An educator’s perspective on reflexive pedagogy: Identity undoing and issues of power

Introduction

It is a continuing criticism of critical management education (Collinson and Tourish, 2015; Ford and Harding, 2007) that it fails to turn a critical lens upon itself and address the power asymmetry between educators and students. This could be considered especially salient when implementing a pedagogy centred on reflexive dialogue, as is the context catalysing this inquiry. Current thinking on reflexive pedagogy has sought to recast the tutors’ power away from that of an instructor delivering expertise, to educator-as-facilitator in which power shifts in the relationship towards the students (Hibbert, 2013). Such a shift is generally seen as desirable (Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015), but we problematise how desirable this is for educators by asking what identity issues are raised for academics coming to terms with the revised (and potentially diminished) sense of identity occasioned by this approach. The need to understand the element of ‘identity undoing’ (Nicholson and Carroll, 2013) which occurs for academics in this context is at least as important as – and inevitably related to – the issues of power raised above.

Taking Hibbert’s (2013) study of the implications of reflexive pedagogy from the students’ perspective as a jumping-off point, we seek to explicate the parallel experiences of such pedagogy for educators. In drawing attention to the educators’ experience, we respond to an important facet of the recent calls for a greater critical understanding of the ‘subjective experience, tensions and outcomes’ (Gagnon and Collinson, 2014: 664) of leadership development programmes (LDPs), and in particular the inextricability of power and identity. We draw attention to the way in which the educator/facilitator’s experience is ‘dislodged from an implicit position of mastery’ (Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015: 186) by the adoption of a reflexive pedagogy – what Ellsworth (1989, cited in Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015: 186) calls ‘a pedagogy of the unknowable in which we can never fully know ourselves, our experience, others, nor the impact of our actions’.

This then is our project. We turn the reflexive lens on ourselves and our experience of adopting a reflexive pedagogy on an accredited LDP. Specifically, we explore the disruption and challenge to our taken-for-granted sense of identity and power within the student–educator relationship. The article is structured as follows. We begin by examining the notion of identity undoing in the context of LDPs, particularly as occasioned by the juxtaposition of power relations and resistance. Next, we outline a dialogic ‘testimonio’ approach whereby we use vignettes drawn from our own reflexive dialogue – a series of letters written between two of the authors – as a process of inquiry into reflexive pedagogy from the educator’s perspective. We use a detailed analysis of these vignettes to unpack the issues of educator identity undoing and power/resistance in the context of a reflexive pedagogy. We conclude by discussing the presence of a paradox within reflexive education that the greater the success in enabling reflexive dialogue between students, the greater the desire of the educator to intervene to limit the scope and impact of reflexivity in order to not become ‘a spare part’.

Reflexive pedagogy

Reflexivity – notably described as the sine qua non of critical management studies (Fulop, 2002) – is as fundamental to the learning that can be gleaned from surfacing our own implicit knowing as it is to the emancipatory agenda surrounding issues of power. Drawing from the language of ethnomethodology, reflexive dialogue is a vehicle for considering the ‘ongoing accomplishment of organized artful practices of everyday life’ (Garfinkel, 1967: 10) such that we know better ‘how to go on’ (Wittgenstein, 1953: 59). Key to reflexivity is its inherent recursiveness in ‘translat[ing] something [i.e. taken-for-granted norms and assumptions] from being used for thinking to being that which we think about’ (Hibbert, 2013: 805).What occurs in reflexivity is not the ‘outside in’ (Baker and Kolb, 1993) reflective learning of ‘theoretical insights or major intellectual breakthroughs, but moments in which we […] “understand something that is already in plain view” (Wittgenstein, 1953: 89) and the difference this new understanding may make to our lives’ (Cunliffe, 2002: 57).

