Contemplating or confronting? How the Inner Development Goals can activate reflexivity through Q methodology

This chapter explores how the Inner Development Goals (IDGs) can trigger processes of reflexivity. Challenge-based learning (CBL) connects theory with practice. However, methods that allow CBL participants to reflect on their development within a normative framework are still rare. Through the IDGs we develop a method to evaluate CBL courses aimed at increasing self-efficacy (‘Selbstwirksamkeit’), validating the method through a workshop with experts. Self-efficacy is the capacity of people to pursue goals, and the IDGs provide normative concepts that bridge inner reflection to outer, goal-oriented action. We used the IDGs as a pathway to triggering individual and group reflection on self-efficacy. We eschewed traditional measurement scales and opted to engender reflexivity in the CBL participants through Q methodology. To co-create these conditions, the IDGs were “confronted” in two ways. First, we describe confronting the IDGs through first-person narratives, describing the encounter with each other through the planning and delivery of the workshop. This process raised our various shared and distinct identities, and shaped our responses to the IDGs. In this sense, we place the intersubjective into both a performative and an instructional context. Second, we describe how Q methodology enables a confrontation with the IDGs that creates the conditions for collective leadership through learning. We identify two specific viewpoints on the IDGs, the perceptive translator and the relational disruptor, and describe how awareness of the subtle but salient differences among these viewpoints enables a broader, more systemic, and critical perspective on our practice as researchers and facilitators.