Ferdinand Buer: Lehrbuch der Supervision
Reviewed by Dr. Birgit Szczyrba, 2000-10-01
Translated from German version by DeepL
Ferdinand Buer: Lehrbuch der Supervision. Der pragmatisch-psychodramatische Weg zur Qualitätsverbesserung professionellen Handelns. Votum Verlag (Münster) 1999. 304 pages. ISBN 978-3-933158-25-3. 19,50 EUR.
There is a detailed German review for this work. Read here
Summary
Ferdinand Buer's textbook on supervision is a clearly structured work that leaves it up to the reader to decide where to start, depending on their interests and focus. The first part of the book, the theoretical foundation, is informative and linguistically appealing about the author's philosophical background, professional demands and concrete maxims for action.
Pragmatism as a pluralistic, anti-fundamentalist model of thought with its focus on improving social action in the next, responsible steps provides the backdrop for teaching the psychodrama method for managing professional relationship work, which Ferdinand Buer himself learnt, teaches and has been theoretically enriching and further developing with his written work for many years.
The combination of the pragmatic thinking model with the psychodrama method, which can endow learning processes with a high degree of effectiveness through the condensation of emotion, physical action and reflective insight, leads convincingly to the design of a pragmatic-psychodramatic supervision that fulfils its claim to professionalism in a self-critical way under the influence of postmodern complexity and theoretical-technical and professional-political confusion and conflicts.
The second part of the book deals in detail with a logical and clear introduction to supervision practice. The author takes great care in explaining and graphically illustrating topics such as client acquisition, the relationship between supervisor and supervisee and the ethical dimension of supervision.
The extensive lexicon of terms is particularly helpful, not only for supervision training candidates, which, in addition to the specialist vocabulary required for supervision practice, also takes into account a broad horizon of scientific and disciplinary relationships and thus – actually the third part of the textbook – represents a helpful and exciting reference work for scientists, students and practitioners.
All in all, Ferdinand Buer's textbook on supervision is a work whose basic premise, the distinction between format and procedure, brings structure to the jungle of supply and demand, efforts to develop a theory of supervision and professional policy disputes, and which offers the reader the opportunity to use it in a pragmatic and participative way for individual benefit. An unusual, relaxed and at the same time engaging textbook not only for supervisors, but for people who are interested in supervision and want to utilise supervision to improve the quality of their own work.
Review by
Dr. Birgit Szczyrba
Sozial-und Erziehungswissenschaftlerin, Psychodrama-Leiterin (DFP/DAGG), Leiterin der Hochschuldidaktik in der Qualitätsoffensive Exzellente Lehre der Technische Hochschule Köln, Sprecherin des Netzwerks Wissenschaftscoaching
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