The family therapy field encourages commitment to diversity and social justice, but offers varying ideas about how to attentively consider these issues. Critical informed models advocate activism, whereas postmodern informed models encourage multiple perspectives. It is often not clear how activism and an emphasis on multiple perspectives connect, engendering the sense that critical and postmodern practices may be disparate. To understand how therapists negotiate these perspectives in practice, this qualitative grounded theory analysis drew on interviews with 11 therapists, each known for their work from both critical and postmodern perspectives. We found that these therapists generally engage in a set of shared constructionist practices while also demonstrating two distinct forms of activism: activism through countering and activism through collaborating. Ultimately, decisions made about how to navigate critical and postmodern influences were connected to how therapists viewed ethics and the ways they were comfortable using their therapeutic power. The findings illustrate practice strategies through which therapists apply each approach.
As new practice domains open up for practitioners of family therapy in the medical, organizational, and human relations fields, family therapy educators and supervisors are required to cross the epistemological spaces of scientist‐practitioner, postmodernism, and critical theory. These new possibilities challenge family therapy educators to become comfortable moving between multiple epistemologies and require a hybridization of knowledge and pedagogical approaches. This article identifies multiple conceptual frameworks for teaching graduate students theories of family therapy and introduces a meta‐pedagogical framework for a developmental pedagogy that supports integration of seemingly differing epistemologies.
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