Dealing with the current emergency

• Monday 23rd March 2020

Thank you to all our staff, students, teachers, and colleagues in support companies who have helped us to carry on with our teaching, supervision, and placement programmes.  Although the physical office is closed for a deep clean, we are carrying on.  You can still email us, and still call us (although it may take a little more time to get through).  We are continuing to provide all the whole of our syllabus, with the exception of those practice modules that cannot be taught effectively online (not everything can be taught online).

We are also asking all students to carry out research interviews online.  For those students who have already obtained ethics approval, please notify us what arrangements you have made to do this.  We will only grant ethics approval to future projects that use remote methods of interviewing or data collection.  There is advice in the research handbook about online methods.  We will also need your first supervisor to confirm that remote interviewing is appropriate to your study.  If it is a study of an emotionally disturbing topic, it may be necessary for the interviewer and the participant to be in the same room, for the interviewer to support the participant as much as possible.  Studies of nonverbal communication would equally be better carried out face to face.  Projects like these will have to be deferred until the period of quarantine is over.

Do keep an eye on MyNSPC and this news channel for new measures to support you whilst you minimize travel or mingling with other people.  There will be advice about online therapy and supervision, digital resources that will be available, and ways for you to keep in touch with the whole NSPC community—if only to say, ‘how are you doing?’

Best wishes from Emmy and Digby, and the whole NSPC and Existential Academy team.