SC resident receives doctorate for research into rural school psychology
A Swift Current psychologist has completed innovative doctoral research about the challenges faced by rural school psychologists in their practice.
Dr. Conor Barker successfully defended his thesis during a presentation to an external examiner and his research committee at the University of Regina, March 6.
“I don’t think I’ve been more prepared for any event my entire life,” he said. “You just have no idea what the external examiner is going to say, but luckily for me my external examiner very much saw the value of the work and made a lot of connections to other work that’s been going on in the field of psychology. So it really became a celebration of the work and a broader discussion in terms of applications and ways that we can apply what I’ve learned through this study and how it can inform the practice of psychology.”
His thesis has been nominated for a research award, which is a recognition of the standard and quality of his research. The title of the study is Sustaining clinical competency in wide open spaces: A communities of practice case study of rural school psychologists. His interest in this research topic was influenced by his own experience as a school psychologist in southwest Saskatchewan.
“I’ve had the opportunity as a school psychologist to not only do psychological assessments that I was trained to do, but to really get involved in consulting and working with teachers, parents, families and children,” he said. “This has resulted in me having different capacities and competencies as a result of being basically one psychologist for a vast rural area.”
He therefore started to think about the expanding roles or rural school psychologists and the additional competencies they have to develop, and he wondered if others have a similar experience.
Barker developed a novel research methodology to find answers to his questions, which was one of the reasons that his study was nominated for a research award. He used a communities of practice framework to interview eight rural school psychologists from different parts of the province.
“I didn’t want the interpretation of these results to just be what I think about rural school psychology,” he said. “The research methodology that I developed is called a thematic delphi analysis. So what happens in this process is that the participants not only provide their data and provide their perspectives, but they also actively participate in the analysis. They got to not only provide the ideas, but they were also able to see the ideas presented by the other participants anonymously and then they were given the opportunity to expand or assign or dispute some of the findings that the others had.”
An important advantage of this approach is that it challenged a lot of his own ideas about the role of rural school psychologists.
“It confirmed some things I thought, for sure, but it also challenged some things and it challenged the team as well, because we all look at it from a different angle,” he said. “When we’re all describing what we’re seeing and experiencing, when those things compare and contrast, then what happens is that you work towards a consensus and you actually have a richer description as to what things are.”
The first focus of his study was to look at the key competencies of a rural school psychologists. His research highlighted the importance of relationships in the practice of a rural school psychologist.
“When it comes to the relationships that school psychologists have in rural areas, it’s not just a relationship with that individual parent or that individual kid, but it is a relationship with the entire community and the system that that child lives in,” he said.
An important concept in psychology is that a psychologist must avoid competing relationships with clients, but it is not always possible in a rural setting.
“The reality in a rural area is that those relationships happen, whether they’re intended or not, because we’re still members of the community,” he said. “My clients are also the people I see at the store, at social gatherings, at Frontier Days, and I have to have a way to engage with them so that I’m meeting their needs as a therapist, but I’m also a member of their community. It’s by being a member of the community that I actually gain trust and respect, and so it’s a shift from how we typically talk about psychological practice.”
The second aspect he explored in the study is the creative approach that school psychologists often need to follow in their rural practice.
“What happens in rural school psychology very often is that there is a disconnect between the training that we receive as psychologists and the demands of what we’re required to do as psychologists,” he said. “There’s a space in the middle where your competency is being challenged. You don’t necessarily know the perfect intervention that you could do, but you’re the only psychologist within hours of travel and sometimes those hours of travel become a barrier to families to access services.”
It therefore means that rural school psychologists need to engage in creative practice, and his study indicated that it is a three-step process. The first step is to take time to think and reflect about the approach to follow, which is contrary to the tendency to act quick and on your feet. The second step is to access resources, and the third step is to improvise to come up with a solution for your client.
“This doesn’t mean making something up out of the blue,” he emphasized. “This is taking what we know as good practice and as evidence based practice, and it is the new and novel application of it, but you’re going to try it out and monitor it and see if it works, and through that process we end up developing new and novel and innovative strategies that can actually support students in rural areas.”
His research findings indicate that a school psychologist in a rural setting cannot just specialize in a single aspect, and there are more opportunities for creative practice. His study therefore challenges the notion that psychologists are trained around specific competencies.
“One of the major things that is always said in psychology is we only practice in the areas in which we’re competent, and competent means that you have received training in it, you have received supervision in it, and you have experience doing it,” he said. “The reality is as school psychologist I’m advocating for a different way of developing competency and I’m allowing for a shade of grey in there where you have psychologists that use their knowledge and their creativity to develop new and novel practices.”
The other implication of his research findings is that there is a specialty competency in working as a generalist, and there are particular skills that psychologists need to have when they are working in a rural area and when they are working as generalists.
“I’m not suggesting that we throw out research, in fact, the opposite,” he emphasized. “I’m saying that once we ground our students and our trainees in psychology in the research and in the literature, within our supervised practice we also need to encourage students to think creatively about solutions, about combining different therapies or adjusting a therapy based on what we know about a particular case or a particular student or a particular context, and encouraging that creativity rather than stifling it, rather than saying that’s not an evidence based practice.”
Barker’s research has been well received and he is preparing articles for publication in two academic journals.
He has also been invited to join the faculty at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, where he will work as an assistant professor in inclusive education. For the next year he will be working remotely from his current location in Swift Current, and he will already start teaching by distance this summer.
“I’m excited about that, because I miss teaching,” he said. “I was a teacher before I was a psychologist. So I get to go back to teaching and I get to do all the things I love to do. I get to teach, I get to write, I get to do my clinical work and I get to support students in their development.”