Narrative therapy and outsider witness practice: Teachers as a community of acknowledgement

When people meet together to hear, respond to and acknowledge the preferred accounts of people’s lives, it is referred to in narrative therapy as ‘outsider witness practice’. In this paper, we describe how the outsider witness practice framework can support staff in educational settings to acknowledge preferred accounts of identity. We summarise the broader orientation to life, identity and relationships that inform narrative therapy as a context for locating outsider witness practice. We then describe the outsider witness practice framework and scaffold in some detail and illustrate this with an example of a piece of therapeutic work with a young man. This paper is intentionally written in the first person. This reflects our wider commitment as narrative therapists to inviting and promoting a sense of personal agency, ownership and accountability.