If companionship is a journey undertaken together, what does it mean that the relationship is also designed to end?
Angie Titchen makes the ending explicit.
In Critical companionship: part 1, companion and co-learner are together for the duration of their journey, followed by what she calls a mutual parting. The relationship has to be established, sustained and closed. Titchen, 2003.
That is easy to overlook.
Most accounts of supportive relationships concentrate on how to begin them or how to make them work.
Titchen also makes leaving part of the work.
The significance becomes clearer when we look at what the companion is supposed to help another person become capable of doing.
The framework includes bringing hidden or taken-for-granted knowledge to the surface.
Making apparently unproblematic situations available for questioning.
Supporting critical investigation of one's own practice.
Developing knowledge that can be exposed to scrutiny.
The companion is therefore not simply there to improve a particular answer.
They are helping another practitioner become more able to examine their own practice.
Titchen and McGinley's account of practitioner research makes the same orientation visible. Critical companionship is used to help practitioners investigate their own professional knowledge, analyse evidence from their practice and articulate what they know so that it can be questioned by others.
The work belongs increasingly in the practitioner.
That does not mean the companion becomes unnecessary in a simple, linear way.
People continue to learn with others.
Expert practitioners still need challenge.
A person who can investigate one problem independently may need accompaniment somewhere else.
But there is an important difference between a relationship that develops capability and one that quietly develops dependence.
Mutual parting puts that difference on the page.
The companion is not trying to become permanently indispensable.
There is a second complication.
The companion has learning to do as well.
In the second Nursing Standard paper, Jayne Wright and Angie Titchen describe new critical companions using the framework despite having no educational background or previous experience facilitating learning.
Their early accounts suggest that the framework could help them acquire critical-companionship skills.
But the authors are cautious about expertise.
They tentatively suggest that developing the level of expertise represented in the original framework may take at least five years, unless someone is already a skilled facilitator.
So companion is not a title somebody earns by volunteering to be supportive.
The companion is also becoming.
Learning when to speak.
When to wait.
How to recognise what matters.
How to combine knowledge of the person, the situation and the evidence.
How much challenge this moment can hold.
How to be present without occupying all the space.
A later critical review makes the difficulty even more explicit.
Michele Hardiman and Jan Dewing examined the critical-companionship framework while developing less complex facilitation models. They concluded that the original framework was theoretically and practically demanding enough that novice facilitators might need stepping stones before they could use it well. Hardiman and Dewing, 2014.
That is a useful resistance to the metaphor.
Companion sounds natural.
The practice described underneath it is anything but automatic.
There is knowledge to develop.
Judgement to exercise.
A relationship to negotiate.
Power to notice.
Timing to learn.
And eventually an ending to recognise.
This changes the image of accompaniment.
It is not one person permanently walking beside another.
Sometimes the work of a companion is to make possible a stretch of the journey that the other person can later travel without them.
That last sentence is an interpretation rather than Titchen's formulation.
But it seems consistent with a framework that aims to develop the co-learner's own capacity and explicitly includes mutual parting.
The journey is shared.
It is not surrendered.
And the ending is not necessarily evidence that the relationship failed.
It may be part of what the relationship was for.
We have now travelled far enough into Titchen's work to understand that companion was not merely a warmer synonym for critical friend.
It carried ideas of commitment, mutuality, reciprocity, particularity, skilled judgement, development and eventual parting.
Only now is it safe to look back towards Clyde Street.
Because years after this literature appeared, Keith Lyons chose a remarkably similar word for his own work.
Travel Companion.
The resemblance is obvious.
The route between them is not.
So the next question has to be disciplined:
What happens if we place these two ideas of companionship beside one another without pretending that one produced the other?
References
Titchen, A. (2003) 'Critical companionship: part 1', Nursing Standard, 18(9), pp. 33–40. doi:10.7748/ns2003.11.18.9.33.c3502. PubMed record.
Wright, J. and Titchen, A. (2003) 'Critical companionship. Part 2: Using the framework', Nursing Standard, 18(10), pp. 33–38. doi:10.7748/ns2003.11.18.10.33.c3506. PubMed record.
Titchen, A. and McGinley, M. (2003) 'Facilitating practitioner research through critical companionship', NT Research, 8(2), pp. 115–131. doi:10.1177/136140960300800205. Publisher record.
Hardiman, M. and Dewing, J. (2014) 'Critical Ally and Critical Friend: stepping stones to facilitating practice development', International Practice Development Journal, 4(1), Article 3. doi:10.19043/ipdj.41.003. Full article.