Addressing professional tensions through intellectual candour and stewardship, thoughtful dialoguing as a duoethnographic collaborative exploration

Using duoethnography, we explore our experiences of physiotherapy practice and education and argue that the profession’s desire for credibility is at the expense of vulnerability, risk and intellectual candour – of imagining the profession and education of its graduates differently. We identified key themes around: alignment/misalignment, reflection/reflexivity and professional scope. This methodology models risk and questioning through the juxtaposition of different perspectives. Through our contrasting narratives, we remain open to new forms of learning, modelling what intellectual candour demands from us: facing the problems of the past so that we might learn from our history and change our future. This can be considered stewardship (Barradell, S. 2021. “Caring in and for Stewardship.” Physiotherapy Theory and Practice 37 (6): 663–671; Golde, C. M., and G. E. Walker. 2006. Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline. Jossey-Bass) and offers physiotherapy a way to address the tensions between vulnerability and credibility, creating new possibilities for physiotherapy to move towards. While physiotherapy offers the context for this research, the duoethnographic method of exposing thought processes has relevance for other professions.