Talking with feeling: using Bion to theorise ‘work discussion’ as a model of professional reflection with nursery practitioners

ABSTRACT

Making sensitive pedagogic relationships in the nursery is a deeply human activity evoking joy and satisfaction, but stress and uncertainty too. From an international perspective, strong local reflective spaces are required if early childhood provision is to be culturally and context responsive, counter-balancing globalising pressure to standardise provision. Further, nursery practitioners are entitled to a formal space where their subjective experience of the work, its demands and dilemma, can be expressed and understood.

This paper is about ‘Work Discussion’ (WD) as such a reflective space. Professional reflection is now included in early years policy frameworks internationally for the reasons above. WD, distinctive in including explicit attention to emotion in pedagogy, is one model of a reflective space.

This paper arises from a longitudinal evaluation of WD in nursery funded by the Froebel Trust. The methodology of the evaluation and the positive findings of impact for children have already been published. The aim of this paper is to theorise WD, drawing on the work of Wilfried Bion, a psychoanalyst and theorist of thinking in groups. Empirical data if offered to illustrate the explanatory power of Bion’s theory including what may be discussed openly and what is avoided in pedagogic reflection.

KEYWORDS:

• Pedagogy
• culture
• professional reflection
• early years
• emotion
• feeling
• love
• anxiety

Introduction: what is said and what is avoided in early childhood pedagogic reflection

Although giving life to silent data is a validity nightmare, I entertained the possibility that what teachers said was important, but ‘what was not said’ may be significant. (Brennan 2016, 6)

The following is an extract of discussion in a professional reflection group with nursery practitioners:

Practitioner idly commenting to colleagues in a group: Of course, you have your favourites … (amongst the children)

Colleagues: Looking back at the practitioner in silence and with an air of shock …

Practitioner: Oh come on you guys! You know you have your favourites …

Colleagues remain silent for a few minutes before one says: Well, I suppose deep down …

Another adds: Whatever your feelings, you always treat all children the same

Others said: We don’t have favourites

(Elfer et al. 2018a)

Watching early years practitioners work with young children and listening to them speak about their work provides ample evidence of the love, joy and satisfaction they often experience (Page 2011; Bjørgen and Svendsen 2015). These are easy emotions to experience and to observe. There are also more difficult emotions. Examples include the anger of practitioners towards colleagues perceived as unkind or thoughtless in Brazilian nurseries (Cardenal 2011, 248), persecutory guilt in North American practitioners (Madrid and Dunn-Kenney 2010) and burn out and alienation in Austrian nurseries (Datler, Datler, and Funder 2010).

The presence of these different emotions raises important questions about the part they play in overall practitioner experience and in how practitioners’ talk together about their work interactions and their experience of them. Professional reflection, the common but ill-defined term for such discussion of work experience, is now widely cited in the international literature as an essential element of early years policy frameworks (Urban et al. 2012; Oberhuemer 2013; ISSA 2016). Yet professional reflection remains largely untheorised and its processes empirically unexamined.

The two quotations above suggest that important aspects of early childhood pedagogy may be avoided in discussion. In the second example, the discussion of having different feelings towards different children seems to be a difficult one to even start. It seems to us vital that practitioners should have a space for reflection for two reasons.

First, there is a need for a model of professional reflection that facilitates democratic and sensitive practitioner attention to the values and expectations of local communities and cultures (Moss 2007; Griet Roets, Roose, and Roose 2012; Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 2013). A powerful critique of the International Standardised System of early learning and assessment, led by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development), is based on its decontextualization and lack of democratic accountability (Urban and Swadener 2016). Differences and conflicts exist between practitioners’ own beliefs and practices, between these and local communities, and between different ideologies (Logan, Press, and Sumsion 2012). Discussing difference in teams working closely together involves emotion too, for example it can require courage to openly disagree with a colleague and there are psychological incentives for maintaining a sense of superficial agreement.

Second, practitioners are not technicians. Their work demands deep human engagement with the subjective emotion and commitment that this evokes. Practitioners’ own needs and vulnerabilities can be difficult to acknowledge but are an inevitable aspect of their humanity. All of this requires attention to the costs and contribution of emotional labour (Hochschild 1983) and the influence of emotion in pedagogic interactions and in thinking about these interactions (Bibby 2009; Kenway and Youdell 2011; Britzman 2015).

This paper aims to theorise a model of reflection that is responsive to these two needs. The paper is one of the series arising from a funded¹ longitudinal evaluation of such a model of professional reflection called ‘Work Discussion’ (WD). The process of WD is described in detail later in the paper but to introduce it briefly here, it refers to the discussion of a consistent and regular group of professionals, enabled by a trained facilitator of work experience. The discussion includes sensitive attention to emotions evoked by the nature of the work and their influence on thinking about the work and on its practice. WD has been used in different professional contexts (Rustin and Bradley 2008) but has not been explored theoretically or empirically within early childhood pedagogy. We give a description of WD and its use in this evaluation later in this paper but the essence of WD is to enable participants:

‘To tell it like it is’ … it is often a very new experience for people to be encouraged to … include subjective thoughts and, sometimes, some acutely painful troubling feelings (Klauber 2008, xxi)

The overall aims, design and methodology of the evaluation have been set out elsewhere (Elfer et al. 2018a). The methodology of the evaluation (Elfer et al. 2018a) and the positive findings of impact (Elfer et al. 2018b) have already been published. The experience of practitioners participating in WD will be the subject of a forthcoming paper. The purpose of this paper is to theorise the processes of WD in nurseries drawing on the theory of Wilfred Bion (1961) on thinking in groups and to illustrate the theory with empirical data.

