineptitudes or admit to not doing things well. In contrast to case records and reports, reflective accounts provide a space in which it is permissible to write about poor practice in a relatively safe way. In this context, to acknowledge mistakes or difficulties is not typically seen as a sign of incompetence, rather it is seen as a way of dealing with the uncomfortable feelings that making mistakes will have engendered as well as promoting learning for the future about how to do things differently/better. Nevertheless there may be considerable inhibitions on reflectors to say the right thing. The fact that this account was produced for a research study may have made it easier for the student to select a poor performance which is how this account is connoted in Fook et al. (2000). Certainly the student in Exemplar 1 conveys a struggle with their role: I was getting really involved in it all (lines 34); I became really absorbed in the injustice of it (lines 45); I played the rescuer, he the victim (lines 56); it took me three sessions to work it out (line 6). The final evaluation is that the session was all over the place, really messy (lines 1718). In order to arrive at this judgement, it is clear that the writer is operating with some ideal model of how the session should have been or rather how they should have conducted the session. The writer articulates the view that it is the counsellors responsibility to provide structure and to retain control of the session regardless of the propensity of the client to resist that control and to try to take the session in a different direction. Counselling sessions are clearly meant to be orderly, structured and disciplined affairs and the student needs to account for this deviation from the norms of good practice. After all, some blame attaches to the participants. They did not conform to the model of counsellorclient behaviours. Here, however, the clients failure to act in an appropriate way is tacitly accepted. He is not counted as particularly blameworthy. Instead the student is prepared to accept blameworthiness, openly acknowledging that they did a lot of things wrong, although they attribute this to inexperience. This serves, of course, as a form of exculpation. This was not malice aforethought or lack of care on the part of the student. Rather they were a bit out of their depth when the sessions developed in an unexpected way. Had they been more experienced they would have been able to see through the clients behaviour more quickly. They would have avoided being drawn into the clients perspective and been able to preserve third person neutrality. They would have avoided over-involvement and acted more appropriately. Although the practitioner did not manage to achieve these things, nonetheless they quite skilfully display their knowledge of what is it to be a counsellor, how a counsellor should comport themselves and what they should be concerned with, i.e. not the superficial issues or presenting problems but the underlying issues (the real issues in his life, line 7). Blameworthiness is thus mitigated by the capacity to know what was wrong with the session and how to put it right in future. The student is not discredited as a

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practitioner in their account. They have produced a plausible account of their failings and can, therefore, still pass as a trainee counsellor. A further aspect of professional identity is worthy of comment here. Within the educational sphere, social work students are not simply trying to show skilful performance as a social worker, or in this case counsellor, they are also endeavouring in their reflective accounts to demonstrate practice grounded in knowledge since the ability to integrate theory into practice is regarded as an essential attribute of the competent professional. Whilst some reflective accounts may concentrate more on surfacing the personal thoughts and feelings of the practitioner, others are concerned with being a knowledgeable practitioner and are more theoretically oriented. These accounts make reference to relevant knowledge and literature as in the following exemplar:
. . . My withdrawal had two negative functions: first, it allowed me to indulge in a safe space of the victim, therefore I did not have to take a chance in debate; and second, by not extending myself, the supervisor was denied a constructive space where she could mirror her argument. Foucault (cited in Sawicki, 1991, p. 52) claims power is exercised rather than possessed . . . The power I exercised against myself would otherwise be known as sabotage (Fook, 1999, p. 196).

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Typically references are displayed in this conventional manner as they would be in academic assignments. Kadushin would be having nightmares (line 14) is rather different. It is a very informal way of referring to one of the leading exponents of practice knowledge in relation to interviewing (Kadushin, 1997). The form of the reference in this account performs very useful work in that it makes a strong claim on the part of the writer for a great deal of familiarity with Kadushin work and orientation. It is of course backed up by the references to structure, control and order elsewhere in the account to indicate knowledge of the theoretical components of counselling (there are of course different models of the counselling relationship, some of which would assign greater importance to an empathic, person-centred approach over structure). Whilst the execution of the practice is at fault, the practitioner can still demonstrate that they know what they should be doing and are endeavouring to work within a clearly articulated frame of reference. The work that they are undertaking is not simply befriending or just talking but counselling. Despite the flaws in the performance, the writer can still account for themselves in a way that suggests their integrity as a practitioner. Their professional identity is thus not undermined by their ownership of errors. In this sense, this account is typical of a mea culpa sort of confessional in which a lucid narrator turn[s] back on a past self steeped in ignorance, confusion and delusion (Cohn, 1978, p. 145) and in so doing creates distance between this past self and their present state. Exemplar 2: a worker settling into practice in a child protection agency
1 2 This was a recent incident involving a male ward (aged 9), the middle of three children, who has been rejected by his mother at birth. He has been a ward for