These two key elements of the emancipatory agenda, power and reflexivity, may not work in concert however. Processes of reflexivity can bring about disturbance and disruption and power may be exercised to limit this disturbance. The discomfort encountered is the ‘disruptive’ (Hibbert et al., 2010: 55) forerunner to the ‘clearing out’ or ‘unlearning’ (Antonacopoulou, 2009: 422) of existing knowledge and the questioning of assumptions and perceptions to make room for new insights. In exploring these tensions, the lens of research on reflexive dialogue has focused understandably on recipients of pedagogic designs and on the ‘liminal space or state of between-ness’ (Hawkins and Edwards, 2015: 24) occupied by students as they engage with these tensions and transition from one identity to another in the course of leadership learning. Here, we shall reverse the lens and look at the impact of the pedagogy of reflexive dialogue on us, the designers and educators, to explore impacts of being disruptive, creating ‘sticky-moments’ (Riach, 2009: 361) and generating discomfort associated with the taken-for-granted aspects of identity as teacher and the use of power in learning. We therefore ask the question, ‘If in the educator’s context such disruption can be resisted and the pedagogy be manipulated, might this occur?’ ‘Would this paradoxically limit the emancipatory potential of a reflexive pedagogy?’ ‘Would indeed an educator use power to resist identity undoing?’

Identity and ‘identity undoing’ in the context of leadership education

Identity is a well-established construct in critical management studies (see Brown, 2001; Brown and Lewis, 2011; Collinson, 2003; Thomas, 2009), is becoming so in critical leadership studies (Carroll and Levy, 2010; Ford, 2006) and is starting to be adopted in critically oriented leadership development work (Carroll and Levy, 2010; Gagnon, 2008; Gagnon and Collinson, 2014). Such studies tend to build on Alvesson and Willmott’s (2002) ‘identity work’ framework revolving around an interplay between self-identity (the self as reflexively understood), identity work (the ongoing struggle to achieve or accomplish self-identity) and identity regulation (the – often tacit – adoption of discourses and practices that shape certain identities above others). This framework speaks strongly to the locating of identity within broader organisational themes of power, control and discipline where the subject’s ‘self-definition(s), coherence(s) and meaning(s)’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002: 622) are targeted and moulded in multiple points of intersection with an organisation. The result is that ‘people are continuously engaged in forming, repairing, maintaining, strengthening or revising, the constructions that are productive of a precarious sense of coherence and distinctiveness’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002: 626).

That leadership development requires participants to engage in the dynamics of identity work and identity regulation is becoming better understood (Carden and Callahan, 2007; Carroll and Levy, 2010; Gagnon, 2008; Gagnon and Collinson, 2014). Such development cannot avoid the presence of implicit – and frequently explicit – leadership models and judgements about what counts (or not) as leadership that participants have to contend with and work through in what has been called an ‘identity workspace’ (Petriglieri, 2011). That educators and facilitators also engage in identity work in the same identity workspace is, however, a very recent field of scholarly interest and one to which we seek to contribute.

Nicholson and Carroll’s (2013) work on identity undoing provides a powerful conceptualisation of identity struggle that seems most resonant with the tensions experienced by educators in reflexive pedagogical practice. They theorise, beyond the traditional foci of identity formation, construction and regulation, to what they contend has been an overlooked phenomenon of loss, fragmentation and disruption which they term identity undoing. Identity undoing is presented as ‘kaleidoscopic’ (Nicholson and Carroll, 2013: 1230) and manifested through a range of processes from reflexive critique (shaking up) to unlearning (letting go), to episodes of ‘stuckness’ and seeming immobility (floundering), accompanied by a similar range of emotional responses from delight to pain. While the focus of Nicholson and Carroll’s (2013) work is primarily on the participants of an LDP, their gaze inevitably includes facilitators/educators. In the early interaction data from their study, facilitators are generally analysed as hierarchical figures with the institutional and pedagogical power to inflict, invite, sanction and moderate identity undoing. In the subsequent analysis of facilitator interviews, facilitators reveal their own struggles with identity and accompanying anxiety and discomfort with holding authority in processes which depend on participants feeling agentic. The insight that ‘facilitators too can be subjects and objects in identity processes and that understanding one’s impact as facilitator could be assisted by seeing oneself as an object’ (Nicholson and Carroll, 2013: 1241) seems profound and ripe for further exploration.

