1-6 JUNE, 2008 (20 CE credits)

• Five Workshop Sessions, 9am to 1pm;
• Access to Informal Conversation Time with Speakers;
• Welcome Reception and Buffet Dinner;
• Walking Tour of Venice;
• Two Traditional Venetian Cocktail Hours (aperitivi) at Select Locations 7-8pm;
• Access to the specialized professional staff of "Just Venice!" who are native to Venice and can arrange high quality, reasonably priced excursions, cultural events. They can also provide recommendations and reservations at a wide range of excellent restaurants.

Meals: Lunch and dinner on your own. Each day there is a lunch provided for about 15 Euro near the conference center featuring high quality local Venetian food. Our host in Venice will also have recommendations of restaurants of different levels and menus available.


Reasonably Priced Quality Hotels Nearby Conference Venue:

Hotel Domina Giudecca
Hotel Belle Arti: www.hotelbellearti.com
Pensione "La Calicina": www.lacalcina.com

Other resources for lower cost accommodations:
www.filcoo.com
http://www.caffelletto.it/inglese/inglese.htm

Workshop Presenters

Gaye Stockell, MA started her career as a psychologist working in community psychiatry in Sydney, Australia. Whilst there she was introduced to the work of Michael White and David Epston. They had most recently published Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends (1990) and Gaye, along with Marilyn O'Neill started to explore Narrative ideas and put the ideas into practice. Currently working in independent practice, Gaye has continued that exploration within many contexts and with lots of people. She is very appreciative of the impact that Narrative Therapy has had on both her professional and personal life

Workshop Contributor

NOTE: David Epston regrets that he is unable to be at this workshop. However,

he has actively participated in its co-construction and his stories are woven throughout.

David Epston, MA, CQSW, D. Litt., is codirector of the Family Therapy Centre in Auckland, New Zealand and adjunct professor at the School of Community Studies, UNITEC Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. In 1985, David Epston and Michael White were the innovators of narrative therapy. Epston's work has been received enthusiastically in the US, as well as Latin America, Canada, Europe, Asia and the South Pacific. His publications include Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, Experience, Contradiction, Narrative and Imagination and Playful Approaches to Serious Problems: Narrative Therapy with Children and Their Families, and Biting the Hand that Starves You: Inspiring Resistance to Anorexia/Bulimia.

Summary of the Workshop

Peggy and Gaye have the honor of introducing, reviewing and celebrating Michael White's remarkable contribution to the world of therapy and community ideas. In addition to telling the stories of Michael's influence on our work, we will feature collaborations between Michael and David Epston, the co-founder of narrative therapy. Through viewing and listening to recorded interviews, reviewing transcripts, story-telling and actual practice, we will demonstrate reverberations from the spectrum of Michael's early work through his most recent ideas and practices.

Narrative explorations are like journeys with therapists as companions, guided by a range of maps. Throughout this workshop, we will highlight several narrative maps for guiding therapeutic conversations into new territories:

• Externalizing conversations
• Re-authoring conversations
• Outsider witness practices and definitional ceremonies and
• Re-membering conversations
  
  

These maps never specify the destination, nor determine the route taken. Instead, they orient the therapist to recognize possibilities in the hidden territory of people's lives.

By reviewing recording interviews and transcripts, we will demonstrate Michael White's skillful narrative interviewing - how he began by being with people, meeting them where they were, in the known and familiar, and then slowly with his questions he accompanied them into new territory, moving from pain toward possibilities, clarified values and actions. We will illustrate how these practices can awaken in people a sense of agency, to understand they could actively shape their own lives according to their commitments, values, and understandings of life.

The workshop will also review the ethics that guide narrative therapy. We will explore concepts and specific practices for therapy that honors social interdependency and diminished hierarchy, toward making therapy more participatory and linked with a community of support.

In particular, we will focus on:

• An ethic of collaboration that honors both professional knowledge and insider accounts of journeys of self-discovering in overcoming complex problems, aided and abetted by communities of support that include human service practitioners;
  
  
• An ethic of circulation and innovative public practices that narrative therapists use to incorporate audiences into the therapy process.

Our goal is to create a tribute that will be meaningful to many of us, and would have been to Michael. Throughout the workshop, Peggy, Gaye and David will explore the personal history of narrative ideas and practices in the contexts of therapy, community work, research and teaching. Through recordings, David Epston will tell stories about his collaborations with Michael over more than 25 years. Peggy and Gaye will reflect on the impact on their work, making visible how they carry Michael in their professional lives and their future work.

Course Goals and Objectives

• Describe the tradition of thought that shapes narrative practice.
• Define three significant implications of this tradition of thought for narrative practice.
• Identify the primary categories of inquiry of the definitional ceremony, re-authoring conversations, remembering conversations, and externalizing conversations maps for therapeutic practice.
• Summarize three specific applications of these maps, as illustrated in the workshop.
• Provide an account of the relevance of the notion of the "absent but implicit" to therapeutic conversations.
• Describe the relevance of this notion to addressing pain and distress that is an outcome of trauma.
• Formulate three therapeutic questions that reflect an understanding of the relevance of the "scaffolding" of therapeutic conversations in one's own counseling practice.
• Differentiate the therapeutic orientations that foster a sense of personal agency from those that diminish a sense of personal agency.
  
  Workshop Agenda
  

DAY 1 - Monday, 2 June (9am to 1pm): Introduction and Background

9:00 A review of Michael White's early work through video-reviewing and storytelling.

10:00 Introducing externalizing conversations
11:00 Break
11:15 The process of re-authoring.

12:00 Definitional ceremonies and outsider witness practices
1:00 End of Day 1

DAY 2 - Tuesday, 3 June (9am to 1pm): The Commitment to Insider Knowledge

9:00 Reckoning with power and the ethics of collaboration.

10:00 Stories from Michael's commitment to the politics of practice

11:00 Break
11:15 Broadcasting through letter writing and public practices:

12:00 Witnessing insider accounts of psychiatric crisis, severe depression and sexual abuse

1:00 End of Day 2

DAY 3 - Wednesday, 4 June (9am to 1pm): Influences on Community Conversations

9:00 Stories from psychiatry, Indigenous populations and communities of health and welfare workers

10:00 Community conversations

11:00 Break
11:15 Putting ideas into practice.

12:00 Narrative interivewing exercise for participants

1:00 End of Day 3

DAY 4 - Thursday, 5 June (9am to 1pm) Narrative Therapy: A Personal History. Reflections on Collaborations with Michael White by David Epston (via videotape)

9:00 The craft and art of narrative therapy:

10:00 Video viewing and transcript reviewing.

11:00 Break
11:15 Continued story-telling and review of collaborations by David Epston

12:00 Question-asking and transcripts

1:00 End of Day 4

Day 5 - Friday, 6 June (9am to 1pm) A Medley of Tributes and Reflections

9:00 Michael White's more recent work: Addressing Trauma; the absent but implicit

10:00 Mapping narrative conversations

11:00 Break
11:15 Re-membering practices: Re-membering Michael. .

12:00 Definitional ceremony: .Saying Hullo Again

1:00 End of Day 5

CANCELLATION POLICY:

For conference registration fee:

100% refund up to March 1st
50% refund between March 1st and May 1st
After May 1st no refund

For Hotel Domina:

30 days prior to the scheduled arrival date: no penalty.

Cancellation within 30 days prior to the scheduled arrival date:
50% of the whole stay.