Narrating Significant Experience 199 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 many years. The state social welfare department are going to close his family group home. He has had lots of different carers. His behaviour is variable, but he has responded well to the most recent couple looking after him. He has improved in so many ways. I had to tell him about the closure of the group home and that we would be looking for a foster placement for him. I had been his worker for about a year; he had had lots of workers. The incident took place at 7.30 in the morning and it was to tell him of the closure of his family group home. It was difficult for both he and I. I picked him
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up and took him to McDonalds for breakfast and told him about the foster placement. The boy started crying and saying I wont go! I hate the state welfare department! I want to stay where I am! He was adamant he wouldnt go. I walked him to the door and I thought he would take off. He said: Can a child die of a broken heart? My response was: Its possible, but we would take care it didnt happen to him. We would try to find a good home for him. I could see him adjusting on the way home. Will they have Nintendo there? He was lost, but still wanting the other worker. I spent an hour with him altogether. The incident was critical to me because of my sadness; my own feelings were very much involved. He was a very tragic little fellow. I was dealing with my feelings, much more so than at other times. The situation didnt make sense. What are we doing to this child? He is finally in a place that works and it is to be closed. His mother is screwing him up and now were screwing him up. I remember driving home and sitting at the lights in tears; I hadnt cried before. There was no-one to debrief me, so I had to come back and get on with it. I was concerned about his reaction and his response. I wondered if he would take off. I knew he was capable of violent behaviour; I wondered fleetingly if he would do it at McDonalds. When he was silent, I was concerned at this and the sadness. I was thinking as it was taking place: Is it possible to do this in a way that is gentle and going to make sense to the child knowing full well it wont be what he wants, He has made such gains. Are we going to lose all this? I was feeling relaxed, but very sad. I was also feeling anxious about his response. I was angry with the Department, with the people who make these decisions. I felt disappointment with the powers that be. What I found most demanding about the situation was keeping on track with

200 Carolyn Taylor 37 38 39 what I needed to say and not letting my own stuff get in the way. I was trying to present it to him positively and gently (when I didnt feel positive about it). It was difficult trying to link with his feelings (which were similar to my own) and still

40 try and be positive (Fook et al., 2000, p. 8990) It has been suggested that social workers operate in an environment where paradox, unpredictability and blame appear far more pronounced than was previously the case (Pithouse, 1998 p. 2). Social workers have to do their best in less than favourable circumstances, juggling a range of competing imperatives, for example to protect children and safeguard their welfare and to provide stability and continuity in their lives. Within this precarious environment, it is not surprising that workers struggle to deal with highly charged events and situations. At one level, this can be read as an account that gives access to the inner turmoil of a concerned and dedicated professional faced with an intractable case. However, as I have suggested earlier, we need to go further and explore more directly just how an account such as this is constructed to such vivid effect:
[Narratives] should not be read through to the life beyond but read reflexively as part of, as moves in, and as constituting the lives they are ostensibly about (Edwards, 1997, p. 271)

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Two aspects are particularly important here. One is the way the practitioner constructs the child and their circumstances, the second is the way they construct themselves as a social worker. In the first exemplar, the student social worker is troubled by acting as rescuer to the clients victim. This does not seem to conform to the image of detached professionalism the counsellor is supposed to manifest in their relations with clients. The second example presents a direct contrast to this in that the rescuervictim motif is used to construct an account of caring practice by/on the part of the worker. There is a clear attempt to persuade us as readers that the child is a victim of circumstance from the moment of his rejection at birth by his mother (line 2), the implication being that his siblings were not rejected in the same way. This victimhood is accentuated as the account continues, culminating in the potent phrase a very tragic little fellow (line 20). We are therefore asked to accept that his potential for bad behaviour (I knew he was capable of violent behaviour, line 27) be read in the context of his tragic life with many moves and changes of worker. The use of direct speech is an important device here. In many reflective accounts speech is reported indirectly to paraphrase or summarize the original speech, for example:
She is afraid that even [if] she managed to stay away from her mother, the foster family couldnt have her and she didnt know who else would have her, wants her. So I just soothed her, talked about how she couldnt be emotional in the family and she had to be good all the time because if it got the other kids upset they wouldnt want her (Fook et al., 2000, p. 91, italics added)

