Linden West

Learning in a Border Country: Using Psychodynamic Ideas in Teaching and Research.

Abstract This paper arises out of recognition of the shared importance of psychodynamic theory in our approaches to teaching and research. We demonstrate how psychodynamic ideas—broadly defined as encouraging people to engage more closely with thoughts and feelings that may be hidden from the conscious mind—can be applied in many, diverse, and radical ways. We also show how such an approach can be problematic both for students and teachers. In writing this paper we take issue with those writers who want to separate therapy from education, insisting as they do that ‘therapeutic education’ involves a ‘diminished’ notion of the subject who sees him or herself as a victim of circumstances. Instead, we suggest that entering the border country between therapeutic and educational processes and ideas can be deeply rewarding as well as empowering for teachers, researchers and learners alike.

Struggling for space: narrative methods and the crisis of professionalism in career guidance in England

We report in this article on the second phase of an in-depth project examining practitioners’ use of a narrative model for 1-1 career guidance interviews in England, derived from the work of Mark Savickas. Using biographical narrative interviews, we explored the impact and constraints experienced by eight practitioner participants when engaging with a new model, and their struggles to learn, reflexively, from the experience. Further, in-depth interviews were conducted with four practitioners who ‘risked’ engaging with narrative methods to enhance practice, and achieved some success, but not without struggle and difficulty, professionally and personally. The narratives were analysed using protocols developed in previous research. The results illuminate the difficulties of creating space for experiment within a hard economic environment, dominated by outcomes and targets, as part of what can be seen as the ‘technicising’ of the guidance profession. Although drawing on all the interviews, we focus in this article on two participants’ narratives which are particularly evocative of the need for creative space, in contexts where professionalism appears to have diminished. The research itself provided space to think and imagine career guidance in more holistic ways.

Connecting Bourdieu, Winnicott, and Honneth: Understanding the experiences of non-traditional learners through an interdisciplinary lens

Abstract This paper connects Bourdieus concepts of habitus, dispositions and capital with a psychosocial analysis of how Winnicotts psychoanalysis and Honneths recognition theory can be of importance in understanding how and why non-traditional students remain in higher education. Understanding power relations in an interdisciplinary way makes connections—by highlighting intersubjectivity—between external social structures and subjective experiences in a biographical study of how non-traditional learner identities may be transformed through higher education in England and the Republic of Ireland.

Salvaging the self in adult learning

Abstract This paper stems from a dialogue on the subjects of learning and learners: one forged out of experiences in research and teaching, and the application of psychodynamic insights, developmental psychology and recent work in the neurosciences, to thinking about adult learning and subjectivity. We argue that some notion of the self needs to be salvaged, in a poststructuralist and postmodern world, when considering processes of learning, teaching and, fundamentally, what it means to be human. We recognise that this is a complex topic and that we can only touch on limited aspects of it here, but our paper represents an attempt to bring new trans-disciplinary understanding of selfhood into conversations about adult learning. The paper builds on our other recent writing, which explored the border country between psychotherapy and educational processes, and between different epistemological perspectives, including the place of unconscious processes in understanding learners and learning (Hunt and West, 2006).

Transformative learning and the form that transforms: towards a psychosocial theory of recognition using auto/biographical narrative research

In this article, I interrogate the changing forms that may be fundamental to transformative learning and how these are best chronicled and understood. Drawing on auto/biographical narrative research, I challenge the continuing primacy of a kind of overly disembodied, decontextualized cognition as the basis of transformation. Notions of epistemic shifts, for instance, and their central importance, can lack sufficient or convincing grounding in the complexities of whole people and their stories. I develop, instead, a psychosocial theory of recognition, drawing, especially, on critical theory and psychoanalysis: in this perspective, the experiencing self, in relationship, constitutes, agentically, the form that transforms, while fundamental changes in mind-set are deeply intertwined with shifts in inner–outer psychosocial dynamics. I challenge, in the process, some conventional boundaries between cognition and emotion, self and other, the psychological and sociocultural as well as collective and individual learning.

