EdD Student Blog: Ola Aralepo

What Do You Think You are Doing?’

Mental Health Professionals’ Perspectives on Reflective Practice with Education Professionals: A Place2Think Case Study.

Ola’s work from his IFS study provides a thought provoking analysis of a case in a Mental Health setting.  He created a poster for the Annual Conference for Doctoral Education at the IOE (2024) and also presented this work in a seminar.

Ola’s work asked the important question: What are MHPs perspectives on reflective practice (Place2Think) with education professionals?

Within his research, he used a conceptual framework based on Third Space Psychagogy (Bhabha, 1994; Foucault, 2010) Methodology: Exploratory Qualitative Inductive Case Study.  He then sampled seven MHPs based at his own workplace organisation and collected qualitative data using semi structured interviews (one each lasting 45 minutes). The data was analysed using Reflective Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022)

The findings revealed three themes:

1. Place2Think is viewed as a valuable resource – offering a safe space for connecting and communicating. It provides restorative and formative functions for supervision.
2. Such reflective supervision echoes Foucauldian psychagogy used for self governing.
3. MHPs said they stepped out of role (on some occasions) and felt a sense of self-empowerment as central to their role.

Implications for practice include the possibility of articulating Place2Think as a reflective supervision/consultation and/or psychagogy across the organisation, getting Place2Think more involved within the wider conversation around supervision in schools, and more trust in MHPs to offer a more restorative service through Place2Think to education professionals.

Since the study, there has been more joined-up thinking around Place2Think, which is now being more overtly articulated as consultation across Place2Be. Place2Think was also presented as a case study at the inaugural Supervision in Education symposium organised by UCL’s Centre for Inclusive Education and St Mary’s University, Twickenham on 12 June, 2024.

This is an example of how the IFS can facilitate the application of research to professional practice.