The Reflexible Person

Abstract

Referring to the European and especially the German education system, this article first identifies that both forms of governance in educational systems as well as pedagogical professionalization have fallen behind. We present new proposals for a substantive and evidence-based reinterpretation and reshaping of what education is and can be and how educational systems can be changed. In order to address these shortcomings, we follow suggestions of a systemic-constructivist pedagogy, and highlight concrete strategies and starting points of an awareness-based system change in the field of educational system development are pointed out. This attempt to not only rethink education, but also to shape it, is based on a critical analysis of the often stagnant internal educational reforms, and the concepts and routines that characterize these stagnant reforms. We hypothesize that, in order to break free from this stagnation, a continuous self-transforming subjectivity of the responsible actors is necessary. This explanatory framework is extended in this article to the figure of the ”reflexible person” (Arnold, 2019a), whose main characteristic is reflexibility, in the sense of being reflexive as well as flexible. The reflexible person possesses practiced and strengthened competencies for observation and reflection including of the self, as well as reinterpretation and transformation. These competences are substantiated and specified as prerequisites and effective conditions for an awareness-based system change in educational systems. In addition, possible ways of promoting and developing them are pointed out.