Theorising professional reflection in early childhood pedagogy

Is it necessary to theorise professional reflection in early childhood pedagogy? Early years pedagogy is steeped in subjectivity, emotion, conflicting values and priorities, and unexamined assumptions. How is systematic attention to be given to these difficult areas?

We draw on Hannah Arendt’s approach to thinking:

… matters that were not given to sense perception … and can be validated by empirical tests … thinkers were agreed that, in order to deal with such matters, man … withdraws from the world of appearances (Arendt 1978, 16)

We have been facilitating pedagogic discussion with groups of nursery practitioners over the last 15 years, trying to enable this ‘withdrawal from appearance’. The aim has been to enable long-held and ‘common sense’ practices, often taken for granted by individual stakeholders as self-evident truths, to be examined and better understood.

Our experience has been that such discussion can be enriching, illuminating and relieving but also messy, painful, partial, exposing and confusing. Group discussions can easily shift, as if seamlessly, from what seems like deep level engagement with a problem or issue, where uncertainty is briefly possible, to a different group mindset of superficial agreement and retreat to certainty. Uncertainty, complexity and the risk of disagreement and its consequences are easily avoided. Critical professional reflection can be emotionally as well as intellectually challenging. Who is not tempted to ‘reach for facts and reason’ (Keats in Rollins 1958), pretending to stay ‘uncontaminated by emotion’ (Kenway and Youdell 2011). In this Journal, Bibby (2009), drawing on Bion, has already challenged the portrayal of thinking as purely rationalist and we return to her work later in the paper.

There has been valuable progress made in documenting accounts of different kinds of professional reflection in the early years literature, notably the volume of papers edited by Pamela Oberhaumer (2013). Yet professional reflection in the early years remains largely presented as straightforward and unproblematic. Theorisation is vital if professional reflection is not to be rendered superficial, falling far short of critical attention to the emotional rewards and costs of early childhood pedagogy and to hidden assumptions, value positions and stereotypes.

The four aims of the paper are therefore to

1. introduce the theory of Wilfred Bion on thinking in groups;

2. describe the aims and procedures of Work Discussion;

3. introduce our evaluation of Work Discussion and illustrate the discussions;

4. use Bion to theorise and illustrate the complexity of the discussions drawing on empirical data from the evaluation.

Wilfred Bion’s theory of thinking: knowing and not knowing, thinking and not thinking

Wilfred Bion provides a post Kleinian theory of thinking in which unconscious and defensive states of mind have ontological status. The impact of unconscious anxiety in nurseries was first proposed by Bain and Barnett (1986) and Hopkins (1988) and its influence has been documented in Austrian nurseries (Datler, Datler, and Funder 2010) and in English ones (Elfer 2014).

We are drawn to Bion’s model of thinking because of its attention to the unconscious and its impact on thinking and avoidance of thinking and knowing:

… Not knowing is held to be a primary requirement of being able to ‘get to know’ something. The distinction is between a form of ‘knowledge’ that impedes exploration and learning because it is saturated knowledge, without space for discovery and an active relationship to the as yet unknown, and a process of cognitive and imaginative relating to experience that is a transitive and provisional one and leaves room for changing emotions and uncertainty. (Rustin 2008, 12).

The place of emotion as central to an understanding of thinking processes is central in Bion’s work. Rustin has argued that it has a profound contribution to make in both our understanding of the development of thinking in infants as well as in understanding thinking within groups and institutions (Rustin 2019). For Bion, thinking arises from curiosity, a mental position prompted partly by frustration at not knowing and the desire to understand. We do not spend much time thinking about things we do not care about. The ‘caring about’, alongside an acknowledgement of ‘not knowing’, are important pre-conditions for thinking. If thinking is motivated by emotion, it also evokes emotion. If the emotions evoked by a thought are too threatening or painful (for example, the practitioners’ anxiety that feeling differently towards different children is professionally reprehensible), then even acknowledging this reality becomes difficult. In Bion’s model, facilitating thinking involves the capacity to contain the anxiety that can be evoked by an idea or a thought.

Tamara Bibby has already introduced Bion and the concepts of K+ (not knowing but the desire to know) and K- (not lack of knowledge but avoidance of knowing or the desire not to know) in this Journal. She used Bion to theorise pedagogical interactions in primary school:

… to move from not knowing to knowing requires we must necessarily transit through a period which will involve uncertainty, frustration and anxiety, and this uncertainty inevitably carries risk (Bibby 2009, 43-44).

