Stop poisoning the absent ducks – what is adult guidance in research?: Applications for researchers
“What are you doing here? I heard you’d retired.” Grace was asking.
“Well…” Val started, but realised she didn’t want to tell the whole stupid story, not now, not in this sudden pleasurable place of the unexpected meeting with Grace. “The pension didn’t quite work out,” she decided to say. “I need to earn a bit for a while, so I’ve got a temporary post as a family support worker.” A duck quacked. It must have found the soggy crust, Val thought, and was then overwhelmed with guilt as she remembered you weren’t meant to feed bread to ducks. Had she poisoned it?
Overview: September 2023
This month’s fiction is: There were no ducks, but she fed them anyway.
This month’s application posts are:
Theraplay is guided by the adult: Applications for practitioners
Stop poisoning the absent ducks – what is being ‘guided by the adult’ in research?: Applications for researchers
Not a victim or a survivor, just an identity of many sensitive parts: Applications for educators
“Time started to bend. I was carrying the future inside me. I would learn that I was also carrying the eggs, already within my baby’s womb, that could go on to partly form my potential grandchildren. My future grandchildren were in some way inside me, just as part of me spent time in the womb of my grandmother. I was carrying inside me a pool of amniotic fluid, which was once rivers, lakes and rain. I was carrying a third more blood, which once was soil and stars and lichen. The baby was formed of the atoms of the earth, of the past and the future. Every atom in her body existed when the earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. She will live for many years, I hope, when I have returned to the ground. She will live on the earth when I am gone. Time bends.” (Jones, 2023, 35)
Last month I puzzled over how I could have a research methodology that didn’t impose a colonial view or whitewash over Indigenous research methods, but I was seeking something that combined a sense of being in the world and also being of the world. The quote above, from Lucy Jones’ book Matrescence, gives me a toe hold in my state of wrestling with this notion of being a practitioner-researcher into my own practice. This is what my doctoral heuristic inquiry was about; my body as a mother being a body of knowledge, the ground on which I walk and draw my wisdom. It is what ties me to past and future, to the universe and the earth, this mysterious but ordinary thing that mothers do. My mothering body and all it meant to me is the state of being I research from, my ontology.
As I keep thinking about the ‘motivation to research’ diagram I invented last month (see Merging back to Earth). My reflections on being a practitioner-researcher (Theraplay and other therapy) this month are about the connections between my body and the body of the earth when that connection has been disrupted by a world that doesn’t individually ‘mother’. It makes more sense if you look at the diagram – it’s the bit in the middle of the diagram from which everything else grows.
Taking the process of knowing that is formed in the embodied experience of becoming a mother, theorising this, and then sharing it with you as something that all people can use, makes it possible for me to work with the earth elements of research without appropriating the knowledges of other people(s). As I’ve said before in posts, this isn’t about anything as concrete as suggesting you have to be someone who has given birth to find my ideas useful. This is about taking an experience and thinking, what does it mean, how does it make a difference in caring for the vulnerable. It places care of the vulnerable, through the generous use of power, as central to what we believe is important to theorise. My indigenous research epistemology is to take being a mother seriously as something scholarly as well as sacred.
Much of the literature I’ve looked at this month to make sense of the tacit knowledge reflect in the fiction has focused on the problems of pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood. Of course it does – it comes from the realm of medical research, whose purpose is to return abnormal to normal. “Problems” are labelled as such by systems that have a definition of what straightforward or normal is. Straightforward/normal comes to be defined through a particular lens to the point where it can be difficult to challenge this out of fear of being cast as ‘other’. To take this route to researching and make sense of the knowledge that is useful to our practice feels a bit like continuing to feed ducks bread that is not good for them.
The transformation, metamorphosis as Jones calls it, of becoming a mother and becoming a different person is unlikely to be straightforward for anyone – it is a huge thing. I feel dehumanised by the literature as it stands because the focus feels so much on ‘complications’ or ‘problems’, which suggests that if these are resolved, there is no “issue”!
I want the experience of becoming a mother and using the wisdom that can grow from that in our professional practice to be a HUGE issue because it restores value to that experience. I was reduced to tears when I read Paulo Freire (1985, 20): “While both humanisation and dehumanisation are real alternatives, only the first is man’s vocation. This vocation is constantly negated, yet it is affirmed by that very negation…Dehumanisation, which marks not only those whose humanity has been stolen, but also (though in a different way) those who have stolen it, is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human.”
My vocation as a practitioner and researcher is to enable myself and others to find the path to becoming more fully human, or, put another way, find a felt sense of safety in the world where they know they are wanted, valued, and loved for who they are, not what they do.
It was a ghost that got in the way of the relationship between the fighting male and female last month. This week the ghost seems to have transformed into a duck who is being fed even though it is not there, and when it does appear the food is something that Val thinks is bad for it, something she has thrown in out of despair, rage, and misinformed old habits.
The duck, half in and half out of water, holds that space between the visible and the invisible, the conscious and the unconscious. If there is nothing to connect visible and invisible, conscious and unconscious, then there is a suffocation and overwhelmedness, a cut-off-ness from depth and meaning-making. There is rage in Val that there is that cut-off-ness from meaning-making, a desolation she feels when this connection is absent and it is mad-making. She doesn’t know how to find the good food when there is such deprivation (the canteen has gone, the workers are not fed any more, but the people who make the rules have the space to rest), and she needs the outside reconnecting reminder in Grace.
First there must be understanding, and shade. Reducing the pressure creates the capacity to focus on what needs to be focussed on by selecting the right focus. Val doesn’t seem to be getting the focus right in this fiction – she can’t connect to that aspect of grown-up-ness in herself. But nor is the world of work accommodating her, making space for who she is, or allowing other sorts of adult leadership within itself. The power relationships are all topsy-turvy: Val is powerful in her experience and her age, the trainer is powerful in the position she’s been put in, and it seems there is no ‘messing around’ space where the interface between these types of grown-up-ness, or in the context of this blog, the epistemological and ontological positions, can find relationship rather than antagonism. It is as if the very flow of the river has been stifled.
My exploration of the tacit knowledge I hold, expressed in the fiction this month, brings me to the intense need to create and protect, that for me was part of motherhood. The following quote suggests it is more than just motherhood, but something that extends to many forms of human creativity.
“As humans, we so often feel helpless in our own smallness, yet still we find the resilience to do and make beautiful things, and this is where the meaning of life resides. Nature reminds us of this constantly. The world is often cast as a purely malignant place, but still the joy of creation exerts itself, and as the sun rises upon the struggle of the day, the Great Crested Grebe dances upon the water. It is our striving that becomes the very essence of meaning. This impulse – the creative dance – that is now being so cynically undermined, must be defended at all costs, and just as we would fight any existential evil, we should fight it tooth and nail, for we are fighting for the very soul of the world.” (Cave, The Red Hand Files)
We have to work out what to feed our research ducks, so life is brought back to our rivers to fulfil our vocation to humanisation. The art and creativity of research gives us that power, a power that means striving to give love space is the essence of finding meaning from within a congruent epistemology and on a congruent ontology. This is being guided by the adult in research.