Narrating Significant Experience 201

This summarizes the content of the talk without giving any of its inflections and nuances of expression. In contrast, in the second exemplar, direct speech is used to convey to the reader the strength of the childs feelings, his level of distress as well as the workers careful and caring response (Its possible, but we would take care of him . . . lines 1516). The use of the device of active voicing (Wooffitt, 1992) services a particular function: it adds to the immediacy and authenticity of the report giving a strong sense of this is what really happened (Taylor and White, 2000, p. 68). It renders the account more authoritative and therefore credible to the reader. Reflective accounts display some similarity to ethnographic texts in their style of reportage which mixes the authorial statement of events, times and places; the indirect summary of speech; free indirect discourse, more directly mimetic speech (Atkinson, 1990, p. 124) along with direct speech. As Atkinson further notes [r]eported speech may also be presented in this indirect mode so as to create the equivalent of an interior monologue, so that personal feelings or responses are constructed (Atkinson, 1990, p.124). Verbs such as I was thinking, I felt followed by indirect content paraphrase are used several times in both the above exemplars to construct inner thoughts/feelings as authentic presentations of what was going on inside the workers head at the time. As the hearers of the story, we are not left in any doubt about the perilous nature of the childs situation: he is finally in a place that works (line 22) . . are we going to lose all this? (line 32). This categorization of the childs situation employs extreme case formulations as well as a rhetorical question. These, according to Pomerantz, are used to legitimize claims in situations where someone anticipates or expects their co-interactants to undermine their claims and when they are in adversarial situations (Pomerantz, 1986, p. 222). Whilst the hearer/reader is not an adversary, the social worker has made a strong criticism of the child welfare process by claiming that the childs best interests are being overridden by the powers that be (note the impersonality of this rather clichd phrase). By emphasizing the plight of the child and putting it in an extreme way, the social worker seeks to buttress their claim and fend off potential disagreement. A prime function of the narrative is to persuade the reader of the authenticity of the story and the credibility of its teller. Whilst the narrator cannot control how their account is received, they can work with artfulness to get the listener/reader on their side. We are invited to adjudicate on the position adopted by the practitioner and clearly expected to take the workers side against the monolithic entity the Department. In the main, a clear contrast is made between the worker and his/her display of emotionality and care and the unfeeling/uncaring agency. This distance between the practitioner and the department is, however, broken down at one point when the worker says His mother is screwing him up and now were screwing him up (line 23, italics added). The repetition of screwing up conveys the wrongness of the decision, the degree of its impact on the child. It is followed immediately, however, by a strong emotional display by the worker

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202 Carolyn Taylor

(. . . in tears; I hadnt cried before, line 24). A stark contrast is portrayed between the department/powers that be and the practitioner. Who cares about the child? Who is hurting on behalf of the child? The answer must surely be the worker. Different versions of social work identity are foregrounded in the two pieces of reflection. Both practitioners show who they are/what they know/ what their relevancies are (Baker, 1997) in presenting the case and articulating their role, responsibilities and obligations. However, they take different stances on the issue of siding with the client. Whilst not taking sides is portrayed by the student in the first example as an indication of sound professional practice, for the second worker it is a mark of increasing comfort with the role of practitioner that they can take sides and be emotionally involved. In a sense, the worker is presented as a victim alongside the child as they are powerless to rescue the child. Nonetheless, they preserve their integrity and curbed their emotions in front of the child not letting my own stuff get in the way and present it positively and gently (lines 3738.). In many ways, what we have here is an atrocity tale of the unfeeling bureaucracy making decisions out of hard calculation that trample on the feelings and needs of service users (Dingwall, 1977; Baruch, 1981). Often these are told by the clients and service users themselves, but workers may also convey an us-and-them feel to their working relationships. This performs important work for the professional in preserving his/her integrity as a worker who clings fast to the needs and wishes of the child whilst still working to tell him sensitively and gently about a decision that will distress him. This is not a routinized worker who simply abides by the rules but someone who is able to work within an agency and yet disagree with it. As such, the worker is demonstrating her expertise and experience as a worker. She is displaying care as a core element of her social work identity.

