Ideas and Resources – The Permeable Practitioner

hanging peppers In this section you will find a repository of ideas and activities I have developed to work with colleagues and teams. You will also find a list of further reading which pulls together literature and references from the blogs posted on the website. I aim to use this section to share resources I am often asked for. I’ll add more content as I develop it.

Using images to facilitate and prompt discussion

I find prompting people to select pictures which might tell someone else something about a specific phenomenon can be really useful in a variety of education, research and supervision contexts. It can be especially powerful in complex situations which are difficult to describe. I notice that in talking about selected images, people are often more readily able to articulate feelings, opinions or behaviours which they may otherwise have struggled to articulate. I also notice that using pictures often helps people to avoid getting too tangled up in professional jargon and get to the essence of a practice concern. Importantly, because the person is talking about a random, third party image, there’s no right or wrong but plenty of possibility.

Some people have something to say about lots of pictures and others are very selective. I seldom find people have nothing to say, but there’s no pressure if that happens and we would try something else.

I find greatest value in this activity when there is dialogue around the images that are selected, but in supervision, I may encourage supervisees to use this as a form of private reflection too

Some practical tips for working with images

I’ve gathered a large collection of postcards over the years. However, there are also published sets of images which are useful if the work you are doing is going to be broadcast in some way, such as a talk which will appear on YouTube, or in research where you may want to include and reference images in a subsequent publication. Envision Cards is a set of images available from NHS Scotland’s Knowledge Network or you could create a set using freely available images from an online resource such as Unsplash or your own stash of photographs.

If you are working face-to-face, you can spread your pictures out on a table. You might want to create a folder to keep your postcard collection in which makes it easy to flip through when working one-to-one.

For remote working I have saved images into clusters on PowerPoint slides and converted these to a pdf which is easy to share with participants ahead of your time together and when you are together using the share screen function of your video conferencing.

You will find more ideas about using images and other resources in these sections

Working with the idea of a platform for practice

Working with the idea of Practitioner Permeability

Ideas and Resources for Supervision