Power and resistance as shapers of educator identity

It is some years since Reynolds (1999) made ‘[t]he case for rehabilitating less hierarchical approaches to learning’. He hoped to ‘achieve a coherence of values between educational content and process’ and ‘avoid the contradiction between a critically based curriculum and a methodology that reinforces authoritarian relationships’ (Reynolds, 1999: 550). More recently, Nicholson and Carroll (2013: 1242) note the ‘power and authority implicit in facilitators’ expertise’ and the evident asymmetry felt by their research participants/students even in a more facilitative, less didactic learning environment. The ‘judgmental gaze’ (Ford et al., 2010: s75) continued to be personified by the course director and internalised by students through the theories presented, the assessment of outputs and the adoption of prescribed managerial discourses. Thus, LDPs – and particularly perhaps such high-profile assessed programmes as Executive MBAs – remain ‘technologies of power’ (Nicholson and Carroll, 2013: 1227) which shape and dictate the ways in which participants seek to craft and reinvent themselves.

That, of course, is not to argue that students do not resist such technologies of power, as indeed they do. Gagnon and Collinson (2014) argue that leadership development is intrinsically identity-shaping and must be considered as having power-effects, yet within that there are always ‘opportunities for oppositional discursive practices and resistance’ (Gagnon and Collinson, 2014: 4). In their study of two global LDPs, they investigate what they call ‘identity-targeting practices’ (Gagnon and Collinson, 2014: 5) where certain ‘idealized’ (p. 9) identities of leaders are detailed, emphasised and even imposed on participants. While their focus is largely on the anxiety and compliance with which such identity-targeting practices were received, they also note ‘surprising levels of dissent and opposition’ (Gagnon and Collinson, 2014: 16) with participants making choices to enact alternative and oppositional identities instead of the idealised ones on offer. In the extreme, participants were even observed as choosing to exit the programme. Carroll and Nicholson (2014) likewise argue that leadership development spaces are ‘steeped in power, resistance and struggle’ but go further to argue these ‘entangle facilitators and participants alike’ (Carroll and Nicholson, 2014: 1414). They propose a more generative and fluid understanding of ‘resisting work’ which they argue needs to be understood as a set of relational and situated practices intimately engaged with the exercise of power and leadership. They reason that a binary logic that separates out power and resistance as belonging to separate groups is simplistic. This said, while their article goes on to explore how the facilitators/educators ‘consent, cope and resist’ (Kondo, 1990: 224) with and in relation to participants, it does not take the additional step of exploring the parallel issue of educator tensions and struggles with power and identity.

The ability of educators to radically alter or reduce power imbalances in such programmes may be partial at best. In major part, this is a consequence of the ‘social, psychological and cultural attributes of the training room’ and the performative nature of the ‘ritual, scripted and ceremonial behaviours’ (Ford and Harding, 2007: 481) which occur there. Inevitably, it is most pronounced where assessment is a central aspect of the learning context. So despite much canvassing (see, for example, Ford and Harding, 2007; Frank, 2005), the potential for learning interventions which redress the tutor–student power imbalance may be much more problematic than anticipated, with particular attention needing to be paid to the educator’s perspective.

Our experimental crucible

The context for this study was a leadership module within an Executive MBA in the home institution of two of the authors. The cohort consisted of 16 post-experience students from four nationalities and seven sectors. The stated objective was ‘to provide a framework within which leadership knowledge and experience can be explored and articulated, in order to gain a deeper and more grounded understanding of individual leadership practice and of leadership practice generally’ (Iszatt-White and Kempter, 2012).

Drawing on Kempster and Iszatt-White (2013), the designed pedagogy was to place the student/managers into pairs to become co-coaching discussants. The focus of the pair was to help each other examine past influences on their own leadership development/practice and/or current leadership challenges in their working contexts. Each discussant was to interrogate their partner’s challenge drawing on relevant theory to enable a critically reflective dialogue. It was a transparent aspect of the module (as set out in the module outline document) that the culmination of the co-coaching process would be a credit-bearing written assessment.

Both the first author (M.I-W.) and the second author (S.K.) were involved throughout the module in supporting the co-coaching process, providing clarity as to the aims and assessment format and as additional tutor support to the co-coaching pairs. Time was given at each of the 10 programme modules for a formal input on leadership and for the co-coaching pairs to meet. The participants were encouraged to capture ongoing insights and reflections on the co-coaching discussions in a learning journal. The assignments produced at the end of the module, together with the learning journals, formed part of the resource material we drew upon in this research.

