1,720,992 research outputs found
Discursive and Material Practices of Mourning: Bodies, Space and Time
Get PDFWithin the territory of mourning, this thesis tells three autoethnographic stories of death; the unexpected death of the author’s 16-year old brother, Grant, when she was herself a child; the later painful dying of her father; then the wrenching ending of her mother’s life. Within these significant encounters with death and loss, three particular moments are selected in an exploration of the ways in which mourning, materiality, space and time are co-implicated. These moments are shown to embody an intersection of mourning and materiality – as bodies, tears, feet, dresses, breasts and fluids – space and time.
Poststructuralism and new materialist theorising frames the analysis of the ways in which mourning is both discursively and materially produced. Autoethnography becomes a diffractive methodology that uses self as data, including showing the professional learning/teaching moments in which the connections between mourning, bodies, tears and loss were first made visible to the author.
In a further step, the thesis moves into the professional domain of counselling in a New Zealand secondary school. The author’s experience of a death in the school community becomes a reflecting surface for noticing the ways in which mourning rituals constitute the subjectivity of those grieving. The author suggests that her professional practice as a school guidance counsellor is shaped by her earlier personal family encounters with mourning. In particular, she suggests, the deconstruction of the stories of these encounters produced particular practices in her work with students, staff and a community touched by sudden death.
Personal lived experiences with death and mourning are folded into the mourning school as a dynamic assemblage. In these ways, time and space are shown to meet with the temporal materiality of bodies (both alive and dead), tears, dresses, veils and fluids and their discursive implications, to produce a timespacemattering
You and me and shame
Get PDFThis research project investigated the effects of bringing an as-yet-untold story of shame to a narrative therapy counselling conversation. The researcher, who became the client, invited a narrative practitioner to join her in three conversations, a counselling conversation and two interpersonal process recall conversations. The data generated from these conversations as well as the personal research diary kept by the researcher are woven together as research findings, presenting a layered, journeyed account of the movement experienced by the researcher.
This study noticed the challenges of recognising and speaking stories of shame. Attention is given to noticing vulnerability and the difficulty of speaking stories of shame and also to the role of witnessing in the relationship between the counsellor and the client meeting within a context of shame.
This autoethnographic account offers itself as practitioner researcher. Knowledges produced in this research highlight the importance of considering first the role of shame in the life of a problem and second how it is to be positioned as a client in a counselling relationship
Rescuing speech: Teaching a writing aesthetic for counselling practice
No full textThis author locates and describes the narrative therapy practice of writing poetic documents, and outlines a process for teaching counselor education students to craft poetic documents. Rescued speech poems, as poetic documents, are crafted by a therapist using only “rescued speech,” that is only words that clients have spoken in therapy. Significant words are noted during therapy—rescued, on narrative therapy terms—and later arranged in poetic form by the counselor. The author describes the steps of a teaching process intended to support student counselors to develop linguistic attunement and a writing aesthetic. Illustrative examples of poetic documents written with rescued speech are offered. In these ways, the article contributes from a narrative therapy perspective to the wider field of poetry therapy
"But I still love him": Women talk about love and violence, and counsellors respond
Get PDFThis feminist research enacts a new materialist performance of theory/practice that investigates love-entangled-with-violence in intimate heterosexual partner relationship. The study investigates the double dilemma of a woman’s love-connectivity to her partner that refuses to be unfelt and unthought, despite the disturbance of violence, with the counselling conundrum of how to effectively and ethically respond. The data materials were generated in two cycles of group interviews. The initial waves of data were drawn from narratives told in interviews with women whose intimate partners had subjected them to physical abuses and coercive controls produced through accretions of surveillance, accusation and constraint. These narratives were haunted by intensities of love dis-join-ted. Consequently, the women engaged with counselling or therapeutic programmes. As researcher, I wanted to learn what women had to say about their experiences of therapy and to take these readings of therapy to a group of counsellors in collective documents. In a second wave of interviews, a group of counsellors offered practice accounts of justice-doing, cut together-apart with women’s struggle, refolded into ethical considerations for finding safety. In that sense, both the counsellors and women-in-danger traversed uncertain territory. Collaborative therapeutic practices, such as those the counsellor group described in this research, act as apparatuses for interference and contestibility, and hence, for change.
