Pope - A personal account of my relationship with PCP

INTRODUCTION

When I began to think of my brief for this presentation, i.e. “what PCP has meant to me, what I have done with it and where it might go?” I realised that it conjured up what the philosopher Dilthey termed ‘connecting threads’:

“The person who seeks the connecting threads in the history of his life has already, from different points of view, created connections which he is now putting in to words ... the units are formed by the conceptions of experience in which present and past events are held together by common meaning. Among these experiences those which have special dignity, both in themselves and for the passage of his life, have been preserved in memory and lifted out of the endless stream of forgotten events.” (Dilthey, 1976, p.215)

So what follows is not a traditional academic paper but reminiscences of some of my experiences with PCP which I have ‘lifted out’ to share with you today.

EARLY BEGINNINGS

My first formal exposure to PCP was as an undergraduate student at Brunel University. Unlike at many British universities, Kelly’s theory was part of the Psychology Course. I had an opportunity to compare and contrast many different psychological perspectives but kept coming back to Kelly’s ideas. I found that his ideas resonated with how I felt about how we learn and potential blocks to learning.

Several years earlier, I started a ‘Pure Science’ degree at the time when chemistry nomenclature was changing. When I asked why this was the case I was told “You do not need to know just learn it”. Up until that point learning had been a joy but now I was disillusioned. As you might expect I neglected Chemistry but was drawn to Psychology, which was offered as a fourth subject but was seen as incidental part of the course. I decided to withdraw. I did not let myself be trapped by parental and others’ expectations. I was not to become a victim of my biography. I vowed to respect the right of students to question the knowledge offered by their teachers and realised the importance of constructive dialogue. This is a fundamental tenet in PCP. So I suppose this was when I first became an advocate of Kelly’s ideas without knowing it!

When I finished my Psychology degree I stayed on to teach part-time and joined Brunel’s Centre for the Study of Human Learning to complete my PhD. The Centre, directed by Laurie Thomas was recognised as one of the main institutions applying Personal Construct Theory and grid techniques in education. Working with Laurie, I was able to explore further my interest in PCP and its implications for Education. At the Centre, which was a pioneer in the development of interactive programs for the elicitation of Repertory Grids, I was involved in field testing these programs and also in its consultancy work. One memorable assignment was for a well-known High