Confession, in-service training and reflective practices

This article focuses on how confession operates in contemporary discourses on reflective practices. By revisiting and mobilising Foucault's genealogy of confession in relation to how reflective practices are mobilised in an in-service training programme for healthcare assistants (HCA) in elderly care, it is argued that the HCAs are shaped as their own confessors. It is further argued that we need to take into account traces from both Stoic and Christian times to fully understand how reflective practices operate and shape subjects. The empirical material consists of interviews with HCAs, their managers, supervisors and teachers in an in-service training programme where the use of reflective practices was a key component.