Revisioning and refreshing your reflexive abilities as practitioners and supervisors through aspiration, inspiration and perspiration
Presenters: John Burnham and Rubina Singh
Book
AFSP members: £40 plus booking fee
Non AFSP members: £55 plus booking fee
Students: Free
Workshop
30 June 2026
10:00 am – 4:00 pm
Location
Online
Organiser
Scotland AFSP
‘Reflexivity’ is a regularly used term within systemic thinking and practice. In brief it refers to an aspirational process in which an individual person, or persons in relationship take a ‘step out’ to explore: their relationship with themselves (self-reflexivity); with each other (relational reflexivity); with ideas (conceptual reflexivity); with their feelings (emotional reflexivity) (Burnham, 1993, 2005) and their surroundings (contextual reflexivity). These processes include: clarifying aspects of practice that may have moved from ‘original to orthodox’; confirming our commitments to improving our practices and extending our practice repertoire.
We aim to create opportunities for you as supervisors to revision and refresh the reflexive abilities of yourself and your supervisees through:
-
sharing some of our own experiences of enhancing our reflexive abilities often through processes that were personally uncomfortable
-
mapping these experiences onto theoretical frameworks to transform them from personal experiences into professional abilities
-
creating exercises that enable workshop participants to actively experiment with change.
The late Barry Mason (2010) described this process thus:
There is a possibility of two half-day, online follow-up support sessions that give participants the time to express their ‘commitment to actively experimenting with difference’ in their own practice, returning to share and compare with others.