Bibby’s work (2009) is pioneering in conceptualising learning as occurring in the context of individual pupil–teacher relationships and how teachers understand and manage the emotions of learning evoked for individual pupils. Our proposal is that a similar process is at work when nursery practitioners are thinking together in a professional reflection group. Practitioners need to feel that their anxiety about what they can talk about is not only understood by the facilitators but will be understood and managed in the group discussion.

We want to extend Bibby’s theoretical framing from dyads (teachers and pupils) to the processes of thinking in groups. We do this by adding Bion’s conception of ‘basic assumptions’ to that of K+ and K-. Bion proposed that groups of people meeting together for a shared task tend to function in two basic modes of group mentality which he termed ‘Basic Assumption’ (BA) and ‘Work Group’ (WG) modes.

I have arrived at a theory of the group as giving evidence of work-group functions, together with behaviour, often strongly emotionally coloured, which suggested that groups were reacting to one of three basic assumptions. The idea that such basic assumptions are made involuntarily, automatically, inevitably has seemed useful in illuminating the behaviour of the group (Bion 1961, 165).

BA modes are unconscious modes of thinking and behaving that have as their purpose avoidance of the primary task of the group, that is the consciously agreed task for which a group has met. BA modes of group mentality seek to explain the experience in groups when the discussion seems circular, repetitive or unrelated to the core issues. The model proposes that groups momentarily (or for longer) shift their collective thinking state to an avoidant state because the content of discussion is experienced as threatening in some way. In early childhood pedagogy, the dominant discourse of the ever-caring practitioner who is constructed as only experiencing love and devotion to her work seems likely to provoke considerable anxiety in practitioners. How do practitioners speak about the less positive feelings that may arise in their work, especially given the gendered and denigrated social positioning of caring work? Gillian Ruch explains ‘basic assumption’ modes of avoidance as part of the ‘centrality of the human condition, the tendency to adopt defensive positions in the face of complex and emotionally charged situations … ’ (Ruch 2012, 1321).

‘Basic assumption’ modes contrast with ‘work-group’ modes where a group can take account of external contributing factors to internal issues but remain focussed on its agreed task of thinking about how to respond to and manage these. There is not an avoidance of the implications for the internal by remaining focussed on the external. The group can think together, discuss, disagree and tolerate uncertainty but still strive towards understanding and convergence.

French and Simpson (2010) have critiqued the emphasis given in Bion’s writing to ‘basic assumption’ modes of functioning in groups. They argue that avoidant and engaged states of thinking in groups are present concurrently, not as alternating states. They also point out that forms of basic assumption activity may be positively helpful to the group’s purpose, for example, by legitimately fighting external threats or by consciously relying on a leader or some other person perceived to have expertise or other resources helpful to the group. They recognise ways in which groups may avoid thinking but call for more sensitivity to group states of mind that are mistakenly understood as avoidant thus obscuring their creative and helpful potential. Ruch has endorsed this reconfiguration of thinking states in group processes and the importance of:

Finding ways to effectively manage the complex and contested ‘primary task’ of child-care social work without resorting to defensive positions that deny the affective, human dimension of the work … (Ruch 2010, 1329)

Our argument is that thinking about and managing such professional tasks, in our case, the complex and contested tasks of early childhood pedagogy, also without resort to defensive positions, are the central task of professional reflection. The theoretical frame that Bion’s work provides is rich in its descriptive and analytic power. It is beyond the scope and aims of this paper to discuss this further here but is available through key texts from his original work (see Bion 1967, particularly Chapter 9 ‘A theory of thinking’, 1970), through commentaries on this (Ogden 2004) and through the application of the theory in different professional contexts (Rustin and Bradley 2008). In the next section of the paper, we introduce and theorise WD as a model of reflection underpinned by Bion’s theory.

Work discussion introduced: a model of professional reflection underpinned by Bion

Work Discussion has its roots in the development of research on social and work relations in a wide range of organisations and analysis of the interaction of individual, organisation and social context (Hinshelwood 2008). Work Discussion has evolved as a model of thinking about the lived experience of work relationships in diverse disciplines and national contexts (Rustin and Bradley 2008).

A WD group normally includes between five and ten members, meeting for a regular duration (60–90 minutes) and at regular intervals (weekly or fortnightly). Participants take turns to present an example of their practice in the form of a detailed descriptive account of an issue or problem. The group, led by one or two facilitators, provides an important sustaining function as the participants attempt to make sense of the presented work issue. The role of the facilitator is to encourage the group’s curiosity about the scenario, paying close attention to the questions, contributions and reactions as they arise. The facilitators assist the presenter and the wider group to work out some of the more subtle aspects of what happened and why it was considered important for the issue to be brought for discussion.

Although not explicitly used in WD, psychoanalytic theory offers concepts that can elucidate an enhanced awareness of in the moment group responses and reactions as further details emerge from the discussion. It is through the facilitators’ sensitive interventions that the more difficult feelings and emotional experiences arising from the scenario can begin to be thought about and tentatively articulated. This process of professional reflection can assist participants to manage the inherent stress of their work better. However, there is a fine line between lowering defences in order to be more critically reflective and maintaining ordinary human defences that are self-protective and help participants manage the anxieties and stresses of the work that may otherwise be overwhelming.