The study’s originating questions were about how power/knowledge and domination (Foucault) is exercised in heterosexual partner relationship. The theoretical arc of the study took an early turn towards new materialisms (Barad) and the affective potentialities of human-nonhuman assemblages (Massumi). Entities such as vehicles, guns and a knife, queered the trajectory of the study towards differentiating encounters with the thing power of clusters of actants other than and including humans (Bennett). The analysis of the research materials emerges through a Baradian diffractive approach, which maps the effects of difference. Taking Barad’s proposal for the inseparability of matter-discourse, the study sometimes maps affecting moments for the researcher-self onto the theoretical positions of the thesis. The contributions of this thesis are for counselling practices that attend to matter⇔discourse, including other-than-human bodies. A new materialist iteration of narrative therapy, the culmination of this research work, offers shifts in conceptual accounts of affect, and how to address what matters. These differences-in-the-(re)making are themselves indeterminate and ongoing.
How do new practitioners come to understand and effectively use supervision?
No full textThis project investigated how new practitioners come to understand and effectively use supervision. It was based on a collaborative inquiry with supervisors and new practitioners who had met for supervision, and who volunteered to reflect on their experiences in relation to the research question. In particular the study explored how four participating new practitioners had been inducted into supervision during their studies and in their employment after graduating.
The ways new practitioners induction experiences contributed to an understanding and use of supervision were investigated using a bricolage of narrative, action research and interviewing methods. Participants were invited into a co-research position to meet together in their supervisory pairs and explore their responses to starter questions provided to them. These audiotaped conversations were then witnessed by me and responded to in the form of a letter sent back to participants with further questions for the participating pairs to engage with in a follow up conversation.
The study highlighted the challenges new practitioners experience in developing understandings of what supervision is. Whilst a review of literature found attention by authors to the need to prepare new practitioners for supervision, this research found this was not reflected in the new practitioners' experiences of induction to supervision.
Knowledges produced by this research highlight the important role supervisor's play in assisting the development of understanding and use of supervision and a need for further discussion and professional education about supervision for both supervisors and new practitioners
A peer professional learning group: A professional identity forum
No full textIn response to the challenges of academic work when studying for Masters of Counselling degrees at a distance from the university while living in a geographically isolated community in Aotearoa New Zealand, Kandyce Bevan, Nicola Carroll and I came together to work in a peer professional learning group. This thesis tells the stories of how we worked together, and what we did when we worked together. Although our original intentions in working together were to help each other with our university studies and practise counselling skills, what we achieved was the provision of a forum for performing, audiencing, and authenticating our fledgling professional identities and knowledge in the liminal phase of the rite of passage between being positioned as students at university and full immersion in professional practice.
Nicola, Kandyce and I collaborated in deciding the focus, research question, and method for this project. We drew on the practices and postmodern philosophies of narrative therapy in our deliberations. Accordingly, social constructionism, post-structuralism, discourse and positioning theories underpin this project. The method chosen was a bricolage of qualitative research methods: co-operative inquiry, appreciative inquiry, narrative inquiry, and participatory action research.
We met five times for this project. The first three meetings were to decide and refine the focus of the project, the research question and the method. The fourth meeting was the main data-generating conversation. In the fifth meeting Nicola and Kandyce were invited to comment on, and contribute to, the stories I had constructed from our conversations.
The key finding of this project was that it is important, useful, and indeed may be necessary, for students learning a postmodern approach to counselling to have an appropriate forum outside the university in which their fledgling professional identities and knowledge can be performed, audienced and authenticated. Many students will be able to engage supervisors with a matched paradigm for the purpose of such performances. However, in the absence of supervisors who know narrative practice, such performance of professional identity may not be possible. A peer professional learning group, such as ours, may not be able to fulfil all of the functions of supervision, but it can provide a forum to contribute significantly to the shaping of professional identity. It can also provide a safe place to practise counselling skills ethically, and act as a crucible for the co-construction of knowledge
Perspectives on Counselling Supervision in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Get PDFThis article is based on an invited keynote address delivered at the first New Zealand Association of Counsellors' National Supervision Conference Day in July 2017. It considers questions that have continued to be significant for professional supervision over time in counselling in Aotearoa New Zealand, noting considerations for contemporary practice. It reviews a range of research studies of supervision, highlighting recent contributions to discussions of culture and supervision and the use of e-technology in supervision. long white cloud our map in the sky (Robin Fry, 2008)1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of New Zealand Journal of Counselling is the property of New Zealand Association of Counsellors and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.
