Conference report – 1st European Mentoring and Coaching Council Research Conference, University of Twente, The Netherlands, 7-8 July 2011
The practitioner-researcher offers useful perspectives and is not the Cinderella of the research community.
Delegates highlighted the anxiety and concern for legitimacy felt by practitioner-researchers – what one called “walking the tightrope between practitioner and academic”.
“Academics are largely responsible for this discomfort,” reflected David Megginson of Sheffield Hallam University, after the conference.
“We need to wash our mouths out and appreciate the differences and strengths of this position rather than condemn them as a poor sort of researcher.
An example of this was one academic who condemned a presenter for using quantitative data in a predominantly qualitative study.
Ironically, we later had a masterly example of the use of mixed qualitative and quantitative analysis by Erik de Haan in his exemplary series of studies,” Megginson continued.
In her session on the ‘scholar-practitioner’, Dr Annette Fillery-Travis of the UK’s Middlesex University, said: “It’s a continuum. Sometimes you may take pause to do a doctorate, which is very central, and at others you are more active as a practitioner. You’re sitting with a lot of ambiguity.”
In his keynote address, Megginson said the aim of the conference was to talk to people who are both cutting-edge practitioners and researchers to help coaching be a cutting-edge profession. It was not about academics talking to academics.
“This is why David Clutterbuck and I founded the EMCC. We went to a management event and it was hideously boring; lots of academics talking to academics, not very engaging at all. Their presentations consisted of research they did five years ago, which they weren’t interested in any more,” he said.
Help develop themes for research body
Support exists for a coaching forum where researchers can share emerging themes, according to delegates.
Possible topics are:
- Demystifying research for practitioners
- Establishing the EMCC as a research body
- Equalisation of approaches to coaching and mentoring research through Europe
- Beyond ROI to effective functioning
- Coaching skill acquisition
- Comparison of formal and informal coaching and mentoring
- Dysfunctional leadership
- E-mentoring
- How universal is coaching?
- Impact of the ‘cultural self’ on the client
- Indigenous people’s coaching
- Mentoring and coaching techniques used by leaders
- Physiology behind coaching
- Relationship between mentor and mentee
- Supervision
- Self-development and self-awareness of the coach
- Self-talk and inner voice of client
- Use of literary devices
- Where coaching goes wrong
Interested in researching any of these themes? Email David Megginson at: D.F.Megginson@shu.ac.uk
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 5