Armstrong (2010) identifies skills used by experienced group facilitators as including an:

… unwavering focus on the group as a whole, the avoidance of technical jargon – anything worth saying could be said in ordinary language and the refusal of ‘knowingness’, even under pressure (163)

These facilitating characteristics need to be combined with a presence that maintains an insightful capacity to reassure but also to challenge. Hollway and Jefferson (2013) use the term ‘defended subject’ to acknowledge the dynamic nature of reactions to difficult discussion topics and the unconscious need to reduce the associated level of anxiety. For the facilitator in a WD group with its focus on work interactions, the challenge is to remain aware of the impact of these dynamic processes but also to highlight opportunities for reflection, the examination of assumptions, and the possibility of drawing alternative conclusions.

Research questions, methodology, data collection, analysis and ethics

The methodology for evaluating the impact of the WD sessions for practitioners and children is set out elsewhere (Elfer et al. 2018a). This section discusses the methodology for exploring the processes of the WD sessions themselves.

Research questions

1. What issues did WD participants bring for discussion?

2. Was there evidence of ‘working group’ (group working together to think) and ‘basic assumption’ (group avoidance of thinking) modes of group functioning as the group responded to issues brought for discussion?

A third important research question concerns what the practitioners had to say about their experiences of WD. Data to address this question were collected by an independent researcher not involved in the facilitation of the groups. This data will be reported separately and is forthcoming.

Methodology

Kenway and Youdell assert that:

education is almost always positioned as rational – as a social and epistemological endeavour … ‘uncontaminated’ by emotion (2011, 132).

They argue for perspectives outside what they regard as ‘the mainstream educational discourse’ (2011, 132) but recognise that:

conducting empirical research into emotion is not easily done … How do we observe a mood, an atmosphere, the movement of feeling? How can we read emotional subtexts, intimations? (2011, 135).

We add the question of how to explore the influence of emotions like embarrassment that may manifest as defensiveness, or of anger that may manifest as silence or indifference. Interpretation is fraught with difficulty as Brennan indicates in the quotation at the beginning of this paper.

We have constructed a methodology mindful of Britzman’s call for attention to detailed particulars:

In listening to the gap between words, the unmeant reply, the sexual inuendo, off-the-cuff remarks, and inscrutable questions; in watching the raised eyebrows and sudden frowns, … .a psychoanalyst in the classroom learns to wait. Communication does not give itself easily and contact comes when least expected (2009, 12)

Whilst psychoanalytically informed methodologies have had a clear presence in social research for at least two decades (Rustin 2001; Froggett 2002; Hollway and Jefferson 2013), there has been a recent re-articulation of the value of attention to the unconscious in social science (Stamenova and Hinshelwood 2018; Rustin 2019).

In reviewing the contribution of psychoanalytic methods, Rustin draws on Latour’s reference to the use of different symbolic systems to construct inferences in different disciplines according to their ontologies. Rustin cites cartographers’ use of maps and scales, neuroscientists’ mapping of electrical impulses and epidemiologists’ reliance on statistical correlations (Rustin 2019, 106). Our symbolic systems have included the subtle communications described by Britzman above. These have allowed us to draw inferences about unconscious processes and contributed to a data set that can illustrate and facilitate heuristic insight through Bion’s theory of thinking. The data presented below have been analysed through close attention to this symbolic system and its manifestations in the WD sessions. The empirical value of such inferences has already been demonstrated in educational contexts including nurseries (Datler, Datler, and Funder 2010), primary schools (Bibby 2009), secondary schools (Jackson 2008) and universities (Alcorn 2010).

We gathered data from 29 WD sessions, each lasting 75 minutes, in one setting, during a 12-month period, with a group of 10 participants including the Head. Two facilitators worked with the group, one with early years pedagogy expertise, the other was a child psychotherapist with experience in group process. We were aware that the Head’s inclusion may inhibit some practitioners from discussing interactions that they found difficult or were uncertain how to manage. However, his inclusion also showed his readiness to hear about these experiences and contribute to his own difficulties and uncertainties at work.

The WD group was arranged immediately after the end of the working day with the children so that participants would not be kept too late and with compensating time off later in the week. The focus of the discussion was any matter that participants wished to bring concerning their daily work with children and families. We excluded discussion of personal or employment issues unless participants said they felt these were directly impacting on their day to day work. Our primary task in facilitating the group was:

… the creation and sustaining of an atmosphere of enquiry in the group characterized by curiosity, scepticism, fellow-feeling, debate, differences so that the unknown can become less unwelcome … .(Rustin 2008, 12),

Data collection

With the participants’ agreement, the sessions were recorded. We recognised this may have inhibited discussion. However, it allowed the facilitators to concentrate on the group without the need for note taking and it enabled a transcript that could be analysed and independently scrutinised. Immediately after each session, the facilitators independently gave their individual assessment of the group discussion which was transcribed. An independent researcher listened to a sample of the discussions, read the facilitators’ assessments and gave a triangulating interpretation of the role of emotion in the discussion.

