Course content

Revision

Getting back up to speed with stories, maps, questions and practical skills from Level 1.

Absent but implicit

Orientate to the ways that what people hope for, give value to and believe in are hidden within their complaints or their expressions of distress.  Conversational structures that support the development of these into rich accounts of preferred stories and action. Develop skills in double listening.

Trauma

Why it happens, what it means and the most therapeutic ways to respond. How to avoid re-traumatisation. Ways to support protest against injustice that empowers clients. How to recognise power practices and what to do about them.

Power, context and discourse

Expanding on ideas from Level 1 to explore in more detail how problems are always constructed in the context of discourses. Understanding how a sense of personal failure is arrived at and how to respond to it in helpful ways.

Expressions of failure

Why do people experience a sense of failure in their lives? A review of the ideas of Foucault and Deleuze. Therapeutic framework to guide responses to expressions of despair and failure.

Supervision

How to understand supervision from a narrative perspective. Providing supervision or consultation that fits with narrative principles and ethics.

Understanding the narrative process

Using ideas from Lev Vygotsky’s work to envisage narrative as a process of scaffolding from the known and familiar to what it is possible to know with social support. Using these ideas to construct a “map of maps” so that you always know where you are and where you are going.

N.B. Courses will aim to respond flexibly to participants and topics covered may vary with each particular group