Case Writing in the Supervision of Educators Providing In-Home Educational Care
Author(s):
Elisabetta Biffi (presenting / submitting)
Conference:
ECER 2016
Network:
32. Organizational Education
Format:
Paper

Session Information

32 SES 11 B, Organizing Family: Work-family Conflicts and Professional Support

Paper Session

Time:
2016-08-25
17:15-18:45
Room:
OB-E0.01
Chair:
Andreas Schröer

Contribution

The current paper offers a reflection on case writing as a supervision practice, following both hermeneutic phenomenological research (Van Manen, 1990; 2014) and the psychoanalytical tradition of clinical case writing (Ferenczi, 1932).  The analysis is based on the author’s own experience of supervising and training in-home educators involved in the care of minors.  

Education takes place in a range of contexts and involves multiple professional figures. Education professionals are employed in educational services but also in social, welfare and health services, in roles that vary as a function of the specific local context and regulatory framework. At times, educators appear to carry out their work independently of others, especially when they provide educational care for individual clients on the street or in the home. In these situations, they may feel as though they are working “in isolation”, and this in turn can place a strain on their personal and professional resources.  

Thus, supervision is even more strongly required in these types of intervention, so that educators can recover a sense of the educational meaning of their actions in terms of "equipe". As past studies show, writing can contribute to making the professional working  more effective (Cifali, 1996; Cifali & André, 2007) by fostering reflection on action (Schön, 1987). Among the various kinds of writing that may be adopted, the current paper is focused on the practice of writing up educational cases.

Case writing is widely used in other disciplinary fields (sociological, anthropological, medical, etc.) and applied contexts (psychoanalytical, social, legal, etc.), fulfilling multiple purposes: for example, it may be deployed as a research tool, training practice or professional instrument. The term “case” draws attention to the idiographic nature of the situation being narrated, which by definition is unique and unrepeatable, though it may also represent, exemplify or provide evidence of more general phenomena.  In research contexts, “case” corresponds to “case study”, a research strategy (Flyvbjerg, 2011; Yin, 1994) often used in qualitative research to build up an understanding of a phenomenon in all its singularity and originality. This is particularly useful when investigating highly complex phenomena such as the educational dimension of a given situation.

At the same time, case writing demands multiple levels of interpretation, as the psychoanalytical tradition teaches us: the analyst’s account is not just a summary of the core thematic nuclei in the original text, but a revised and restructured version of the original that encompasses the writer’s own judgements, experience, thoughts and emotions (Barbieri, 2005).

Thus, when case writing is used as a strategy in the supervision of in-home educational intervention, it can provide a group of educators with a common focus and a basis for exchange, in that each of them can contribute their own perspectives and lived experience – and relative implications – to the shared space represented by the “case”.

To bring this about, a recursive process must be put in place, which goes back and forwards between the individual and the group, between the written word and an oral exchange mediated by the supervisor. 

Method

In support of the arguments developed here, I present a supervision project of my own, conducted during the second half of 2014 (with sessions held every three weeks), with a group of in-home educators involved in the care of minors. The specific feature of these educators’ work is that they operate entirely autonomously, intervening at the homes of minors assigned to their care by the social services, either to conduct an educational evaluation of family relationships and dynamics, or to provide the family with educational support. Given the solitary nature of their work, pedagogical supervision is critically important to these educators, because it allows them to meet as a professional group and share their professional experience as it unfolds. At these encounters, supervision also acts a device for sharing and processing how they are personally experiencing their educational action, as well as the meanings, both conscious and unconscious, that they attach to it. The current supervision project was based on the practice of case writing. The educators were each invited to produce a written account in which they “described and narrated” one particular educational case that they wished to share with the group, for different reasons (cases were often chosen because they were particularly complex or destabilizing for the educators). Each educator sent this written account to the other members of the group and the supervision session was devoted to joint discussion of the shared cases. In this process, the space of the supervision (which extended outside of the group sessions themselves) was composed of multiple phases: - identification of the case to be written up (educator); -production of a written account; -reading over the case write-up; -individual reflection process, from the time of reading until the supervision session; -exchanges with the rest of the group in the context of the supervision sessions The supervisor’s task was to lead the process, moving recursively from being inside to being outside the process, and drawing on processes of transference and counter-transference (Klein, 1948) to guide the supervision.

Expected Outcomes

The overall supervision process was evaluated at a wind-up monitoring session. The feedback collected expressed on the one hand the demanding nature of the writing process, frequently perceived by the educators to be complex and distant from the direct action mode to which they were accustomed. Indeed, the written text imposes a relationship between self and self – and between self and the written text – that requires one to dwell on one’s thoughts and feelings and this is experienced as difficult and challenging. Especially because the purpose of the writing is to give form in the written text to one’s lived experience. The written word thus represents a return to thought, to the work of the mind, after being immersed in a world that is made up, among other components, of reverie (Bachelard,1968). Nonetheless, the educators reported that this process, though challenging, laid the foundations for more mindful participation in the work of the supervision group: the opportunity to work on a written text offered a boundary, a marking off of their ongoing professional experience, including during the encounter with their colleagues, constructing so to speak a “middle earth” between the self and the group, as well as between the self and the described experience. In general, the participants felt that the practice of case writing was both positive and effective, although they stressed the crucial importance of the supervisor’s role in mediating and supporting the group in re-elaborating the outputs of the encounter among individual educators.

References

Bachelard, G. (1968). La poétique de la rêverie (4e éd.). Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France. Barbieri, G.L. (2005). La struttura del caso clinico. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Cifali, M. (1996). Transmission de l’expérience, entre parole et écriture. In Education Permanente. 22 (127),183-200. Cifali, M. & André, A. (2007). Écrire l’experiénce. Paris: PUF. Ferenczi, S. (1932). Journal clinique (janvier–octobre1932). Paris: Payot Flyvbjerg, B. (2011). Case Study. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Sage, pp. 301-316. Klein, M. (1948). Contributions to Psychoanalysis. 1921-1945., London: Hogarth Press. Schön, D.A. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 4th Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Van Manen, M. (1990). Researching Lived Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press. Van Manen, M. (2014) Phenomenology of Practice: Meaning-Giving Methods in Phenomenological Research and Writing. Left Coast Press, Walnut Creek CA. Yin, R. (1994). Case study research: Design and methods (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing.

Author Information

Elisabetta Biffi (presenting / submitting)
University of Milano-Bicocca
Department of Human Sciences for Education "Riccardo Massa"
Milano

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