Analysis of data

In their independent reflections after each session, the facilitators thought about patterns evident in the discussions. Particular attention was paid to minute and subtle pieces of data illustrated by Britzman above. Attention was paid to shifting group mindsets, for example engaged listening or lack of interest, advice giving or exploratory questions, thoughtful silences or avoidant ones. Tones of responses were considered too, for example, why some issues were taken up enthusiastically whilst others seem to evoke boredom. Secondly, differences and commonalities in these independent reflections were examined. Thirdly, a 20% sample of the sessions and their accompanying reflections were reviewed by the independent researcher.

The facilitators reviewed all recorded sessions, their immediate post-session reflections for each one and the six reviews by the first independent researcher. These data were then coded to identify examples of episodes of discussion that exemplified ‘working group’ mode (engaged, critical thinking together) or ‘basic assumption’ avoidant mode (for example, rushing to advise or direct, avoidance of an issue, or boredom).

In reporting the data in the ‘Talking with feeling’ section below, we present an inevitably heavily edited account of the session dialogues. The editing rationale is to provide both a sense of an evolving group as well as illustrating detailed issues in order to allow provisional theorising of process. The aim is for the reader to see the detail of discussions within individual weekly groups, as well as see how the groups evolved over the year.

Ethical issues

The usual ethical procedures governing participation and confidentiality and the right to withdraw were followed but two further issues were prominent.

The first was that facilitators should respond sensitively to issues brought for discussion that appeared to have their roots in personal issues or home circumstances. The boundary between the professional and the personal is not always easily drawn. Facilitators needed to be alert to the boundaries of discussion within the group and avoid discussion straying into personal or private matters. It is not easy to define the boundaries of this. It requires a continual ethical sensitivity to what is manageable for a group to discuss and that also relates clearly to their work experience.

Second, participants were invited to bring for discussion of any work issue they chose. The focus of discussion was agreed as practitioners’ day to day interactions within the internal context of the nursery rather than organisational, policy or social issues although of course these contributed to the external context. However, 2017 saw a series of terrorist attacks in London with sharply rising societal hostility towards Islam generally and Muslim people individually. The impact on the WD group was so palpable as to render what had seemed a manageable boundary to be ethically questionable. We return to this later in the paper.

The issues brought for discussion

Most issues presented (86%) expressed concerns about developmental issues for the children. These issues fell into two broad groups. One group concerned difficulties for children, for example, separating in the morning or the intensity of attachment of a child to an individual practitioner. The other group concerned managing behavioural boundaries, working with children on the autistic spectrum and how to talk to parents sensitively about children’s behaviours.

Scrutiny of the discussions revealed little information on a practitioner’s motivation for bringing an issue for discussion. Presentations of issues were mostly verbal and often brief, with few details of interactions, context or subjective experience. Emergence of motivations, professional anxieties and conflicts happened only slowly. If asked, the practitioner presenting often distanced themselves saying they thought the issue might be of interest to the group or that it was an issue that most people in the group had found difficult.

The reluctance of some practitioners to reveal difficulties, whether individual or systemic, in their work is easily understood. Practitioners could be courageously open. However, generally, explorations of underlying difficulties were careful and gradual. For example, in a presentation about a practitioner struggling with a child’s intense attachment, several primary difficulties seemed possible. Is the difficulty one of how to enable the child to be more independent? Or is it whether the child’s emotional need to be close is appropriate? Or is it whether a deep emotional attachment, if enabled, will be seen by colleagues, as encouraging dependency or as unfairly diverting attention away from other children? These questions have sensitive personal, professional and cultural dimensions. It is an issue for the group of whether such questions and dimensions can be allowed to surface and be considered.

Talking with feeling: emotions and their presence in the process and content of group discussions

In this section, we illustrate the detail of individual discussions and give a sense of an evolving group. We theorise this data through a reading of Bion in the section that follows.

General description: first term (Spring 2017)

Early on, the data notes a sense of competitiveness between participants, everyone wanting to speak but with little listening. A child was discussed who cried a lot when parents departed. The facilitators suggested that it may be important not to comfort him immediately but to see if he could gradually begin to cope with this painful separation. The group dismissed this, saying that the Head, who was not present that week, wanted children comforted immediately. There was no indication of what the group thought about this or evidence of their agency in being able to influence nursery policy on how separations were approached.

As the sessions progressed, the group at times seemed bored or uncomfortable if any silences occurred. Facilitators worked hard to stimulate discussion and encourage reflection on whatever issue had been presented. There was though no sense of the group feeling any practical value in spending time reflecting on their daily work. Curiosity seemed irrelevant in favour of getting on with the job.