Research approach: reflexive dialogue through an exchange of letters

The research approach consisted of two phases: the first involved the writing and exchanging of letters, and the second related to the analysis of these letters. Using letters helped us become reflexive authors (McAdams and Cox, 2010) and make salient the contextual features shaping our experience. Connelly and Clandinin (1990) suggest that ‘[l]etter writing [is] a way of engaging in written dialogue … [as] a way of offering and responding to tentative narrative interpretations’ (p. 6). In the letters, which constitute the ‘data’ for this article, the two first authors draw on a range of resources: memos and emails between themselves and with the students, interviews with the students exploring their experiences of the educational process, the students’ reflective assignments and learning journals, and scribbled notes from the authors’ ad hoc corridor conversations and meetings. The process of writing letters was used as a method of inquiry in itself (Richardson, 2000). The letters form a testimonial narrative or ‘testimonio’ that is ‘produced in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events she or he recounts’ (Beverley, 2000: 555). In this testimonio conversation, two of the authors, as joint protagonists, provide witness to each other, ‘retelling’ and ‘reliving’ the events and emotions each experienced (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990: 4). The letters thus form a constructed semblance of impressions, hunches, feelings and emotions that become organised in a series of arguments as to what each of us understood, to reveal ‘narrative secrets’ (Kermode, 1981) which might otherwise not have been surfaced. The letters illuminate other relevant aspects of our lives (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000), namely our individual aspirations and ethics of teaching and educating, a sense of identification with aligned practices, and aspects of power as institutionally embedded in the tutor/academic role. Prior to writing the letters, we were not clear what we had experienced in a theoretical sense. Rather, we expressed tacit and felt notions of struggle, loss and resistance. Theorising of these notions emerged as the letters were written and exchanged. The first was written by M.I-W. and set out what our research originally sought to explore and the surprising issues we encountered. The second letter by S.K. responded to these issues by reflecting on the ideas presented and offering a series of alternative interpretations. In the final letter, M.I-W. responded by drawing on previous personal experience of facilitating learning within an experiential educational trust to explore an emerging argument from S.K.’s letter.

Having captured the ebb and flow of our emerging understanding, the second phase sought to focus on what had emerged as the key elements of our shared experiences. Of prominence were aspects of educator identity, power and resistance in the context of a reflexive pedagogy. These were the salient impressions of the letter authors, but this was a co-constructed sense-making process: how might these letters be interpreted from an independent perspective? This then was the role of the third author (B.C.). B.C. not only offered an independent eye and a robust process of analysis with regard to our testimonio data but also stimulated a second-order reflexivity. B.C. forensically examined the testimonio data, extracting sentences and words and offering up nuanced interpretations. In response, the letter authors contextualised such interpretations to stay close to the meaning the events/experiences held for us, the ‘actors’. The iterative dialogue provided a useful trail of evidence and reasoning to establish the authenticity and credibility of our interpretation (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). To this end, B.C. undertook a ‘careful reading and re-reading’ (Rice and Ezzy, 1999: 258) of the testimonio letters, from which she drew a list of vignettes which best illustrated the emergent themes of identity undoing and issues of power/resistance. The use of longer vignettes was considered desirable to retain the richness and intensity of the original letters: to sustain a sense of verisimilitude to the original reflexive account while at the same time being cognisant of the need to avoid becoming ‘lost in minutia’ by ‘always [having] a sense of the whole’ (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990: 7). Drawing on Fereday and Muir-Cochrane (2006), it was noted that the importance of a theme could be established by a single comment rather than requiring repetition where this comment had sufficient resonance. Thus, the process ‘involved recognizing (seeing) an important moment and encoding it (seeing it as something) prior to a process of interpretation’ (Boyatzis, 1998, cited in Fereday and Muir-Cochrane, 2006: 83). The final stage of our iterative dialogue centred around the process of review and re-review to clarify the relationship of the themes with the vignettes and subsequently with our theorising about the impact of a reflexive pedagogy on the educators with regard to identity undoing, resistance and power.