Teaching Professional Ethics in Counsellor Education in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Get PDFOne mark of a profession is that it articulates a shared vision of the responsibilities involved in professional relationships, generally expressed in a Code of Ethics. But what are the processes involved in inducting new members into a profession and offering them opportunities to translate and grow personal ethics into professional ethics? The study on which this article reports aimed to investigate the practices employed by counsellor educators in Aotearoa New Zealand in ethics education. The study asked two organising questions: what is taught, and how is it taught? In reporting on the study, this article seeks to offer a contribution to dialogue about how ethics might be learned and taught in initial counsellor education. The article raises questions for further discussion. To what extent should the how and what of ethics teaching be woven together? How do we educate for a practice where we cannot know ahead of time what ambiguities will emerge? How much theory of ethics is needed for ethical practice? When do we begin to teach ethics? How well are we teaching an ethics of partnership that is relevant for Aotearoa? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of New Zealand Journal of Counselling is the property of New Zealand Association of Counsellors and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.
Justice in Therapy: an autoethnography
No full textQuestions of social justice are a central concern to the profession of counselling and at the same time readily overlooked perhaps because of the infusion of individualism and humanism out of which counselling emerged. This thesis is an autoenthnographic study of my history of an orientation of views and actions towards social-and- cultural justice. The intention of the study is to explain this history and show how it influences a centering of justice in my current counselling practice. This autoethnography is more than a story: any retelling is performative. The study thus tells of the shaping of my counselling practice and further shapes my practice as I elaborate the links between my lived experience and the practices of postructural therapeutic work. This elaboration begins in my early childhood in a Quaker family in New Zealand: for example, I recount children's stories that centred matters of justice. The focus then moves to the wider culture encountered in my adult life, shaped amongst other experiences by chosen alternative life-styles, the humanistic human potential movement, single parenthood, feminism, and my introduction to voluntary counselling through Youthline. The third focus traces the later development of my therapeutic practice, showing the inflluence of family therapies and the emergence of narrative therapy. Woven throughout these three life phases are accounts of efforts to live out social-and-cultural justice, with others’ voices threaded through my own.
My hope in this writing is to take the reader to their own histories of justice and the practices of these in their therapeutic work, with a view to keeping this conversation alive
Discourse, Narrative and Agency: A Contribution of Local Stories to Disability Theory, Research and Professional Practice
No full textThe impetus for this study arose from a realisation that the post-structural concept of agency was relevant to disability studies. In locating this study as a contribution to the knowledge of disability and disablement, the initial chapters explore the theoretical genealogy of disability studies and the methodology for the study. In broad terms this has been a discursive and narrative research project, which sought to explore how discourse constituted the lives of six people with impairments and/or illness. Within this examination, specific attention was paid to those occasions in which the participants were able to take up alternative and preferred subject positions when they had been positioned in ways that removed or reduced their agency on account of their having an impairment and/or illness. The six people who participated in the study are introduced at the end of Chapter Four and the next three chapters provide an account of their accounts. Overall, the participants’ accounts of their experiences told how medical discourse positioned them in ways that removed their agency but not exclusively so. In contrast to medical discourse, disability rights discourses offered alternative subject positions because disablement is not constructed as an inevitable consequence of having an impairment and/or illness. In regard to the benefit of disability rights discourses for disabled people, two of the participants had been advantaged by the career opportunities available to them within the disability sector that arguably had been created by disability rights discourses. However, generally speaking, the participants’ accounts of their experiences showed that disability rights discourses were not the only discursive option for them. On those occasions in which the participants took up subject positions that afforded them agency, they were often calling on more than one discursive idea or practice, typically beyond both medical or disability rights discourse. The participants’ lives were more diverse and complex than the reproduction of any one singular discourse. Hence, even between just six people’s accounts, there was significant difference between how each person called on and negotiated discourse so as to take up subject positions that offered them agency. In considering the participants’ accounts, a number of generic storylines have been generated from the research process. In particular, these were: the negative impact of deficit discourse on disabled people’s lives, the advantages and limitations of disability rights discourses, the complex and person-specific processes of taking up subject positions that afford agency for the person, and the experience of silenced, subjugated and contradictory subject positions. These quite specific understandings about the processes of disablement for people who have impairments and/or illnesses, and their corresponding actions of agency, are discussed in more detail in the concluding chapter in regards to implications for future research, theory and professional practice
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