Towards the end of the first term, the practitioners were asked about their experience of the group:

In the beginning, I was a bit nervous because I haven’t spoken in a big group before like this with someone from outside but after these few weeks, I feel more confident now … , as I get to know you, then I can build up on that and speak more – that’s how it works for me sort of thing … initially we didn’t know what to talk about, so silence and then the dreaded questions, and then ‘oh my God!’ (Session 7: 6 March 2017)

The reference to the ‘the dreaded questions’, seemed an important expression of the emotional response to the experience of exploration of an issue. Another practitioner had referred to the ‘poke, poke, poke’ of questions. The facilitators framed any questions with great care in a tone of interest rather than challenge. These participants clearly experienced the questions as intrusive. Discussing subjective experience and struggle at work is exposing and might be interpreted as not managing, incompetence or inexperience. In that respect, their sense of dread is understandable. The depth of sensitivity felt about exposing struggle, not knowing, or uncertainty seems an important insight.

By the end of the first term, there were signs that the group was thinking and talking together in a different way. The data revealed more spontaneous contributions following presentations with others adding detail and giving illustrative examples of interactions in a lively way. There was evidence of increased curiosity, for example, one of the practitioners wondered if a child was being ‘babied’ (not allowed any agency). The facilitators suggested the possibility of a child also being given too much responsibility. There are clearly cultural as well as professional factors here. The two possible patterns provoked considerable discussion. Third, there were courageous expressions of hurt and personal need in the work:

I used to find that really annoying. We had a child who cried and cried and cried and somehow, we worked it out settling him in … And then they go to the three-year olds room and they’re not even sad to see you go. That used to hurt a lot … (Session 9: 20 March 2017).

Finally, there appeared to be a general increase in confidence in participants’ readiness to speak in the group. Nevertheless, some participants appeared to struggle with even the most careful and tentative exploration of an issue from the facilitators.

Second term summer 2017

The second term data showed the group often lapsing into a bored and disengaged state. If no one spoke, there was evidence of discomfort rather than valuing silence as an opportunity to think. The facilitators recorded their desire to push the group, to be more challenging in asking questions and to start leading a discussion, all of which would have risked moving the agenda away from one determined by the group. The facilitators’ own challenge was to bear expressions of boredom, avoid the pressure to be ‘entertaining’ and remain with the primary task of helping the group think.

The facilitators explicit recognition of the difficulty of thinking after their day of work with the children seemed valued by the group and the group discussions became more relaxed. A less defensive group culture appeared to emerge and an increased readiness to talk about personal feeling and its part in work interaction was evident. However, some spontaneous comments like the one quoted at the beginning of this paper on having favourites amongst the children, were met with silence and seemed too risky to discuss.

The discussion sessions appeared to evolve slowly. It was also the conclusion of Ramadan and four practitioners had been fasting. In the last week of Ramadan, there was a presentation about a two-year-old girl who was distressed and uncontained:

She seems to be getting worse … At one point, I was standing holding her for half an hour; what we are trying to do now is hold her for five minutes, put her down for five minutes and then pick her up for five … .But she was just getting really physical today; she was charging towards adults, literally charging into them, crying uncontrollably … getting worse and worse (Session 16: 19 June 2017)

As the meaning of this two-year old’s behaviour was explored, the news was dominated by three terrorist attacks and a major tower block fire in London with great loss of life. The facilitators record their concern about what impact these events may be having on the work of the practitioners given increased tensions in communities and the location of the nursery in an area with a large Muslim population. Despite the research boundaries, groups are open systems and external events influence internal dynamics.

Nevertheless, for the facilitators to proactively ask about the impact of external events would have been a departure from the agreed focus. As this dilemma was considered, there was a further attack when a van drove into a group outside a Mosque killing someone. The facilitators note that it felt impossible to continue talking about work interactions, in a team of practitioners including Muslim women, without asking about the impact on these attacks and the fire. The practitioners responded immediately talking with intense feeling about the related rise in street hostility to people identified as Muslim and their anxiety about being subject to personal attack travelling to and from the nursery.

The summer term ended with a strong evidence in the data of a group more able to express personal emotion evoked at work, to tolerate differences of view between themselves and to look critically at alternative cultural and pedagogic approaches in their work.

Third term autumn 2017

Over the summer, there were considerable staff changes and the appointment of a new team leader. Two of the new members of the group had had prior experience of professional reflection groups and immediately welcomed the WD sessions. In the third session of the term, the Head spoke of his constant anxiety about whether practitioners could speak to him about the demands of the work:

… more than anything, that sense of having to rely on people being able to tell somebody if they’re having a hard time … it can feel quite negligent to realise suddenly that somebody is struggling but you have not realised; you do depend on people to signal … .(Head/Session 22: 2 October 2017

In the following week, the opening discussions included resentment and a sense of being ‘used and abused’ by some parents. There were accounts of the careful work that had been invested in preparing for a child to start only for the child not to turn up on the agreed day, parents having made alternative decisions without informing the nursery.

