Inside the Circle 2025: Exploring the Ontario CPE Supervisors' Lived Experience of the Interpersonal Relations Group Process Portion of CPE
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research used a philosophical phenomenological (primarily Gadamer) methodology and asked the question, “What is the lived experience of Ontario Clinical Psychospiritual Education (CPE) Supervisors in the Interpersonal Relationships (IPR) group process portion of CPE?” It used a 90-minute, semi-structured interview format as it sought to understand the supervisor experience of safety in the group. 11 Ontario Certified Supervisors were interviewed and explored this question in relationship to participant supervisors’ experience as students and/or as educators. In the history of CPE, there has been significant harm done to students by some supervisors who were well-meaning, but unaware of their impact on students. This impact has been described as bullying, traumatic, and “surgery without anesthesia” at its worst (Ragsdale, 2009). At its best, it is transformative and enriching. While there has been movement toward trauma-informed approaches, there is much more that can be done to ensure student safety in these educational programs. There is little current research about this component of CPE, and this study adds to the understanding of the supervisor experience. From the data, three key things were learned. The first is that supervisors learned theory of IPR from their own experiences as a student, from what was handed to them in their supervisory training, and from intentional pursuit of new ways of thinking that were more resonant with trauma-informed practice. Secondly, it was found that participants described their experiences of IPR as either unsafe or safe enough, with no middle ground. They believed it was the responsibility of the supervisor to create a “brave space” in which student learning was optimized. Finally, participants shared their experience of vulnerability in teaching CPE/facilitating IPR as students circumvented laid out processes of conflict resolution and moved quickly to grievances. They also reported the lack of felt support from their managers, colleagues, and the institutions they worked for. The author recommends considering restructuring IPR to incorporate elements within verbatim and theological reflection work, and/or to require 10 hours of personal psychotherapy per unit of CPE in order to contribute to the goal of SEUS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".