Hello Karen and everyone,
I do like 'clinical licence' - sounds very much
like my idea of 'practice-relevant research' ... or 'practitioner literature
use' - responding to ideas in the literature that promise to be useful in
dealing with the matter at hand, and especially if it looks like helping the
practitioner be creative, or able to act in a 'discontinuous' way and break an
unproductive sequence or routine; which involves using practice-based
evaluative criteria to make that judgement of 'promise'; and includes being
reluctant to waste any more time with enunciating the critique, and how it is
justified, by the application of the practice-based evaluative criteria in
mind, so that you can get on with trying the new idea in practice: the
real, practical critique will come when the idea doesn't work.
Yesterday morning, flitting through my brain
(because I have been working with literature, in a systematic way, recently),
was Gregory Bateson's material on the 'punctuation of human interaction' and the
use of terms like 'dominant' and 'submissive', 'succouring' and 'dependent'
in his 1964 essay on Logical Categories of Learning and Communication. His
point was that what we might see as 'leadership' or 'followership' in a dyadic
interaction, depends on things like 'point of view', and where, in a sequence of
interactions between the parties, the see-er and definer might abitrarily select
an action as the start of a sequence, and that action of one in the
dyad which is arbitrarily designated the role of stimulus, to which the
action of the other becomes, by definition 'response'. The ongoing
sequenced interchange is 'structured by the person's own perception of the
sequence as a series of contexts, each context leading into the next' and the
'particular manner in which the sequence is structured by any particular person
will be determined by that person's previous Learning II (or possibly by his
genetics)'.
Where a mentor might be involved in helping another
deal with bullying, at the first level of personal management and coping, and by
endeavouring to strengthen the individual's self-reliance and capacity to deal
with the inputs effectively based on an appropriate and increased knowledge of
the field in which they are operating, then part of what the mentor will be
doing becomes helping the mentee know about how meaning perspectives
operate - what they are, where their bases reside, how they are applied, how
they can be legitimately, and on similar rational/reasonable bases,
challenged. Where PhD studies are really about building a usefully
creative and independent operator in a research field, much of the challenging
must be about refining the knowledge and skills of associated with
being able to judge when any critique is valid or not,
and from its own paradigm's point of view. Being
able to know that there are multiple points of view is a part of that process of
skill building. Being able to find out what is the novice
researcher's particular point of view, and where its strengths and
weaknesses lie, is another step. When the novice knows enough to be
able recognise the different paradigms, and their respective strengths
and weaknesses, including their own first default, they will then be in a
position to more ably and 'reasonably' choose which paradigm is appropriate
to what they want to understand, and by undertaking 'research', as part of their
learning process. The trick is to learn enough for confidence in the
application of its use, while still be open to learning that there are different
and there might be better ways of conducting theor particular inquiry, and
hopefully by such open and critical faculties to also work on strengthening
whatever way (establishing tougher rules around validity etc) they do choose to
use.
Sarah, from this point of view of mine, an
appreciative inquiry, if it involves the researcher and one other, is a
system (even if only of two, still a system of interactions, of
interrelationship). A dyad is one of the simpler 'organisations', by
definition.
Bateson, G. (1964 & 1971). The Logical Categories of Learning and
Communication, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (pp. p.279-308). Aylesbury,
Bucks.: International Textbook Co.
