Shared Workshop: Training

Workshop 1: Speaking Back to Our Ancestors: What We Couldn't See Then, What We See Now, and How We Can See Differently in our Teaching and Training Context 

Sally Bates

Dr Julia Jude

Shila Rashid

Jason Maldonado-Paige

Systemic therapy, like all living traditions, evolves through both continuity and unfolding. As we mark 50 years of AFT and reflect on our journey as a professional community of practice, we ask: what does it mean to honour our ancestors while speaking back to them? How do we engage with the wisdom of those who came before us, not as passive recipients but as critical and creative conversationalist. Over the past five decades, systemic training has travelled with ideas that our ancestors could not have imagined—including decolonial thought, Indigenous and New Materialism epistemologies and ethics. 

This workshop will explore: 

• What it means to speak back to systemic ancestors with gratitude, curiosity, and a willingness to push beyond their limits. 

• How a systemic therapy’s creative irreverence has allowed practitioners to occupy both the centre and the edge, challenging traditional boundaries while evolving within institutions like the NHS, Social Care and other private and professional institutions. 

• How the work of emerging and future practitioners and trainers can continue expanding systemic epistemologies in ways that reflect our independent values. 

• How systemic training can embrace temporality—learning from the past while making space for ‘otherwise’ futures that honour relational accountability. 

In this workshop we invite you to travel and pause together with us to acknowledge where we have been, where we are, and where we might get go and get lost together. Honouring our ancestors is not about preserving the past unchanged, but about recognising the power of time-traveling ones that allow us to bring forth the voices, ideas, and futures that systemic therapy must continue to embrace. 

Workshop 2: Honouring our ‘invisible’ ancestors - The Role of an External Examiner 

Kerri Newns

Dr Yvonne Ayo 

The presentation will consist of own journeys into becoming external examiners from graduates to supervisors, trainers and manager of training programmes and how these inform our practice as external examiners. The regulatory frameworks of the QAA and AFT’s Blue and Red Book will be presented to demonstrate the ethical and professional dimension within which we practice. Importantly, we consider how systemic ideas of domains theory (Lang, 1990; Bond, 2017) and positioning theory (Harre and van Langenhove, 1999; Campbell, 2006) underpins our thinking and our reflections upon our practice will be discussed. We also include voices of influence (Schon, 1980; bell hooks, 1994; Burnham, 2012 ). Some opportunities and challenges will be presented and how we endeavour to maintain an ethical stance in the role of external examiner. Scenarios will be employed to enable participants to gain an understanding of the range of issues we encounter in our work.