This critical reflection emerges from a conversation with Dr. Cathy Richardson, Metis Professor of social work at the University of Montreal, Canada and from my own long-standing practice as a social worker, supervisor, and educator working across frontline practice, organisational contexts, and most recently in social work academia. Rather than presenting supervision as a neutral or technical activity, I reflect on supervision as a relational, ethical, and political practice—one that is deeply shaped by resistance to colonialism, neoliberal governance, and psychologised professional norms. In doing so, I draw on response-based practice, narrative therapy, intersectional feminist scholarship, and decolonising perspectives to consider what supervision might become if it were oriented towards collective care rather than individualised performance or organisational compliance.
I write from my position as a cisgendered, heterosexual woman of multi-generational white settler ancestry, currently living and working on Dharawal Country in Australia. Acknowledging positionality is not a preliminary gesture to be dispensed with, but an ongoing ethical practice that informs how I show up in supervision—particularly when working alongside Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers and communities. Supervision, in this sense, is never detached from land, history, or power; it is shaped by whose knowledges are legitimised, whose distress is recognised, and whose resistance is made visible or erased.
My orientation to response-based practice was shaped initially through Narrative Therapy, particularly Michael White’s work on listening for responses to trauma and violence, rather than solely for impacts of problems or preferred alternative stories. My orientation to response-based practice traditions was through engagement with the work of Allan Wade, Linda Coates, Cathy Richardson and Vikki Reynolds, whose contributions foreground resistance, dignity, and the importance of context of social responses. These ideas resonated strongly with my own frontline experience as a first responder to sexualised and systemic violence within interagency child protection contexts, where I witnessed how professional and institutional responses could either support recovery and dignity or reproduce harm.
Supervision, for me, has become a space where parallel and intersecting narratives are held together: the stories of workers, the stories of those they work alongside and the broader organisational, political, and colonial contexts that shape both. Central to my supervisory practice is listening for responses—how workers respond to violence, injustice, ethical constraints, and organisational pressures, as well as how they respond to their own moral distress. This shifts supervision away from deficit-focused analysis and problem solving towards recognising agency, resistance, and ethical intention, even in contexts where options are constrained by systemic and structural barriers.
Much of what workers bring to supervision is not a lack of skill or knowledge, but moral distress arising from being required to participate in systems that conflict with their values. Neoliberal organisational cultures often individualise responsibility, prioritise risk management, and frame supervision as a mechanism for compliance, performance monitoring, or burnout prevention. Within such contexts, supervision can easily become co-opted into a “tick-box” exercise that obscures power relations and structural injustice. I remain sceptical of these managerial imperatives and concerned about professional accreditation processes that privilege psychologised, individualised models of supervision while marginalising collective, relational, and justice-oriented approaches.
In response, my supervisory practice begins not with case presentation or predetermined templates, but with the question: Where are you at today? What is carrying weight emotionally, ethically, or politically? This open entry point allows supervision to be responsive rather than prescriptive. While some supervisees arrive with highly structured expectations for supervision shaped by medical or organisational models, others—particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander workers—prefer to yarn, moving between community, professional, and organisational worlds. For many, these worlds are not separable; work does not end at five o’clock, and professional decisions are entangled with kinship, community accountability, and ongoing exposure to racism and colonial violence.
Within these conversations, values and ethics become a central organising thread. Drawing on narrative and response-based approaches, I listen for moments where workers’ values are enacted, thwarted, or compromised, and for the conditions that shape these experiences. Tools such as values lists can be useful prompts, but they are always held lightly, recognising that values shift over time and context. Supervision becomes less about judging past actions and more about creating a breathing space—a pause in which workers can reflect, reconnect with what matters to them, and consider how they might respond moving forward in a way that aligns with their values.
Increasingly, I am drawn to collective forms of supervision and what might more accurately be described as solidarity practices. Where workers lack access to supportive teams, I facilitate collective spaces—online solidarity groups and in-person retreats—where shared reflection, storytelling, and mutual witnessing can occur. These spaces foreground “pushback” narratives: moments, however small, where workers resist oppression, reach for solidarity, or imagine alternative responses. Even the act of thinking about resistance, when action is constrained, is recognised as meaningful.
These collective practices challenge the privatised, siloed model of supervision that dominates professional discourse. They raise important questions about what supervision is for, whose interests it serves, and how it might contribute to social justice rather than merely sustaining workers within unjust systems. I am increasingly interested in supervision as an under-researched site of practice and inquiry, particularly in relation to decolonising and de-psychologising approaches, collective care, and alternative methodologies such as collaborative autoethnography.
This reflection is deliberately unfinished. It is offered as an invitation rather than a conclusion. I am seeking allies—practitioners, educators, and researchers—who are interested in reimagining supervision as collective care and in pursuing research questions that challenge dominant paradigms. I welcome further conversation as part of the work itself, recognising that knowledge-making in social work is, and must remain, a relational and collective endeavour.