Counselling as 'Conversational Art': Development of a language-based Approach to Counselling and Laboratory Training of Counselling Skills

Abstract

To enhance the teaching of two MSSC courses that provide foundation knowledge and skills, the proposed project follows an action research approach to plan and design, through a series of collaborative inquiry sessions joined by MSSC students/graduate and professional associates/peers teaching and/or practicing counselling, a teaching-learning process that incorporates a language-based approach to counselling as part of the course content of SS5800 Counselling Theories and Practice; to implement the lesson designs and conduct self-study sessions to further develop a conceptual framework for an indigenous language-based approach to counselling and pedagogical approaches to teach this approach in the context of a theory course (SS59800) and a laboratory skill training course on counselling (SS5841). A language-based approach to counselling sensitizes counsellors-in-training to the performative and action-oriented nature of language, and enhances their capacity to intelligently navigate the process of a counselling conversation to arrive at a shared understanding with the client of a new (re)constructed reality that is more amenable for the client to make positive changes. The project will produce a collection of conceptual and self-study research papers describing the groundwork for a language-based approach to counselling and counsellor education, together with curriculum materials for teaching this approach."