Learning new ideas and practices together: A cooperative inquiry (original) (raw)
Related papers
This article recounts the learning processes and experiences of five family therapist colleagues from the Trondheim Family Therapy Center in Norway in learning to use challenging new conversational practices in their work with couples. These therapists undertook their learning together, adapting John Heron's Co-operative Inquiry to also make sense of the learning process itself. Through reading and viewing videotaped demonstrations, through team discussion and practice, from personal reflections, and through feedback from clients, these therapists learned to use Johnella Bird's relational language-making approach. Data from these different aspects of the learning process were mapped using Adele Clarke's Situational Analysis to depict the complexities of that process. The results are discussed with respect to the challenges faced by therapist teams wanting to learn and use new ideas and practices in a practice setting.
MULTIPARTY TALK IN FAMILY THERAPY: COMPLEXITY BREEDS OPPORTUNITY
Journal of Systemic Therapies, 2007
In the current era of family therapy where there is a marked shift from devotion to clinical specific models to a focus on the common curative factors across all psy-chotherapies, process research has become essential to providing a window into the fluid microelements of the therapeutic process. Specifically, discourse analysis accentuates the importance of language in creating and shaping new under-standings in therapy, as well as, the evolution and shifting of therapeutic alliances that invite exploration, risks, and collaboration. This article provides important snapshots into the alliance building and alliance-building skills of well-respected Canadian family therapist, Karl Tomm. Informing these snapshots is the meticulous discourse analytical work of Shari Couture, who tracked the use of discursive practices as they created new opportunities for clients and therapist to define new possibilities in relationships and ways of being. The article is not only an informative introduction to discourse analysis but also helpful in showing its clinical application. Discursive investigations of multiparty talk can aid family therapists. In this article, discourse analysis was used to demonstrate how a therapist and family members concurrently engage multiple conversational partners to accomplish forward movement after conversational impasses. By looking closer at conversational practices, therapists can become more aware and creative as they attempt to move forward with clients. With the microlens cultivated in a discursive analysis, therapists can adopt alternative "conversational courses of action" as they become more sensitive to constructing "interven-tions" with clients. With this sensitivity, it is less likely that therapists will
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy
I think the quality of connection between the therapist and clients is paramount to establishing an empowering, human-to-human partnership. I am saddened to see limited emphasis on actual practice in training-it is possible to graduate without any actual guided and observed practical skill. I also dislike the current focus on diagnosing, classifying, and using prescriptive checklists to 'manage' clients, even though I understand why this is so prevalent. This book resonates with my bias.
Transcending a Differend: Studying Therapeutic Processes Conversationally
Contemporary Family Therapy, 2006
Studies of actual conversational behaviours used to generate positive change in family therapy are relatively rare. In this study such conversational details were examined as they occurred in a single session of family therapy. With passages identified by family members as helpful, discursive methods of analysis (conversa-tion analysis and critical discourse analysis) were used to examine an actual conversation between a renowned family therapist (Karl Tomm) and a family formerly at a conversational impasse. Conversational practices and sequences in talk used by the therapist and family members to bridge these differences in their ways of relating are discussed. Traditionally, process researchers have focused on examining change moments in therapy as one-way interventions delivered by the therapist. Few researchers have investigated how therapists and families constructed change in the back-and-forth of their conversations. As a post-modern family therapist I find this an important area of focus as I understand therapists and clients as constructing change in therapeutic interactions. Being influenced by post-modern notions I believe a person can alter her or his actions by constructing different understandings through language (Anderson, 1997; Kaye, 1995). Furthermore, as a family therapist I see this construction as occurring through non-linear, ongoing circular processes. Consequently, I utilized discursive methodology in my research. With a discursive investigation I could study the conversational behaviours of both the family and the therapist and highlight the importance of interaction and language in creating solutions.
