Embracing complexity across disciplines: Reflective supervision and postdegree training integrate mental health concepts with speech-language therapy and graduate education.

Abstract

This article illustrates how relationship-based practice and reflective supervision can augment the practice of professionals in allied health disciplines in the earliest childhood fields. The authors describe how mental health constructs were integrated into the discipline-specific expertise of one speech-language pathologist and how, in turn, that affected her leadership as graduate program director. The article highlights the transformations that took place within one discipline through the assimilation of a transdisciplinary, relationship-based, and reflective model. The ongoing individual and group supervision of a speech-language pathologist through an intensive, reflective, 2-year experience in a postdegree certificate training program is described to explore the change process; a detailed analysis of one case is used to illustrate shifts in clinical practice and the broadening of theoretical paradigms. Further, the authors illustrate how the graduate program director implemented the use of these constructs with clinical supervisors at her university upon completion of the postdegree training program so that the supervisors could, in turn, introduce and use them with their graduate students. Finally, the benefits, concerns, and limitations of engaging in transdisciplinary work are briefly addressed.