Qualitative Coding as a Pedagogy for Fostering Professional Dispositions and Reflexivity

Abstract

Many fields require practitioners to develop the dispositions, reflection, and reflexivity skills to navigate complex professional demands. Yet, there are limited methods for fostering these skills. Given that the act of qualitative coding is both iterative and reflexive, this paper shares an innovative approach to teaching students how to apply coding to their own reflective writing. We feature our process of teaching preservice teachers our self-coding method and lessons learned along the way from engaging 100 teacher candidates in the practice. Over four years, across three different higher education settings, graduate and undergraduate teacher candidates alike demonstrated insightful reflections about their developing professional dispositions and exhibited reflexivity. We conclude with suggestions on how other fields can adopt the self-coding process to develop reflexive practitioners.