Kathie Crocket

Informing supervision practice through research: A narrative inquiry

Abstract Intention: This study focused on questions of whether and how clients benefit from supervision. As practitioner research, the study was intended to shape the researchers’ own supervision practice. Method: The qualitative approach was based on interviews with a small number of experienced practitioners about their supervision experiences. The findings are presented in the form of reflexive stories, told by each researcher. Findings: In these stories the researchers tell how engagement with experienced practitioners’ accounts of their past supervision shaped the hopes and intentions the researchers hold for their future supervision. Implications for practice: The stories suggest there are therapeutic benefits in an ethic of transparency that provides for practices that overtly carry stories in both directions between counselling and supervision.

Counselling supervision and the production of professional selves

The culture of supervision is produced both in wider professional contexts and in particular local supervision conversations. This paper is shaped by the post structuralist ideas of governmentality and disciplinary power. It uses these ideas to trace the detail of a supervision conversation, noticing the shaping effects of ideas familiar within the professional culture. Excerpts from the supervision conversation demonstrate a supervision process that pays attention to the politics of its own production, and thus to the culture of supervision that it produces.

Rescuing speech: Teaching a writing aesthetic for counseling practice

This 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.

Counsellors becoming Counsellor Educators: A New Zealand Example.

ABSTRACT The international literature on adjunct faculty in higher education, including professional education, does not yet cover counsellor education in particular, although many programmes rely on the teaching services of experienced practitioners in adjunct faculty positions. This article reports on a small, exploratory study conducted with adjunct faculty members appointed to one-year, full time fellowships in the counsellor education programme in which the authors are full time academics. The study identifies the mutual benefits of this practice, to the practitioners who teach as adjunct faculty and to the counsellor education programme. It also identifies areas that are problematic. In view both of the identified benefits and the difficulties experienced, the authors discuss their responsibilities as permanent academic staff to the practitioners who teach as adjunct faculty. The authors suggest that programmes benefit from the ethic of hospitality that adjunct faculty can offer and invite academic staff to bring (un)conditional hospitality to the collegial relationship in counsellor education.