Made a mistake? Fret not… Exploring ideas for turning missteps into opportunities for student and trainer learning

One thing is certain – we all make mistakes. Meanings assigned to these and personal responses will vary. 

You might well be thinking “what even is a mistake?”, “who gets to define it as such?”, and “how do we know when we have made a mistake in relationships?”. This workshop explores contexts giving shape to the definition and meaning(s) of mistakes and considers the potential utility of mistakes in training others. 

This workshop is designed for systemic trainers, tutors and supervisors, and we will:

• Explore the origins of commonly held ideas about mistakes and how these may shape our personal and professional relationship(s) with them

• Reconstruct mistakes as incidental resources that can be harnessed and put to use in learning contexts – for example, by helping us enact ways of being in trainer-student relationships that model systemic positioning and attend to power, privilege and process ethics (Swim, 2001). Mistake-making and positioning around these can be considered political in this regard. Who can ‘afford’ to make – and own up to – mistakes? And for whom can mistakes more readily become stories of growth and learning? Sara Ahmed (2017) reminds us that privilege shapes which lives can "bend without breaking" and there is an asymmetry of consequence of mistakes between students and teachers (and across other areas of personal/social difference) 

• Share stories of ‘making use of our mistakes’ from clinical practice for discussion during our teaching practices with students

• Draw on examples where we have worked with mistakes made as they have unfolded live during relationships with students/supervisees and discuss implications for the ‘mistake-maker’ around responsiveness, repair and re-positioning. Applying Bond’s idea of the domain of rhetoric (2017) to ourselves as trainers, we hold responsibility for developing coherent accounts of our actions in teacher-learner relationships

• We will explore meanings this action holds personally and professionally for us and for our trainees/supervisees, and for the teaching relationship

• Consider a systemic view on mistakes as an inevitable part of the aliveness and messiness of interacting in relationships as well as essential for the evolution of systems

• Through this interactive workshop, you will be invited to consider:

• Your own personal relationship with mistakes and contexts that shape embodied responses to these, including themes relating to shame and ideas of professional competency 

• Implications of sharing examples of mistakes with students and supervisees and how to use these as a resource. Exploration of mistakes can open up a window into other discourses or ideas about the personal and professional self, including those relating to unexamined areas of personal and social privilege

• How mistakes can be used to support the development of systemic thinking in looking reflexively at initial positioning - and subsequent repositioning - when they are picked up and worked with in the moment

• How to constructively contribute to and influence the meanings that are made around mistakes – our own – as well as the mistakes of others