Decolonizing Clinical Pedagogy: Supervision Sessions

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: Marriott St. Louis Grand

Room: Majestic A

Floor: Second Floor, Conference Plaza

By decolonizing supervision, we mean the process by which clinical teachers could reimagine the traditional orthodoxy of clinical supervision in order to center and examine issues of race, power, privilege, and inequality together with our students and clients. For example, what are the roles of directive and non-directive approaches, particularly in surfacing issues of oppression during case supervision? How can decolonized, antiracist supervision sessions provide room for imagination and humility during difficult and hopefully courageous conversations about power and privilege? How can we make choices in the supervision setting that help our students more deeply understand the connections between their clients, historical and contemporary structures of racial and other forms of oppression, and the role of the law and legal systems? How can discussing positionality and the lived experiences of clinical teachers, students, and clients equip students with important analytical tools? Ultimately, our goal is to examine and apply an iterative freedom pedagogy that we see as essential to building an antiracist and decolonizing clinical teaching practice. In the session, we will engage participants in exploring possible strategies for effectively addressing issues of race, power, privilege, and inequality in supervision sessions with students. Both in the Rounds context last year and now with Supervision Sessions, we are building upon work that others have done in these areas and hope to push clinical pedagogy further in the direction of decolonizing and antiracism pedagogy.