Otherly motherly: Complicated maternal positions in practitioner education: Applications for educators
Otherly motherly: Complicated maternal positions in practitioner education: Applications for educators
Viking didn’t eat his breakfast. He had come downstairs with her, but then, as she packed up her lunch for work, he returned to the bed and curled up. Before she left for the day, Val went and stoked him again, gazing at him in a puzzled manner.
“You’re really not okay, are you?” She lay her face against his fur. He didn’t even smell like he usually did!
Overview: October 2023
This month’s fiction is: It is time for you to go
This month’s application posts are:
Researcher positionality: Grandmothers are other-with: Applications for researchers
Why, when I am exploring the education of the next generation of practitioners, does my tacit knowing process bring forward knowledge is presented in the fiction as a not-okay, doesn’t-smell-right cat?
Therapist educators and trainees enter a contract, a bit like Val enters a contract with Graham. The relationship between Val and Graham is not about the meaning of the relationship between them, but about what their relationship means for Viking.
As therapist educators, we use our relationship with our trainees to sensitise and cultivate their hearts, hands, and heads to know how to attune to others. Our relationship with our trainees is not about the relationship between us, but about what it means for the people they will see in the future. It is about how we enable them to develop the ability to use their power in the service of the more vulnerable other who will come to them. As educators, we are in a challenging position of needing our tacit maternal wisdom to attend to the birthing and early needs of new practitioners – an absorption into their wondrous growth – and at the same time we need another position because we need to evaluate them.
Combining last month’s fiction and this month’s, one of the things I am grappling with is that trainees do need to learn content or fixed knowledge (the new starter induction that Val was receiving last month, the balance of leading with guiding and enabling in educating others), as well as being knowing-, or process-, focussed. A core skill in educating independent, mature, and skilful practitioners is helping them develop the experiences that mean they do not apply knowledge in a fixed way. As an educator, it can feel like I am both giving and taking away all in one. It is as if I am saying ‘you must know this theory and apply it’, while at the same time saying ‘you must first listen to your client and not apply theory if it doesn’t fit’. That just doesn’t smell right!
This makes for extremely tricky relationships of power, since there is not a right or wrong to a skill. So how do you know that as educators you are evaluating trainees ‘fairly’ and, as a trainee, how do you know what you need to do to be good enough? How can trainees feel safe enough to come apart in order to remake themselves as practitioners?
As educators, we are helping trainees to make a shift from the expected manstream in their learning to something that is tuned into and able to articulate the multiple tacit knowledges that we all draw on in our fast processing of a complex situation when we work with our clients in the intensity of the therapy room. Specifically, where we are training practitioners to work with children or child states in adults, I argue we are educating them to apply tacit maternal knowing to their therapeutic relationships. This can be a big shift in expectation for our trainees for whom education, particularly in white western cultures, is predicated on concrete knowledge and skill acquisition rather than the cultivation of not knowing to create space for tacit knowledge to emerge. Being engaged with the multisensory in our education process is a central aspect of this shift because tacit knowledge is developed through the bodily acts of doing. We are shifting from teaching heads to teaching hearts via the hands. Trainees are shifting from learning how to do something, to learning how to be someone.
There is a huge overlap in notions of tacit knowledge and internal working models in terms of how each is formed and how each impacts on the way one sees oneself in relationship to the world. The distinction that is useful to make as we as educators seek to elaborate our pedagogy of therapist education, is that attachment theory is about mothering and tacit knowing is about knowing how to make skilful practice decisions.
As therapist educators, we are not there as mothers, we are there as teachers; but we have to be otherly motherly to model how we want trainees to be, to help them feel safe, to educate their hearts so what they do with their hands (skills) is grounded in a moral, ethical, and humane root congruent with the endeavour of therapy to alleviate distress. Therapist education is not direct practice in the same way as being a practitioner, or even being a practitioner researcher, because of this odd contract that the benefit is for someone outside the current relationship. So the motherly and grandmotherly perspectives I’ve thought about in the other two posts this month don’t fully apply.
But all education in the relational realm is a punctuation point (see August’s post for researchers), not a destination. Relating it back to one of the things that came out of my research around the importance of process is that process only emerges, and knowing only becomes knowledge, at points where you stop and give it space to come to the surface in a fixed way – then it sinks again.
In understanding the role of the core concept being multisensory, when applied to therapist education, I find myself thinking about whether other aspects of tacit maternal knowing need to be to the fore. How do we theorise and make sense of being otherly motherly as therapist educators?
