Playing with metaphors in supervision

Ramsey-Wade, Christine

Abstract

The process of supervising doctoral research students can be overly dry and focused on outputs, lacking a playful focus on the lived experience of the supervisee and the intersubjectivity of the student-supervisor relationship.

While supporting a student to research the use of client-generated metaphor in psychotherapy (Cott, 2021), we began to incorporate student-generated metaphor into the research supervision process. This enhanced the supervision relationship, providing an immediate insight into the supervisee’s lived experience and pastoral needs at each stage of the research journey.

In this session, I will share some details of how we started to incorporate metaphor into our supervision meetings, and how I now play with metaphor with all my supervisees, including some feedback from students about their experience of this.

We can then all play with this idea together in a whole-group discussion.

I will close the space by facilitating a collaborative creative writing exercise, which will produce a group poem summarising some of the key metaphors of the session.

Please come along if you are interested in metaphor as a pedagogical device, and/or in the use of flexible creative writing exercises for therapeutic or teaching purposes.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: 7th Community Psychology Festival
• Start Date: Oct 13, 2023
• End Date: Oct 15, 2023
• Deposit Date: Oct 17, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 20, 2023
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/11181849