... more specifically, my work role. I was enabled to do this at a conference at the University of Central Lancashire this week. Understanding came to me as it always does: relationally, emotionally, experientially; and specifically in the company of two colleagues from other universities.
A lot has happened since 2007 when I met Jill and Chris at the first Authenticity to Action conference in Grange-over-Sands. There I heard about, and signed up to, DUCIE, a support network for Developers of User and Carer Involvement in higher Education. DUCIE (mostly Jill and Chris) ran regular meetings for mutual support roughly twice a year. In the old days, we travelled to each others' universities. More recently, meetings have been online, so the sense of connectedness on seeing people in person in Preston was heightened.
The Service User and Carer Participation role has held a unique, and loosely defined, place in universities. Whenever DUCIE's met, we've compared notes on work which is pioneering. We've always found common ground. Those conversations have been a source of comfort, consolation, and confidence, particularly when I've felt isolated and out of my depth.
Among all the other aspects of my lecturer role (teaching, marking, writing, tutoring, interviewing, degree management...) participation development work has been my driving passion. It relates to my commitment to ensuring people with lived experience of health and social care services have an equal say in how future professionals are educated: what students of social work, in particular, learn and how they learn it.
Participation has become my specialist subject but, though I've written book chapters about it, I often struggle to articulate what it is. It's a way of being though it's shown in ways of doing. Participation in higher education is both institutionalised (a requirement of professional bodies like the Nursing and Midwifery Council) and runs counter to much of academic culture. It subverts hierarchies of knowledge and power which place the value of empiricism (social science-y stuff) above phenomenology (what we feel we have experienced - our stories of what it was like). DUCIE members have all met with considerable resistance. Being in the company of those who understand this, and have experienced it over a long period of time, felt like a homecoming.
Erik Ericson's stage theory tells us that the final task of our psychosocial development is to manage the tension between despair and ego identity that comes in the final chapter of our lives - in other words, to look back and make sense of what we've been up to. He says this starts around age 65 (he was going by old-style male retirement age, I suppose). Whatever. This theory came to mind during those 48 hours in Preston as I looked back on my work in the company of Jill and Chris - as we shared memories, laughter, sorrows, failures, successes. They enabled me to a deeper realisation of what I've been doing, and to a sense of wholeness in relation to my work's varied adventures.
The thought-feeling I took home with me from Preston is this: I've been part of something.
Me in 2011, looking at my audience, which included Jill, Chris, and other participation workers. Photo by Jill. She shared it on the big conference screen during a presentation on Thursday, which was a surprise, a smiley one.
