Session Information
32 SES 11 B, Organizing Family: Work-family Conflicts and Professional Support
Paper Session
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
Expected Outcomes
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.
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