The early stages of mothering are so absorbed by the care of the infant, the use of power in the service of the other, that it is all encompassing. This stage of mothering is about keeping a totally dependent being alive. There is little reflective space in the midst of full on child care, just as there is little reflective space when you are deeply absorbed by practice. The EdD, a study of one’s professional practice, was so profound for me because it created a structure within which I could reflect on my reflexivity. It was a grandmotherly punctuation point from which I could observe my practice while still being in touch with my practice.
The research led me to identify tacit maternal knowing within my practice. Now I can step back again and think that in my practice as an educator, the tacit maternal knowing I use is not in touch with MY practice, but is in touch with developing the practice of trainees who will serve others. Even the grandmotherly application of tacit maternal knowing I talk about in the researcher post has a self-investment. Educating practitioners doesn’t have self-investment in the same way, it feels more about stopping or disrupting something to make space for something else.
Stay with me now because the next bit is going to seem a bit off focus, but is part of me trying to make sense of why it may now be that forms of maternal wisdoms are available for academic study as well as available to integrate into a pedagogy of therapist education.
Might it be that the reality of contraception is something that is allowing this to come into the thinking space now? I know contraception has been readily available from the 60s, but in reality, I am a child of the 60s (born then). Growing up in the 70s, the attitudes still impacted on me and, maybe within the specific cultural context within which I was raised, the enjoyment of one’s sexuality outside of marriage was still seen as deviant. Intimacy, sex, having babies, what your role was to be in life as a woman all got squished into a small, convoluted box which I thought I had to fit into if I was to be acceptable to the world. Bodies = babies. Thinking = power =safety.
It takes time for actual changes in lived experiences to work through from the concrete to become tacit, and then to be available for reflection at punctuation points and emerge into knowledge. I don’t know what Lucy Jones’ personal circumstances (Jones, 2023) are, but in reading her book Matrescence, I found myself wondering whether the culture of her childhood, and now her motherhood, is different to mine because for many, motherhood can now be more of a choice (in our white western English culture). Family size can be limited while intimate relationships continue. Intimacy can become multisensory, embodied, and holistic, enabling people to grow and develop without the physically and emotionally engulfing experiences of parenthood.
Does this management of reproduction disrupt the entangled historical power imbalances that are within the patriarchy imbued with misogyny and strongly related to the reality of bodily intimacy between male and female? Probably leading to pregnancy, gestation, birthing, feeding, and the consuming nature of early mothering? The pattern of the lived experience of being totally wrapped up in young infant care for the whole of one's reproductive life as a woman can be interrupted and so space can be made to think about – to be reflexive and reflective – about the sociological, philosophical and other -ogical and -ophical aspects of maternal experience. So this makes it possible to start to generate multiple aspects of tacit maternal knowledge and make these available to integrate into our role as therapist educators (as well as practitioners and researchers).
In developing a pedagogy of therapist education, I am still working out what this otherly motherly position could be. Such a position holds a specific process of tacit maternal knowing. Tacit maternal knowing is highly relevant to educating practitioners who will work with people who need healing and alleviation of distress that has arisen from early developmental distortions. For most therapeutic practitioners, whether we are working with children or adults, whether we are doing Theraplay, or working with other modalities, most of our clients are seeking alleviation of distress that arises from childhood experiences.
I was puzzled by the extract from the fiction for this post, but after this exploration I think it is pointing me to a sense I have that the way we educate practitioners is not okay: it doesn’t smell right for what we are setting out to do in preparing people to become practitioners. Mansteam notions of leading with the head and content delivery being the hallmark of quality teaching and learning don’t fit.
By foregrounding multisensory experiences as an explicit part of our pedagogy of therapist education, the process becomes ultimately more humane because it opens a route into keeping tacit maternal knowing at the centre of our education practice in an appropriate way. The uncomfortable mismatch between power dynamics within the odd contract we have between educator and trainee can be addressed more congruently because we have a language for it.
All the time, I come back to the question of am I equipping people the best I can to go out and meet the needs of the children and families they are working with? The passion to do that and the fact that I can’t pass on my inner wisdom in a quick and easy way makes me want to cry, it feels painfully complicated to explain to you, fellow therapist educators. There is no fast way to pass it on, but I feel the pressure of time always.
We get on, and we do our jobs – we go to work, we curl up on beds, but we also need sometimes to bury our face in the fur and think our therapist education pedagogy really isn’t okay, and keep working on how this art form can be more coherent and congruently articulated.