Talking about reflexive pedagogy in an MBA leadership learning intervention

Discussion

The vignettes speak to complex, powerful and largely unforeseen disruption in terms of two critically informed, committed and experienced educators. These two educators ‘consent [to], cope [with] and resist’ (Kondo, 1990: 224) a range of power shifts in front of our very eyes with real demands placed on their resulting, often very visible, identity work. While in this section we do explore the challenges of such shifts and demands on educators, we do so with the intent of building capacity and tangible practices that will help others negotiate this ‘pedagogy of the unknowable’ with more tacit points of reference and a repertoire of identity practices than the two educators represented here were holding between them.

We understand power as a complex construct with which to work. Using Huxham and Vangen’s (2005) frame, the notion of power by the educator need not just be considered as ‘power over’ students but also as ‘power to’ achieve educational aims. The educators in the vignettes appeared to initially miss the distinction between ‘power over’ and ‘power to’. They seemed to experience both powers as bundled together and did not consider until the final vignette that they could give up ‘power over’ but keep ‘power to’. ‘Power over’ is most experienced perhaps as ‘sage on the stage’, but ‘power to’ seems more compatible with ‘guide on the side’. M.I-W.’s memory of experiential learning and facilitating ‘a whole day’s learning on one page of flipchart paper’ would appear a marvellous example of claiming and holding the ‘power to’ support, stretch and make visible students’ learning without relying on ‘an implicit position of mastery’ (Hibbert and Cunliffe, 2015: 186) that is the essence of ‘power over’. ‘Power to’ needs to be understood as pedagogically sophisticated as in the power to frame questions, disrupt assumptions, prompt links to other experiences, draw in other stakeholder perspectives, tease out affective, embodied and aesthetic responses, and model being vulnerable and in doubt. The ‘paradox of knowing more but feeling less knowledgeable’ in this vignette needs to be recast in power terms as the difference between viewing knowledge as a source of power over students, as opposed to seeing the space between educator knowledge and student experience as the site of learning co-construction. If our two educators could have disentangled ‘power over’ and ‘power to’, they would have felt less bereft of value to students and the enterprise of learning.

This inability to disentangle different kinds of power points to more fundamental dynamics at a systems and institutional level which lock in a number of dominant identities at educator and student level. Both educators and students operate in a space which is far from power neutral and has already carved out lines of institutional, pedagogical and relational power. Malkki and Lindblom-Ylanne (2012) highlight barriers to changing pedagogy in higher education reflected in a desire to be seen as a professional (in the student-educator relationship) and to fall in line with institutional norms. Hedberg (2009) argues that these power relations are part of what the students are (quite literally) buying into when they enrol on a programme – they have an expectation that they will be ‘taught by experts’ and may feel short-changed if that does not occur. Nicholson and Carroll (2013: 1228) draw on the notion of normalising judgment from Foucault’s (1988) technologies of power to make sense of this set of expectations where ‘rules and norms [are] to be followed, respected and preferred, as they represent the “optimum towards which one must move”’ (Foucault, 1977: 183).

This concept of normalising judgement explains what we could term the normalising vignette where ‘the students seemed so pleased, relieved that I was intervening and re-establishing the status quo’. It seems that both educators and students could have felt out of line with institutional norms, unmoored from a set of expectations that more than likely did include pedagogical control ‘owned’ by the educators, and relieved that rules and norms could revert to a more predictable and known learning terrain. We need to be careful, though, about viewing such a reversion as the reinstatement of a more natural order of things. Kondo’s (1990) insights remind us that such a reversion is a moment of consenting and coping that can be undone by concurrent and subsequent moments of resisting. Following this line of thinking then, educators need to understand excursions into reflexive and critically oriented pedagogies as a set of see-sawing episodes which move fluidly and uncomfortably between traditional and disruptive learning relationships and activities. Educators who wish to move their learning interactions beyond traditional norms will need to build the capacity to map, track and name the experience of power dynamics with their students to build both a capacity and intentionality around consenting, coping and resisting.

Much of this capacity building will be affected by anxiety. We already know that educators can be unsettled by student responses to reflexive pedagogy and dialogue. Hibbert and Cunliffe (2015: 186) found that ‘as students express their own emotions, confusion and perhaps resistance in the process of engagement, educators are likely [to] be faced with a set of class signals […] that the educational process is not working’. However, such ‘class signals’ do not appear present in any of the vignettes as students appear to be working autonomously in their pairs, open about their different approach to theory and confident about inviting educators into their reflexive dialogues when they feel the need. Educators in this series of vignettes did not appear to be reading and responding to student’s emotion, confusion and resistance but to their own.