Claiming and Sustaining Space? Sure Start and the Auto/Biographical Imagination

We focus, in this paper, using in-depth auto/biographical research, on a Sure Start project in a marginalized community, seeking to understand its impact and meaning through the stories of families. Programmes like Sure Start represent contested space: they may be seen as an exercise in social control in relation to the marginal other. But diverse objectives, values and people shape such programmes and the resources they offer can be experienced in different ways. We provide three narratives from parents who were initially deeply suspicious ‐ in a community where public interventions tend to be treated with caution ‐ and yet found meaningful support with difficult problems. The narratives also reveal the potential of Sure Start to create transactional space for popular involvement in planning and running public services. We interviewed diverse professionals about these processes and suggest that an auto/biological imagination lies at the heart of effective professional practice as well as research. We are reminded, in the process, of a shared and fundamental human need to be loved and cared for, particularly at times of distress. There is much to learn from such a project, but progress remains fragile and the lessons, for public policy, are easily lost. The sociological imagination enables its possessor to grasp the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals . . . It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self ‐ and to see the relations between the two.

Negotiating professional and personal biographies in a liquid world: creating space for reflexive innovation in career counselling

ABSTRACT This paper explores the constraints to innovative, creative and reflexive careers counselling in an uncertain neo-liberal world. We draw on previously reported research into practitioners’ use of a narrative model for career counselling interviews in England and a Europe-wide auto/biographical narrative study of non-traditional learners in universities. The latter draws on a number of narrative interviews with an asylum seeker, to debate whether such a way of working with people, ‘in a clinical style’, offers contextualised insight into peoples struggles to construct a career and a methodology for doing so. The paper also examines the difficulties of creating a ‘good enough’ professional, psychosocial space for experimentation with creative approaches in a marketised guidance world, where more is expected from less.

Telling Tales: Do Narrative Approaches for Career Counseling Count?

The chapter begins by exploring the rationale for experimenting with narrative career counseling. Our motivation was to provide space to work with practitioners, who were, like us, concerned about the effects of time constraints and, at times, hasty interventions made with clients. In the introduction we outline the two phases of the project and the development of the research, with reference to the location within which the work took place. Next, we explain the usage of key terms, identifying the debates and confusions involved. We also discuss what we mean when we use the term telling tales. Third, we describe the research project in detail and the context within which the work was developed as well as its impact. This is followed by an explanation of the framework for the narrative career counseling model used. We also provide examples of using the approach in practice, detailing the steps that can be taken, although we stress that a flexible approach is required. We move on to explain how the analysis was undertaken, demonstrating the use of an analytical profoma developed for auto/biographical and narrative research. The findings from the first phase of the project are then discussed, after which we describe in-depth interviews with our four practitioners who “risked” engaging with a new model (phase two of the project). We outline the successes achieved, but also discuss the struggles they experienced within, frankly, frenetic environments of work intensification, pressure to achieve targets, and demands for processing larger number of clients in “efficient” ways. We summarize the main points resulting from our analysis of the adoption of a new concept within career counseling and consider the relevance of the model for multiple cultural settings. Our conclusions focus on the need to think of career counseling, and education for career counselors, in more creative, culturally significant, and personally meaningful ways. Our aim is to encourage more telling stories.

Resisting the enormous condescension of posterity: Richard Henry Tawney, Raymond Williams and the long struggle for a democratic education

Abstract Peter Jarvis emphasised relationships in education: people in the West assumed we were born as individuals but we are relationally embedded from the outset and learn to become social beings. This paper is concerned with how we learn democratic sensibilities with a prime focus on ‘liberal’ workers’ education in the United Kingdom and the building of social democracy. It helps us to think about present crises of representative democracy and troubled relations between different ethnic groups. Strengthening our humanity by cultivating I/thou experience, across difference, was the contribution of forms of workers’ education in the United Kingdom. This involved an unusual alliance, in European terms, between progressives in universities and workers’ organisations. Tawney, a Christian Socialist, and Williams, a humanistic Marxist, have more in common when rescued from the condescension of certain historical analysis, and when their contribution is interrogated through life writing, auto/biographical research and the psychosocial concept of recognition.

Time and the Rhythms of Emancipatory Education: Rethinking the temporal complexity of self and society

This is a deeply thoughtful as well as theoretically sophisticated book which merits our serious attention to better appreciate time’s complexity, the subtlety of the analysis and its emancipatory ...