Reflections on Shaping the Ethics of our Teaching Practices

Abstract

This article considers four strands of the authors’ teaching practice in a narrative, social constructionist, teaching program at the masters level. It explores how the ethics of teaching practice are shaped by the therapy practices, and associated ideas, that form the curriculum. These ideas include an ethic of care; shaping and being shaped by power relations; and the constitutive effects of language. The article concludes with a discussion of the place of chaos stories and humor in producing a collegial community of practice. For more than a decade now, the counselor education programs at the University of Waikato have emphasized narrative approaches in therapy, and more recently in family work and supervision. Over this time, social constructionist theory and practice has been woven into the fabric of all our courses (Monk, Winslade, Crocket, & Epston, 1997). This article focuses on the shaping of the ethics of our teaching practices, foregrounding our accounts as teachers. We write this reflection out of a belief that self-witnessing (Weingarten, 2003) further shapes us and the ethics of our practice, serving as a mode of accountability to self and other. However, keeping in mind that Bakhtin (1981, 1986) argued that no utterance occurs in isolation, we acknowledge that our choice to foreground our account holds within it the tension of the absence of others’ utterances such as our students and other colleagues. Their voices have not been amplified in this telling. This account emphasizes four linked strands that contribute to the overall fabric of our teaching practice. We explore each strand in turn. First, we show how the ethic of care we teach is enacted in the daily practices of our teaching lives. A second strand traces ways in which poststructuralist ideas about power relations