In the more child-focussed presentation that followed, a child was discussed who seemed to find it very hard to settle at nursery or to make eye contact with practitioners:

yes, she doesn’t like eye contact … she wants the attention but she doesn’t want the attention as well, I think she gets embarrassed so she’s a really hard one to read (laughs), really hard. I think she gets her own way out of him (Dad) a lot. She was crying one day and I explained to Dad I think it was because she had to put something away. And he’s OK, speaking Bengali to her, offering her sweets and chips (as an inducement to her). And the next thing, he’s getting his money out, so I was like £20, and then another £20 and £10! £50!!! Like she’s a two-year-old!! Literally, he was giving it to her in her hand. I was like ‘No Dad, you need to put your money away … your giving her the wrong message that what I am doing is wrong … (Session 23: 9 October 2017)

The practitioner presenting was shocked at the sum of money being offered to the child and clearly annoyed at feeling undermined by the father. The tone of voice she described using to him was critical and admonishing. The facilitators considered whether there may be a link between the anger evident now, felt towards this father and the earlier emotions of anger felt towards parents who were considered to ‘use and abuse’ the nursery. Were retaliatory feelings creeping into relationships with parents? Yet there were also accounts of practitioners’ deep emotional work with parents. Towards the end of the term, a practitioner described sitting with a mother, ‘feeling the mother’s terror’ (Session 28, 27 November 2017), as the mother faced a formal diagnosis of global delay in her child. Yet when the facilitators spoke of the depth of support this mother had described through the sensitive relationship of trust the practitioner had meticulously built with her, the practitioner was dismissive, minimising her efforts as routine. The practitioners seemed to regard this emotion work as routine, a ‘taken for granted’ aspect of their daily work without distinctive value. We return to this in the Discussion.

Findings and discussion in the light of Bion

Our first research question asked what issues the WD participants brought for discussion and we reported on this above. Our second research question asked about the presence of ‘working group’ modes of thinking (group working together to think) and ‘basic assumption’ modes (group avoidance of thinking). After a year of weekly WD sessions, 29 sessions in all, the data set was considerable, 37 hours of recorded discussion, a further 15 hours of immediate commentary and reflection, followed by a scrutiny and analytic procedure set out in the methodology section above. We have addressed the first research question on issues brought for discussion earlier in the paper. Here, we give three primary findings to the second research question (about the presence of ‘basic assumption’ and ‘working group’ modes).

Finding one: taking thinking, defined by Arendt, as the primary task of the WD group, both ‘working group’ and ‘avoidant’ modes of thinking were evident in each session. Avoidant modes, distinguished from times when thinking stopped because of tiredness or distraction, were associated with topics that evoked anxiety about declaring an individual position or about managing differences of view within the group

Working group modes of engaged, shared thinking were evident in thoughtful silences, attentive listening, exploratory questioning, tolerances of uncertainties, recognition of multiple perspectives and approaches, recognition of personal subjectivity and values and gradual emergence of new ideas.

Avoidance of thinking modes was evident in states of boredom, anger at silences seen as ‘wasted time’, insistence that the facilitators should offer solutions, divergence onto topics that appeared irrelevant, peremptory instructions on ‘correct’ actions, participants talking over one another and a focus on blame of external agencies.

The data reported from the first term refer to periods of the group appearing bored or uncomfortable with silences. Reading this data with Bion, participants’ anxieties would be high about a new way of being and thinking together. They were being invited to expose their own thoughts and feelings. Further, in the absence of the group offering them any sense of immediate value or satisfaction, other demands on their time may have seemed more pressing and worthwhile. Curiosity and reflection seemed irrelevant to them and they spoke of preferring to get on with the job rather than spending time talking about it.

Often, there did indeed seem little to talk about. Presentations often contained scant background detail and generalised descriptions of behaviours. We could see that providing detail might feel exposing and take courage. The ‘choice’ to be in ‘avoidant’ mode despite the boredom, rather than risking a difference of view with either each other, or worse, with the head, was understandable. The facilitators’ task to understand this anxiety, possibly unconscious as well as conscious, is an important one. Facilitators must be mindful of this, framing any questions following a presentation with immense care and gentleness of tone. The participants’ initial experience of exploratory questions as ‘poking and probing’ and ‘dreaded’ can be understood as an expression of their anxiety about any exploration that may expose them.

The group’s increased confidence to explore situations and consider alternative perspectives appeared to result from the facilitators’ direct attention to what it might feel like for the practitioners to let go of fixed ‘positions’ and risk thinking differently about their daily work. This is consistent with Bibby’s findings, also drawing on Bion, about what pupils said about a teacher’s experience of their learning:

We can hear them valuing being able to trust him to treat them and their learning seriously and with respect … (Bibby 2009, 47)

Two other findings about group process emerged that were unexpected.

Finding two: facilitating WD groups demands close attention to the space between the internal (identity and personal feeling) and the external (environment)

The primary task of the WD group is reflection on pedagogic interactions and that is its boundary. This entails a focus on the day to day work and the group members’ values, assumptions, agentic capacities and choices, constrained as they are by their external environment. The environment of the nursery (its ethos, locality, professional values and political demands) of course bears on pedagogic work and is an important site of professional activism. There is a question of whether, if such activism occupies the WD group, it displaces or becomes a form of avoidance of the reflective task (closer attention to subjective experience and its roots and influence). Equally, too much attention to subjectivity risks another form of subversion of primary task, turning the group away from its pedagogic task to something more akin to a therapy group. That is not the role of WD either.