The educator relationship with theory appears to be at the heart of their anxiety and resisting. ‘Driving with theory’ appears to come from educators and as educators ‘give up’ pedagogical power, then this driving is replaced by ‘dipping into theory’ and theory stops being ‘the solution’, meaning the student encounter with theory becomes ‘superficial’. We need to pause here and understand theory as a crucial ‘knowledge object’ in the pedagogical enterprise (Miettinen and Virkkunen, 2005; Rheinberger, 1997). Knowledge objects can be understood as technical where they are treated as fixed, pre-defined, permanent and replicable, or epistemic where they are seen as relatively undefined, open-ended, historically situated and still experimental. In order to achieve new and novel practices, objects need to be moved from a technical to epistemic frame which then allows for learning through a process of bricolage – characterised as ‘improvising, imagining, playing and searching for new cultural resources’ (Miettinen and Virkkunen, 2005: 451).

The vignette sequence, set within institutional norms, places emphasis on theory as largely technical where it appears to hold value as what it is (rather than what it enables), comes pre-formed and requiring acquisition rather than adaption and is the end-game rather than one of a number of ingredients for meaningful learning. Ironically in the vignettes, it is the students who exhibit some degree of bricolage and who utilise theory in an epistemic way combining storytelling, practical experience, dialoguing and discussion. This distinction between technical and epistemic knowledge objects helps us understand the problem is not theory itself but how that theory is held and used. This is an identity question, and the movement from using it in technical to epistemic ways can be viewed as an identity undoing question.

Identity undoing invites us to view the potential loss associated with theory in ways that go beyond simple notions of unlearning and relearning. The distance between being ‘masters of theory’ and ‘a spare part’ is after all a fairly large one and is characterised by fairly viscerally loaded words such as ‘unease’, ‘insecure’ and ‘uncomfortable’. The original work on identity undoing (Nicholson and Carroll, 2013) implied, but didn’t specifically explore, that identity undoing might be quite different for educators as opposed to students. From their observational material, it could be seen that while educators were committed to co-crafting a learning space with participants, there was still marked asymmetry where the educators in essence held such a space – offering guidance, structure, advice and process facilitation – while students focused on learning how to learn in such a space. Now drawing attention to ‘identity undoing’ as experienced by educators in the context of a reflexive pedagogy, we would argue that there is an inherent relationality which occurs for both parties: a fluid interplay between the identities of educators and students, invoked through a process of claiming and granting (DeRue and Ashford, 2010) between the parties which allows the educator to fulfil different aspects of the learning process (e.g. supporting learning vs assessing assignments).

In our series of vignettes, we gain a further sense of the complexities around educator undoing. Perhaps somewhat ironically these vignettes were based on an experience of engendering reflexive dialogue between students, yet no reflexive dialogue happened between educators and students. There was no space or scope for the educators to openly display their anxiety and doubt and the students could not assuage or reframe what needed to occur for the emergence of new educator roles. In short, no one was holding this learning space to support educator identity undoing. From the vignettes, we see that if reflexive and critical pedagogies are to disrupt traditional roles and power relations, then it is not enough to offer new identities to students and not educators. A reflexive and critical space surely needs to be an intersubjective space where educators and students not just move in relation to each other but make that visible through artefacts, words and actions. ‘Spare part’ after all is not the direct opposite of ‘master of theory’ and there are a wealth of identity options in-between, one of which is presented in the final vignette where ‘good facilitator’ enters the picture based on ‘how I work rather than what I know’. That might have actually been the identity students were ‘sensitively’ trying to link into their conversations. We suspect educators seeking to utilise a reflexive pedagogy have hugely underestimated the identity terrains implicit in much of this work and have even more underestimated the power of students to help hold such a space.

