Here’s an excerpt from a chapter I wrote on culture/ethnicity and supervision, the paragraph seems more than apt these days.
“We don’t colonise, these days, through the barrel of a gun, but through the comfortable words of those who change the hearts, minds and spirits of people” (Waldegrave, 2001).
Supervision provides a powerful learning environment that helps in the maintenance of integrity and is therefore a critical factor in practitioner development for learning to work with diversity. Freshwater (2005, p109) suggests that supervision provides a space for the “preservation or restoration of integrity in caring” and as such a supervisor needs to have integrity themselves. Supervision provides us with an opportunity to look at ourselves and resource ourselves so that we can then re-engage with our work in new ways, with new knowledge and skills and strategies. This revitalising quality of supervision allows us to then return to our work refreshed. With the impact of neoliberal policy and increasing demands for quality and outcomes, the importance of having someplace to replenish ourselves takes on new urgency. Nowhere is this more apt than in working with people of diverse cultures, where policy has not kept up with practice so that few of us are resourced for working with difference in time stretched, resource poor systems. Supervision is one of the most powerful and intimate of learning environments and as such it needs to be a safe one, so that the work of learning can take place and enhance the delivery of care and support. The supervision experience can be a powerful facilitator of the development of knowledge and skills that meets the therapeutic needs of diverse groups. With our changing demographics, supervision needs to be more inclusive, not just in terms of working with diversity but also regarding worldviews from different locations and positions.
DeSouza, R. (2007). Multicultural relationships in supervision. In D. Wepa (Ed.), Clinical supervision in the health professions: The New Zealand experience. (pp. 96-109). Auckland: Pearson Education.