Meeting the Wharenui Shapes Teaching/Learning Therapy: Place Pedagogy, New Materialism, and Whakaaro Māori

Abstract

A cultural meeting house hosts a group of Master of Counselling students at the start of their studies. This article focuses on an exploratory study with one student group during their encounter with the house. We give a material-discursive account of one student's narrative of family, belonging, and connection to the house. In the account we draw on whakaaro M aori (cultural thinking and understanding), new materialism, place-space learning, and narrative therapy.1 This article shows the shaping effects of encountering a cultural house as part of learning counselling practice. 2 In the counselling program we experience the country, history, land, and the people of the land that shape us as teachers, students, and clients for the counselling mahi (work) we engage in. 3 Here we re-tell the material↔discursive account of one student's narratives of family, belonging, and his connection to the house and especially the two pou. 4 As we meet each other and the house, these intra-actions interweave a becoming-with-pou, becoming-withthe house. 5 We want to claim that the teaching/learning practices we engage in open up the possibility for a student to state, as one counselling student did, about one of the courses: 'I am the course and the course is me. 'A Place A pedagogy of place or place-learning (Gruenewald, 2003;Penetito, 2009;Somerville, 2010Somerville, , 2013Somerville et al., 2011) invites us to acknowledge, think about and shape teaching, learning, and counselling through, with, within, and for a place. Such a place can refer to 'both a specific local place and a metaphysical imaginary [placespace]' (Somerville, 2010, p. 330). While Somerville's focus is on her work alongside indigenous people in Australia, Penetito (2009) writes about place-based education in Aotearoa New Zealand. He draws attention to what possibilities emerge from the particularities of a place and how place-teaching/learning may include services and participations that connect individuals with community. Elements of a place pedagogy

A Critical, Relational Approach for Working with Suicide in Family Therapy

“…Informed by scholarship across several fields (i.e., feminist theory, critical suicide studies, family therapy), this paper describes the integration of DBT and narrative therapy as a means of developing a critical, relational approach to addressing suicide in CFT. These models are held together with the ethico-onto-epistemology of agential realism (Barad, 2007), making it another contribution to the small body of work in the family therapy literature that is incorporating new materialist and posthuman thinking (e.g., Kotz e, Crocket, & Waititi, 2016).…”