Without intersubjective and reflexive dialogue in the moment about the learning dynamics and identity work between educators and students, we appear to get sequences of resisting students and resisting educators who eventually run out of capacity to hold a reflexive learning space and eagerly retreat to a more traditional norm as they do in this vignette sequence. In a sense, then, there is a paradox with reflexive pedagogy: the greater the success in enabling reflexive dialogue between students, the greater the desire of the educator to intervene to limit the scope and impact of reflexivity in order to not become ‘a spare part’. Such a paradox is supported by a raft of institutional and systemic norms and expectations. In light of this experience, we suggest this has the effect of generating unconscious resistance to reflexive dialogue in both the students and educators. Educators eventually will resist the loss of value and expertise and students eventually will resist the loss of educator involvement and input. Both are required to undo significant aspects of learning and expert identities, but, unlike for students, there is no one to hold and support the identity undoing of educators unless they learn to do so better themselves and/or seek support and input from students.

Our take on pedagogic resistance draws on Mumby (2005: 37) who suggested that resistance is not a dysfunctional response to organisational control (Courpasson et al., 2012) but rather is conscious resistance within unconscious control. In this way, we suggest resistance and control become central mechanisms impacting educators’ ability to undertake reflexive pedagogy and, more broadly, critical management education. Set within the student–educator relationship, control reflects the normalising expectations and the hierarchical observation, while the resistance is the conscious desire to protect the educators’ identity as expert in control of the learning environment in lieu of there being other identity options for them. Some suggestions in relation to addressing this paradox present themselves in the insights arising from our testimonio inquiry, at least with regard to what educators might need to do differently in seeking to make the adoption of a reflexive pedagogy ‘work’ for both students and themselves. Three aspects appear relevant: first, a need to recognise a movement from institutionalised ‘power over’ to personal ‘power to’ as a significant component to reposition the educator role within a reflexive pedagogy; second, for educators to recognise the need to commit to their own reflexivity, and reflexivity with their students, in the moment (rather than retrospectively as was the case here) in order to surface the intersubjective educator and student dialogue; and third, to produce the ‘holding environment’ (Heifetz and Laurie, 1999: 127) required to process and mutually adjust to the changed identities and roles implicit in a reflexive context.

Conclusion

We would like to conclude by exploring the implications our contribution offers for advancing reflexive dialogue within LDPs. The potential for reflexive dialogue to have a significant role in enhancing leadership education has long been mooted (Cunliffe, 2002, 2008) and calls for a critical voice and critical pedagogic designs (Collinson and Tourish, 2015; Ford and Harding, 2007) are prominent. In the broadest principle, we echo this. However, such calls do not speak to issues of educator power and identity, which our experiences have made salient. It is important to recognise the potential for significant discomfort in the student–educator relationship and for critical education to avoid ‘the contradiction between a critically based curriculum and a methodology that reinforces authoritarian relationships’ (Reynolds, 1999: 550). Exploring in greater depth the apparent paradox that we have highlighted seems fundamental if reflexive dialogue in critical education is to realise its potential. Despite our desire and pursuance of critical management education to engage students in reflexive pedagogy, we unintentionally reinforced the power asymmetries and hierarchical dependency within the educator–student relationship. Central to this paradox are issues of educator power and identity and in particular educator resistance to ‘giving-up’ power and ‘letting go’ of firmly held and valued identities, reinforced by apparent student collusion. Our contribution has been to highlight that without an awareness and understanding of this educator paradox, the good intentions of critical management education may remain just that, good intentions.

Ways of addressing this paradox present themselves in the insights arising from our testimonio inquiry, at least with regard to what educators might need to do differently to make the adoption of a reflexive pedagogy ‘work’ for both students and themselves. Unpacking their own relationship with power, and developing the flexibility to move from ‘power over’ to ‘power to’, is likely to be a significant component in their ability to reposition themselves and their role. At the same time, they will need to commit to their own reflexivity, both between themselves and with their students, in the moment in order to surface the intersubjective educator and student dialogue and to produce the ‘holding environment’ required to process and mutually adjust to the changed identities and roles implicit in a reflexive context. This in turn will be important in developing the skills and the confidence for educators and students to collectively experiment with a greater identity and pedagogical repertoire around the value and use of theory, such as to engage successfully with it as an ‘epistemic frame’ upon which to build affordances for mutual learning.