Therapeutic collaboration: a conversation analysis of constructionist therapy
Collaboration has been a frequently used construct to describe the practices of different therapeutic approaches for working with clients. Missing, however, is a sense of how collaboration is enacted in dialogues between therapists and clients. After defining 'collaboration', we analyse the actual conversational practices of Karl Tomm in his work with a couple, using conversation analysis. Our aim is to highlight the conversational accomplishment of collaboration in observable ways that we feel may be linked to enhancing one's conversational and collaborative practice of therapy.
A conversation analytic study of building and repairing the alliance in family therapy
Journal of Family Therapy, 2016
In this paper, we draw from the methods of conversation analysis to illustrate how different alliances that form the 'web of relationships' of family therapy are ruptured and subsequently repaired. By focusing on the interactional practices of a master therapist, Dr Salvador Minuchin, we examine how he effectively manages a disaffiliative episode that occurred at the very beginning of a therapy session. In particular, we show how Minuchin's practices function to re-establish consensus and a positive alliance and to endorse the mother's parental authority (in a context where she claims to be helpless and lack agency). Minuchin thus uses a range of alliance building strategies to join with the family by sharing their distress and, at the same time, moves the conversation forward in a therapeutically-driven direction to facilitate a restructuring of familial roles and relations. Practitioner points • Find ways to disagree with clients' position without generating stress or rupture in the alliance • Verbal and nonverbal discursive moves to join with clients can create an inclusive context for the therapy • Discursive strategies can endorse client authority and counter a self-deprecating client stance
Trainer's Training In Family Therapy: The Possibilities Of Focussed Reflective Dialogues
AbstrAct The article describes a part of a family therapy training program that aims to promote reflectivity and the professional development of trainers. Reflectivity is embedded in different parts of the training program i.e. theory studies, supervision and clinical seminars. In this part, termed Developing Professional Practice (DPP), the aim is to focus on reflectivity in order to make visible the differences of espoused theory and theory in use. The model of DPP consists of program-length prolonged recall procedure (carried out in five day-long seminars), and takes advantage of the concepts of developing expertise (i.e. vertical and horizontal expertise), models of adult education, and concepts of learning as well as of the reflective approach to family therapy. It also recognizes the isomorphic relationship between the constructivist learning model and social constructionist family therapy. The work done adds to the trainees' possibilities to articulate their way of working more accurately. It also adds to their experiential repertoire of sensitivity to change through learning. John Dewey: " One can think reflectively only when one is willing to endure suspense and to undergo the trouble of searching. " (1933, 16) Donald A. Schön: " When a practitioner becomes a researcher into his own practice, he engages in a continuing process of self-education. " " The recognition of error, with its resulting uncertainty, can become a source of discovery rather than an occasion for self-defence. " (1983, 299)
This paper presents the view that clients, therapists, and practice-oriented researchers can share a common interest in addressing human concerns as arrested forms of inquiry. This action research orientation to human concerns derives in part from Andersen's approach to personal and relational problems as arising within 'stalled dialogues'. Thus, the role of therapist and practiceoriented researcher from this orientation is to alternatively engage clients in new forms of dialogic inquiry. Four words are offered to conceptually guide how to such dialogic inquiries can be optimized in ways that animate clients, therapists, and researchers.
MIXING VOICES: INTERCHANGES AND REFLECTIONS ON THE CHALLENGES OF TRAINING THERAPISTS
Leonora Corsini " … writing to convey a message betrays narrative's primordial function, its essential meaning, which is the search for meaning. We write, therefore, to learn, to know; and this journey of knowledge cannot be undertaken if we are already carrying the answers. " Rosa Montero, The Lunatic of the House " I speak and, before all, I write in the presence of all the world's languages, even if I know none of them. " Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation Social constructionism has contributed to changes in the family therapy field, giving rise to new implications for the therapist training process. In our experience as family therapy trainers, we often ask about the impact of constructionism on students. Can the constructionist position be taught and transmitted? What are the impacts produced when students are introduced to social constructionism? Driven by these questions, we will seek in this chapter to give a voice to these actors in the teaching/learning process, the students. Thus, we will first present the context behind our questions about therapy training from a constructionist perspective, as well as the way training is viewed in our institute, to then discuss the results of a brief investigation performed with students and former students of the course.