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Conclusion
In exploring reflective accounts in this way, I am not suggesting that reflection is unhelpful to practitioners. Nor am I suggesting that reflectors do not write truthfully about their practice. I do not claim that reflective accounts are somehow dishonest representations of practice, that would be unfair to students and practitioners alike. Indeed, it is not the purpose of my argument to make evaluative judgments about the quality of the work displayed in reflective accounts. Rather, I have tried to suggest that reflective accounts make the practice of social work visible in a particular way for a particular audience (see also Taylor, 2003). Rather than seeing them as giving untrammelled access to the realm of private experience (Atkinson, 1997), I suggest that from an analytical point of view, it is important to recognize the place that reflective accounts play in the constitution of professional identity:

Narrating Significant Experience 203 How individuals recount their historieswhat they emphasize and omit, their stance as protagonists or victims, the relationships the story establishes between teller and audienceall shape what individuals can claim of their own lives. Personal stories are not merely a way of telling someone (or oneself) about ones life; they are the means by which identities may be fashioned (Rosenwald and Ochberg, 1992, p. 1 cited in Riessman, 1993, p. 2).

What I have argued here is that the narratives of reflective accounts are not simple descriptions of social work practice. They do not simply hark back to the events they recount, although they must have some authenticity in order to be plausible. If the audience for the account knows the practice, then they can call into question the credibility of the narrator and plausibility of the account if it seems incongruent with their knowledge of the practitioner or practice (Taylor, 2003). However, narratives of reflection are not simply acts of retrospection, looking back towards practice. They are also looking forward towards a knowing audience:
We are not only trying to convince ourselves with our memory constructions. Recalling the past also serves a dialogic function. The rememberers interlocutor (whether present in the flesh or in the abstract form of a reference group) exerts a subtle but steady pressure (Bruner, 1986, p. 59).

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In order to work, in the sense of being authoritative and plausible accounts of practice to the reader, reflection has to achieve verisimilitude for the reader. This vraisemblance (Todorov, 1968 cited in Atkinson, 1990) is not a matter of simply representing the pure facts of the case in an untarnished way. The events upon which the account is based are not available to us as the sole arbiter of authority of the account. Instead, other things come into play. Accounts are not usually the unsolicited confessions of the practitioner. Rather they are called forth in particular educational and supervisory settings to do particular work. Reflectors, it can be said following Foucault, are incited to confess (Usher and Edwards, 1995; Gilbert, 2001). What form then does this confessional take? Of particular importance is the writers capacity to locate themselves within the occupation of social worker, to understand its terms of reference, its norms of practice and its competing imperatives. To pass as a social worker is to demonstrate that one understands how to speak and write about ones practice in a convincing and authoritative way that also tunes into particular preoccupations with ethical issues and dilemmas. It will involve a selection and ordering of the facts and the creation of a particular version whilst suppressing or concealing other possible versions. Reflective accounts are written to persuade educators and supervisors that the social worker can pass as a competent practitioner. They form part of the cultural resources of the profession and perform particular rhetorical work to accomplish professional identity. There is a need, therefore, to recognize their artfulness and to examine the devices and conventions they draw on. We need to pay due attention to:

204 Carolyn Taylor [narratives] construction in use: how actors improvise their personal narrative or their narrative of work accomplished. We need to attend to how socially shared resources of rhetoric and narrative are deployed to generate recognizable, plausible, and culturally well-informed accounts (Atkinson, 1997, p. 341).

I have tried to show here something of these processes at work in the production of reflective accounts. This, I believe, is not simply a matter of analysis; it is also of importance to practitioners. We need surely to move beyond taking texts (and talk) for granted and treating language as merely the medium for expressing inner thoughts and feelings. Social work needs to take seriously the need to explore its modes of representation and to cultivate a more self-conscious approach to the way professional and client identities are produced in practice. We have much to learn from sociology, ethnography and literary criticism about the stylistics and rhetorical properties of communicative practices in social work. Accepted: January 2005

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