Kathie McKinnon, Ph.D., MSW, BSW, RSW, RCC

Dr. Kathie McKinnon – Counselling and Consulting 
#1-231 Victoria Street 
Kamloops, BC, V2C 2A1 

Faculty of Education and Social Work 
School of Social Work and Human Service 
Thompson Rivers University 
900 McGill Road, Kamloops, BC, V2C 0C8 
  
Phone: 250-571-0305 
Email: kxmckinnon@shaw.ca 
kmckinnon@tru.ca 

Kathie McKinnon is a therapist, re-searcher, social worker, and educator.  Kathie is a sessional lecturer and practicum liaison in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. 

Throughout Kathie’s PhD studies social construction invited a richer appreciation of the significance of dialogical engagement in meaningful conversations in all realms of her practice. She is curious about co-creating new possibilities and alternative ways of being-with others in discursive therapeutic space. She counters notions of individualism and nurtures dialogical engagement. Relational construction – being-in the discourse of “we” – co-creates the context of her re-search and practice. Her relational approach to practice and her use of narrative and arts-based therapies, and appreciative inquiry, co-creates dialogical discourse to co-construct emergent ideas, meaning making, and transformative possibilities in her re-search, practice, and teaching. 

The re-search and de-methodology presented in her dissertation moves away from traditional research to focus on the confluence of hope, strengths, resistance, and transformation in the stories and art created by nine co-inquirers, and how their invited conversations, rich in meaning and deeply experiential, illuminated the importance of story and art in therapeutic practice. Kathie believes our stories cry out to be spoken, seen, and shared; they are opportunities to be relational and co-create. We are storying beings. Stories are endless. They enrich life. All artists are storytellers. Stories and art are con-jointly performed, multi-hued relational dialogues that co-create a means for how we make sense of our experiences of being with others and ourselves in the world. Storytelling and art making embrace and align with a relational constructionist perspective of how we make sense of our world together. The sounds and images of our verbal and visual narratives are meant to be heard and seen – the creation of generative curiosity and the beginning of transformative movement.

Kathie McKinnon, Ph.D. Files & Links