SWN025 Chap.3 Critical Incidents and Deconstruction
Critical Incidents and Deconstruction
This chapter covers how to choose a critical incident and how to deconstruct it. It explains what the lectures count as critical, the common themes in students’ incidents, why one concrete event carries general assumptions, and the five deconstruction moves from the tutorial deck: implicit assumptions, third-person language, power as a commodity, fixed identity and binary oppositions.
It also introduces assumption hunting, ideology critique and hegemony as the theory behind those moves. A question bank adapted from the lecture’s published case and from the tutorial deck gives you ready-made families of questions for your own account.
What this chapter covers
- 01
What counts as a critical incident
- 02
Common themes in students’ incidents
- 03
The critical incident technique
- 04
Five deconstruction moves
- 05
Assumption hunting and ideology critique
- 06
Hegemony
- 07
Analysis, resistance, challenge and change
Worked example · free
Find the binary and the missing voice in a short account
- 1Implicit assumption: the referrals were good options, judged by the worker rather than by the young person.
- 1Binary: a hard-working worker set against a refusing young person, which makes his choices look like the problem.
- 1Missing perspective: his reasons for refusing, and what he wanted, are absent from the account.
- 1Power: offering and refusing suggests the worker held the options while he held only a veto, a commodity view of power to examine.
Key terms
- Critical incident technique
- The critical incident technique is a research approach that infers general assumptions from detailed descriptions of particular events.
- Assumption hunting
- Assumption hunting is Brookfield’s term for searching out the taken-for-granted beliefs embedded in everyday practice.
- Ideology critique
- Ideology critique is the practice of recognising how uncritically accepted and unjust dominant ideologies operate in everyday situations.
- Third-person account
- A third-person account describes events from outside, which can locate the problem in others and hide the writer’s own part.
- Missing perspective
- A missing perspective is the view of a person or group affected by the incident that the initial account leaves out.
- Transformative learning
- Transformative learning is profound learning in which the deepest assumptions are found, faced and changed.
Critical Incidents and Deconstruction FAQ
Does my critical incident have to be something that went wrong?
No. The Week 2 lecture includes practice you thought was particularly well done, alongside ethical dilemmas, difficult situations and practice that left you unsettled. What matters is that the incident is significant to you and gives you material for analysing your own assumptions.
Why is a single small incident enough for a whole semester?
The Getting Started page explains that specific responses to incidents carry generic assumptions within them, and the critical incident technique infers those general assumptions from detailed descriptions. A concrete moment reveals more of your thinking than a broad summary of a placement.
What does deconstruction look for in my account?
Following Fook, the lecture lists themes, missing perspectives, dichotomous constructions and categories, implicit assumptions and meanings that are distorted or repressed. The tutorial deck adds critique of third-person language and attention to modernist notions of power and identity.
What themes come up most often in students’ incidents?
The Week 2 lecture lists powerlessness, feeling unable to practise critically, difficulty linking theory and practice, uncertainty about the right practice, conflictual relationships, and a sense of failure or of being misunderstood. Each theme points to an assumption, often about power or identity, that deconstruction can examine.
How is deconstruction different from criticising what happened?
Criticism judges people or decisions, often other people’s. Deconstruction examines your own construction of events: the information you privileged, the labels you used, the binaries you set up and the perspectives you left out. Its aim is to uncover how discourses shaped the account, not to assign blame.
Assessment move
Write your incident twice before the presentation: once as a full narrative, and once as a list of the labels, binaries and assumptions it contains. Bring the list to tutorials and add to it whenever a classmate’s question exposes something new.
For the essay, choose the three or four assumptions that the most theory can work on, usually one each about power, identity and a dominant discourse, and build your deconstruction around them. When you practise, time yourself: a useful drill is to spend ten minutes generating questions about a classmate’s summary before you look at any model answer.
Return to the question bank after each lecture, because new theory often turns a question you could not answer into one you can.
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