Work discussion: Learning from reflective practice in work with children and families

Margaret Rustin and Jonathan Bradley, London, Karnac Books, 2008, 309 pp., £19.99 (paperback)

This edited volume on Work discussion was greeted by me with a mixture of relief and excitement. I was about to begin facilitating a work discussion seminar in a mental health setting and was finding it difficult to locate papers in the literature accessible to a group of seminar participants. So having eleven papers on work discussion gathered between the covers of one book felt like a godsend. However, this rather naïve reassurance soon gave way to an appreciation of the very real difficulties inherent in the work discussion task, which are ably brought to life in Margaret Rustin and Jonathan Bradley's book.

In the series editor's Preface to this volume, Margot Waddell spells out the very distinctive methodology that characterizes work discussion groups in mental health: that is, a methodology that is based upon learning from experience. This does not in itself seem either profound or original as the benefits of experiential learning have long been the clarion cry of educationalists. However, any teacher knows just how difficult it is to teach experientially and anyone who has facilitated a work discussion group knows too well how difficult it is to train professionals in a discipline that prizes the capacity not to know above knowing. The difficulty of working in this way is taken up by Trudy Klauber in her Foreword to the book and she gives very common examples of the ordinary reactions of participants to work discussion seminars, which have a ring of truth. The fact of the matter is that work discussion, with its emphasis on non-didactic learning, fuels negative emotions and anxieties as participants try to manage their anxieties regarding the participant observation task in hand, a task for which they feel unprepared. The difficulty of participating in a work discussion group is exacerbated by the fact that such groups tend to be made up of otherwise well-qualified prof