IJSP Number 6, 2024

12 transformative learning for the evolving supervisor entails the following: (a) agreement to change (the supervisor willingly engages); (b) irreversibility (change that cannot be undone); (c) being all affecting (eg. cognitively, affectively); (d) letting go of the control myth (surrendering to uncertainty); (e) experiencing risk, fear, and/or loss (giving up ‘old’ for new); (f) developing a broadening of perspective; and (g) movement toward increasing identity integrity. The assumptions that anchor these subsequent considerations --- again, extrapolated from our earlier proposals [11, 12, 13] --- are these: (a) becoming a supervisor, developing a supervisor identity, is also a process of construction through disruption or constructive disruption; (b) the beginning supervisor’s own sense of person/personhood or identity is also challenged and disrupted so as to accommodate development of a new, evolving, expanding sense of supervisor identity; (c) supervisor training/supervision of supervision are also processes of personal disruption and disorientation, where beginning supervisors face the disorienting dilemma of ‘to be’ or ‘not to be’; and (d) supervisor trainers/educators are also agents of transformation, their function being to serve as developmental facilitators, reflective instigators, and educational provocateurs to the supervisor trainees that they serve. 4.1. SELF Specific areas of supervisor development potentially affected are: (a) self- in-relation to supervisees/the ‘supervision’ world; (b) identity/view of self as supervisor; (c) empowerment/responsibility in the supervisory role; (d) supervisor self-knowledge; (e) supervisor narrative; (f) meaning/purpose about supervision and as a supervisor; and (g) personality changes (after Hoggan; [14, 15]). These changes perhaps best reflect supervisor self schema development, where “learners experience a significant shift in their sense of [supervisor] self” [14, p. 66]) and a self-as-supervisor vision begins to take concrete form. As that process further unfolds, the supervisor evolves so as to think and feel that “I belong” in this role: A preponderating sense of “I am not…” becomes a preponderating sense of “I am…” [3, 4]. That evolving narrative includes (extrapolated from [13, 41]) developing a sense of: authenticity (to be authentic in supervision); reflectivity (using supervisor self-reflection/appraisal as a facilitative educational tool); power (using one’s own supervisor power to empower supervisees); responsiveness (learning to responsively intervene); supervisory self (reflectively using one’s self in session to advance supervision); and healing self (having conviction about one’s own supervision contribution). Such transformations involve a journey through the lands of liminality [cf. 42, 43, 44], that in-between place, being neither here nor there, that transitional space of possibility [45], where potential transformation is stimulated through the fluidity, ambiguity, and uncertainty of the moment [46, 47]. The developing supervisor struggles with and must pass through