2020: Issue 3 Archives - The Dulwich Centre

Winning stories: Responses to Ambivalence and Insensitivity — Nada Eltaiba

Dulwich Centre — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 04:02:33 +0000

This paper describes a project applying a narrative therapy approach to linking social work students and graduates. Students seeking information about what it’s like to practice as a social worker were encouraged to ask questions and to learn from the experiences of graduates working in the field. In turn, students gave the graduates feedback about their expertise and guidance. The process was interactive and iterative. The students’ lecturer and a graduate co-facilitator took the students’ questions to a meeting of graduates working in the field. Their responses went back to the students, who in turn wrote letters to the graduates witnessing their testimonies and expressing their appreciation. Some interesting questions and issues were raised during the process, leading discussion and storytelling about ways of dealing with workplace challenges and improving outcomes. Documents produced through this process will become a resource for future students and graduates, and inform teaching in the social work department at Qatar University.

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Decentred evaluation that empowers: Incorporating a double-storied approach to evaluation interviewing and story production — Sonja Pastor

Dulwich Centre — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 04:00:06 +0000

In 2015, the organisation in which I work as a counsellor introduced a new strategy to evaluate the outcomes of its services. All operational staff are now required to conduct two digital evaluation interviews per year, some of which will be turned into visual evaluation stories that recount a person’s experience of interacting with our service. Eager to contribute narrative ideas, I incorporated the narrative practice of double listening as a framework to elicit people’s experiences as service users. Double listening is a narrative approach to asking questions which focuses not just on the problem story but also on the person’s response to the problem, eliciting their skills, values and knowledge in responding to the problem. Applying double listening to evaluation interviewing is a way of foregrounding not only the voice but also the agency of service users in representing any change they have experienced, positioning service providers as collaborators in the process of change. A double-listening framework supports the creation of evaluation stories that could have value as therapeutic documents, benefiting the person whose story they told as well as meeting organisational requirements. This paper presents an evaluation interview that I conducted, and demonstrates how qualitative interview-based evaluation practice can benefit participants as well as practitioners and organisations.

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Narrative group supervision in mainland China: A collaborative and re-authoring journey — Tsun On-kee Angela

Dulwich Centre — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 03:57:13 +0000

This paper documents collaborative supervision practices being used in the southern part of mainland China. The supervision is informed by narrative ideas that respect, honour, acknowledge and thicken the experiences, local knowledges and skills of both practitioners and the persons who come to consult them, and render their hopes and dreams visible. Through outsider-witness practices, practitioners acknowledge the persons’ local knowledges and skills, and practitioners’ knowledges and skills in life and practice are recaptured, generating new possibilities.

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Stories and knowledge of responding to hard times: A narrative approach to collective healing in Hong Kong — (Jack) CHIU Tak Choi

Dulwich Centre — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 03:07:00 +0000

This paper describes the application of collective narrative practices with people affected by the recent political turmoil in Hong Kong. It presents considerations for working with people experiencing psychological pain and distress while the traumatic events are still unfolding. By documenting and sharing people’s insider knowledges, partnerships were formed. In particular, the insider knowledges of community participants contributed to helping professionals who were dealing with their own hardships and seeking ways to support community members facing trauma and oppression.

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Using experiential environmental projects to engage unemployed young people and their parents — Hiu Ying (Queena) Chan

Dulwich Centre — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 02:51:34 +0000

In Hong Kong, young people who are not in employment, education or training are often characterised as being unmotivated and socially withdrawn. They experience social stigma and pressure from parents and family members. This article describes how young people’s preferred values and personal agency were enriched through a program that combined narrative practice with practical environmental activities including scuba diving. The young people then joined with the social worker to offer their parents a similar program. This enabled parents and young people to see each other in a new light, reducing tension, and creating space for mutual understanding and support.

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‘There is more to me’: Creating preferred identity report cards at school — Tarn Kaldor

Dulwich Centre — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 02:45:52 +0000

Schools hold great potential for countering the reproduction of constructed norms. However, prescriptive discourses of ‘success’ and ‘normality’ can get in the way. Critiquing these constructs and making visible their effects is a fundamental obligation of narrative therapy. Building on the work of Paulo Freire, this paper illuminates some potential hazards and limitations of the dominant forms of measurement prevalent in education systems. The More to Me project seeks to assist young people to broaden or contest the thinly described identity conclusions commonly recorded in formal identity documents such as school report cards. It explores ways to enrich young people’s stories of identity and self-definitions, via the co-creation of counter documents. More to Me report cards are a preferred identity document in which young people determine the criteria, nominate witnesses to their chosen identity stories and are recognised as co-researchers and experts. It is hoped that the creation of these counter documents contributes to the recognition of young people’s knowledges, competence and contributions.

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Teenagers and the COVID-19 pandemic — Lúcia Helena Assis Abdalla

Dulwich Centre — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 02:40:51 +0000

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated restrictions had significant effects for young people in Brazil, including those living in the poorest communities. It brought new hardships and reinvigorated old problems that had been lying dormant. This paper describes a series of interventions used to stimulate understanding about what we were all living through and how young people were responding. A co-research project called the Quarantine of Possibilities surveyed young people about what they had been doing during quarantine and their tips to make this time more fun. Their contributions were shared with others on social networks. Taking counselling online opened new possibilities as young people were able to talk about the precious objects that surrounded them in their own homes, and suggested ways to enhance our online conversations through fun activities like choosing and discussing creative background images. As the need to go beyond one-to-one online counselling became apparent, a collective conversation about this collective experience was initiated. Young people enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to share what they had been experiencing and what had supported them. They entered into externalising roleplay with Corona and his gang and penned a collective letter. In addition to opening possibilities for future collective conversations, this experience provided the basis for a set of conversation guidelines for counsellors and others wanting to reflect on the invasion of Corona in our lives.

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