Mia O'Brien

Focus on clinical psychology postgraduate training: Taking the curriculum into the next decade

Clinical psychology, like many applied disciplines, often suffers from a lack of congruence between best-practice in terms of pedagogy and evidence-based practice and the actual structure and content of training programs. A small but growing international literature addresses such issues. A small group of researchers from five Australian Universities, led by a team at the University of Queensland, has received grant money over two years to examine and offer constructive strategies for revising and revitalising the clinical psychology training curriculum in Australia, with reference to international pedagogy and training standards.

Raising the Quality of Praxis in Online Mentoring

The decisions made by the designers of mentorship programs impact upon the development of the praxis of the teachers involved. The recent development of online mentoring provides an opportunity to revisit the question of how to design mentoring programs that support the development of a high quality of praxis in the participants. This chapter argues for a broad understanding of mentoring as formally convened, dialogic communities of teachers that include arrangements such as online, peer and group mentoring. It suggests that a high quality of praxis occurs in a space where mentors adopt a critical stance for reflecting upon the intentions behind the technical skills of mentoring. The theoretical understanding of the praxis of mentoring is explored by describing a design-based research project, TeachConnect, that facilitates online mentoring aimed primarily at preservice teachers. The challenges experienced in convening communities within TeachConnect are used to highlight some of the key issues in fostering a high quality of praxis of mentoring in the online space, including the need to balance a fluid adoption of roles within mentorship with the need for well-prepared mentors.

Reconsidering the Communicative Space: Learning to Be

In this chapter we ask the reader to set aside existing perceptions of mentoring, supervi-sion and their relatedness to professional experience and instead join us in a sharply recon-sidered analysis of the communicative space in which teachers and preservice teachers negotiate the phenomenon of ‘learning to be’. We take the Habermasian concept of com-municative space (1990) and earlier notions of lifeworld (Heidegger, 1962/1927; Merleau-Ponty, 1962/1945; Sandberg & Dall’Alba, 2009) as a theoretical frame to foreground learning and practice as ‘ways of being in the world’. A series of three vignettes are pre-sented to illustrate how mentoring is both epistemological (what we know or can do) and ontological (how we are learning to be). It is this learning to be, in the teaching and learn-ing to teach relationship, that we aim to identify, illustrate and elaborate in this chapter.