Ms Pauline Elwell

As Course Director I am responsible for shaping the course, keeping in touch with latest developments in the field and ensuring the student journey is one of success and growth. Having trained as a drama and movement therapist I am interested in how the arts work therapeutically and can be integrated within talking therapy approaches.

I joined CCCU in 2016 as part of the Teach First primary tutor team having been a senior leader and primary school teacher both in the UK and overseas. I also trained as a Drama and Movement therapist at the Royal Central School of Speech and drama. Both have had had a significant impact on the way I work with students. In 2018 I became the Course Director for MA Special Needs and Inclusion and then later for our Teach First Course out in the East of England. In 2022 I became Course Director for our Counselling Coaching and Mentoring undergraduate degree.

'Cultivating a practice of uncertainty and not knowing in an educational landscape dominated by the importance of knowing. What value could ‘not knowing’ add to the field?

Academic Natter talk 2021

When training as a therapist I came across the work of Anderson and Goolishian (1992) who posited the idea of client as expert and explored what they termed a not-knowing approach to therapy. As a therapist learning to sit with not knowing and sitting with uncertainty, I initially challenging. However, when linked with the I/Thou of Buber it enabled me to give my clients space. Anderson and Goolishian challenged the notions of ‘privileged standpoints’ (Wachterhauser 1986 pp 28) and preheld theoretical narratives. What I began to understand, as I explored this further, was how this stance of not knowing, how a practice of not knowing opened up a space for newness, for new knowledge. In dialogue with Dr Sox Sibanda and his work on Ubuntu methodology it was clear that this intersected with his research challenging Eurocentric notions of knowing and that new knowledge is produced at the boundary of thought and unthought. This led to further exploration of this ideas and their link to coloniality and decoloniality.

Butler’s Subjectification: how might researchers use a practice on not-knowing to enable both researchers and participant to become. Postgraduate and staff research conference ‘Decolonising Research March 2022.

In this presentation I explored how we become to know who we are through societal norms that maintain a status quo. Working with Butler’s thinking that ‘Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being (Butler 1997) I wanted to consider how ‘not knowing’ (Goolishian and Anderson1992) , the ‘suspension of desire’ (Bion 1962) and the I/Thou of Buber (trans 1996) would impact this from a researcher’s viewpoint. This led me to considering as a white woman how ‘I must own the part I play between colonialism and efforts to decolonise’ (Chan 2021).

The presentation built on the earlier academic natter dialogue with colleagues to examine the way efforts to decolonise are impacted by colonial thinking where in the Global North we still want to dwell or perhaps squat in the unthought of others to continue to enable the current power structures.

Recent area of interest

The non-human turn: listening to Indigenous voices and ‘all our relations’.

Marginalised voices from Indigenous communities have much to teach us about listening to the natural world. Could learning to listen to ‘all our relations’ begin to bring humans back into balance with the natural world? From the ‘alternate worldings’ of Haraway to the ‘kincentric ecology’ of Salmón how do we in the Global North navigate a way to listening to Indigenous voices and decolonise our relationship with nature.

After becoming the course director for our Counselling Coaching and Mentoring undergraduate I have been returning to my research and practice as a drama and movement therapist re-engaging with dancing the land and exploring ideas around the non-human turn, de-centering the human. and imagining alternate worldmaking for sustainable futures. I am interested in ideas of dwelling in the body, dwelling in the land and dwelling with the natural world. Working with and through the body to access knowledge arising from the body and body memory.

Member of the Education Suite Industry Board