Brief notes from Bridget on group’s work at Study Day
There were eight of us in our group, drawn from education, community work, and
various fields of health – Sam Isherwood (a research co-ordinator from the Royal
Lancaster Infirmary), Brendan Cronin (a primary teacher), Fiona Lawton, Jane
Thompson & Christine Ditchfield (all lecturers at St Martin's College), Elham Kashefi
(a community worker and PhD student), Lynn Garbarino (a practice development
worker at the RCN) and Bridget Somekh (researcher from Manchester Metropolitan
University).
We started quickly on Alan Beattie’s task, which was easy because we had all been
fascinated by his examples of narratives. In quite a short time (about 20 minutes) we
produced our own narratives and read them aloud to each other. These then became a
resource of shared experiences which we referred back to repeatedly during the day.
Because we came from such a wide range of backgrounds our narratives covered a
very broad field of experiences. They were all personal, and some focused on events
which had been deeply stressful. Perhaps because they were all short and were read
aloud with force and intensity it didn’t appear to matter that none of us was very
expert in crafting prose (we didn’t have time for any editing and polishing anyway).
It is not overstating it to say that we were fascinated by each other’s texts. And in our
discussion we focused on the texts themselves, rather than asking each other questions
to go beyond the text. We understood this to be the idea, as Alan had described it, and
it certainly worked for us. We puzzled in searching for meaning, we reflected and
deepened understanding. Maybe we were just cast in the role of understanding
something new about being human and about our own identities.
The sessions by Marion Dadds and Margaret Ledwith injected new ideas into our
group discussion, some of which we found particularly fascinating – Marion’s
‘writing against the brain grain’ and ‘empathetic validity’ for example, and
Margaret’s insights into issues of power and the weaving together of the personal and
the political.
From Margaret’s session we took the question, ‘How do we take the little stories into
the process of political change?’ and referred this back to our own texts. This became
the theme of our presentation to the other groups in the plenary session. For example,
Elham’s work with community juries had given Brendan a possible new strategy for
giving political power to primary school children in his school – to put them in the
role of a jury who could call in expert witnesses – such as the Head teacher – and
cross-question them – would really be a radical change from the current functioning
of the School Council!