However, encompassed within the WD primary task, there is a need for attention to the impact of the external environment on the capacity of a group to be able to think (Armstrong 2010, 163). For example, how might a policy culture of market pressures, audit and surveillance, or instrumentalism (Moss 2007) reinforce defensive attitudes within reflective group cultures, thinking modes being displaced by avoidant modes. The facilitators’ task is to help the group remain focussed on its agreed primary task, the day to day work, without becoming either too personally introspective or diverting to policy issues well beyond the group’s scope. As the data from term two shows, this boundary was completely breached in the light of the terrorist events of 2017. The concept of the integrity of a professional space between the internal (identity and feeling) and the external (environment) as the location for WD remains an important one.

Finding Three: The role and impact of emotion in pedagogic interaction can be intense and demanding for practitioners to acknowledge and think about

The WD sessions throughout the year included many emotions, some intense, from expressions of love and affection through to anxiety, anger and resentment. These emotions arose from the daily work and from talking about the daily work. An important question arises of how such intense emotions may influence practitioners’ responses to children and families and to their own wellbeing. The WD space is one in which links or connections between emotion, thinking and behaviour can be considered.

Practitioners could often see how their emotions were linked to the form of their responses to parents or children, not always in ways they wanted. However, such links were sometimes too difficult to make immediately. In the example earlier of the two-year-old girl offered £50 by her father to tidy toys, the father is seen by practitioners as not responding appropriately to the child, not seeing what she may really need instead of £50, in order to manage. The practitioner’s reported directive to the father is peremptory in tone and words:

No Dad, you need to put your money away … your giving her the wrong message that what I am doing is wrong … .

How may emotion have shaped the tone of this interaction. In her presentation, the practitioner describes the father as undermining her attempts to get the child to participate in tidying. One possibility is that the practitioner has reacted in a retaliatory way that was not consciously intended to make the father feel undermined as she and her colleagues have felt undermined by some parents. The aim of WD is to develop a professional space where such possible links can be explored and tested with the practitioners without the practitioner feeling in turn judged or criticised. The emotion is then less likely to be influential in an unexplored way within practice.

Conclusion

Our starting point in this paper is two challenges in early years policy internationally, both of which require a transformation in how emotion is understood and the attention it is given. The first challenge is how to build civic spaces for young children, away from the family, that are sensitively responsive to the expectation of families and local communities. This entails the need to embrace diversity, difference and uncertainty which in turn are likely to evoke anxiety and therefore risk avoidance. The second challenge is how to legitimate the place of emotion and emotional labour in pedagogy, for example expressions of love, attachment, empathy and loss, as an element of supporting and valuing the subjective work of nursery practitioners. Talking with feeling and about feeling is essential if its contribution and costs are to be better understood.

We welcome a turn in the literature to the role of emotion and emerging models of critical professional reflection that include attention to it. Much work has been done to develop different kinds of professional reflection, particularly with attention to the influence of power differentials, for example whether it is a voluntary or mandated professional activity, how its processes intersect with managerial hierarchies and accountability systems such as supervision and appraisal, and how principles of WD can be used in different kinds of professional meeting outside of a formal WD group. However, we remain concerned that models so far have not addressed the problem of what remains unsaid or avoided in professional reflection discussions, because it involves fear of personal exposure or risking disagreement and conflict. Our contention is that models of professional reflection must theorise the emotion, unconscious as well as conscious, that mediates discussion, if professional reflection is to have real meaning.

We have introduced one model of reflection, Work Discussion (WD), underpinned by the theory of thinking in groups developed by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. We have already published the methodology of the overall evaluation and the positive findings of impact on the progression of children (Elfer et al. 2018a, 2018b). In this paper, we have sought to develop Bion’s theorisation through an examination of the processes of discussion understood with Bion and the role of emotion in the reflections of the practitioners. We have shown how the avoidance of discussion, for example on the issue of different subjective feeling towards different children, illustrated at the beginning of the paper, can be explained by the role of unconscious anxiety. Assisting a group to be gradually attentive to such anxiety takes time. If the WD facilitators can resist the desire to hurry and resist being positioned by the group as experts with answers, the group’s own confidence and sense of agency in their practice may flourish.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the nursery practitioners in England and in Austria who have talked to us about their experiences of their work. We would also like to thank the Froebel Trust for funding the evaluation and their commitment to the work. The evaluation was a collaboration with Child Psychotherapists, Katy Dearnley and Ruth Seglow, both with extensive experience in group relations. Their cross-disciplinary expertise was invaluable. Finally, we thank Professors Debbie Epstein and Adam Ockelford for helpful advice and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Froebel Trust [RCH-07-2016.].

Notes

1. This work was supported by the Froebel Trust under grant number RCH-07-2016.