The Artful Design of Context: Music Therapy and the Role of Self-Reflection

Abstract

Reflective practice is encouraged in many professions as an education tool to facilitate practice development. Like many allied professionals, we recognize as a profession that music therapists need to continue to develop themselves throughout their career and yet a discussion about the employment of reflective practices to develop mature therapists is lacking. In this thesis, Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis is employed to examine retrospectively the impact of reflective practice on my seventeen-year career as a pediatric music therapist which led to its current iteration. The process of this investigation also served as a reflective process in and of itself illuminating hidden contexts and making available a transformed experience of my career and clinical work.