How do clients experience a preordained ending in medium-term psychotherapy? A phenomenological enquiry

This qualitative study explored eight client-participants’ experience of a preordained ending in medium-term psychotherapy (average length 12 months) in charitable service settings. The aim was to investigate the experience of ending therapy, in particular when the ending was a ‘given’. Interviews were conducted shortly after therapy had ended. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was used, and four domains emerged: Individual Experience, Acceptance, Resistance, and Managing the Ambivalence. Eight sub-themes clustered under these domains. Individual experience had one sub-theme: ‘ending therapy is a highly individual experience’. Acceptance had two sub-themes: ‘a basic human acceptance of preordained endings’, and ‘the transformative impact of therapy endings - and the particular ‘carpe diem’ of preordained endings’. Resistance had one sub-theme: ‘fear of loss, and resistance to finality’. Managing the ambivalence had four sub-themes: ‘the painful loss of the relationship can be in part counterbalanced by internalising the therapist’; ‘ending therapy as a transition: looking back and looking forward’; ‘therapy ending prompting a paradoxical confronting of both strengths and vulnerabilities’; and ‘the post-ending therapeutic function of the interview itself’. Accordingly, against a backdrop of the experience of ending as highly individual, there was often a basic acceptance of the therapy limitation, and the preordained ending in itself had the potential to galvanise psychological change, though counterbalancing this was a resistance to ‘finality’, linked with fear of loss. Managing the ambivalence around these tendencies was the challenge participants faced. Participants typically experienced ending as a transition, with something of the ‘before’ being taken into the ‘after’; this potentially included the internalising of the therapist. Participants often had a heightened awareness of both their potency and their vulnerability. Importantly, participants valued the research interview itself as an opportunity to process their feelings both in relation to ending, and to their therapy as a whole. The study recommends future research into the possibility of services offering clients a post-ending ‘process’ session with a third party therapist, as a potential means of deepening, consolidating and validating their experience of ending therapy

Thriving not just surviving: A review of research on teacher resilience

Retaining teachers in the early stages of the profession is a major issue of concern in many countries. Teacher resilience is a relatively recent area of investigation which provides a way of understanding what enables teachers to persist in the face of challenges and offers a complementary perspective to studies of stress, burnout and attrition. We have known for many years that teaching can be stressful, particularly for new teachers, but little appears to have changed. This paper reviews recent empirical studies related to the resilience of early career teachers. Resilience is shown to be the outcome of a dynamic relationship between individual risk and protective factors. Individual attributes such as altruistic motives and high self-efficacy are key individual protective factors. Contextual challenges or risk factors and contextual supports or protective factors can come from sources such as school administration, colleagues, and pupils. Challenges for the future are to refine conceptualisations of teacher resilience and to develop and examine interventions in multiple contexts. There are many opportunities for those who prepare, employ and work with prospective and new teachers to reduce risk factors and enhance protective factors and so enable new teachers to thrive, not just survive

Providence and democracy

"Alexis de Tocqueville was a liberal, but, as he once wrote, a “new kind of liberal.” For us, no feature of his new liberalism is more remarkable than the alliance between religion and liberty that he saw in America and proposed to be imitated, wherever it can, in every free society. In liberalism today, there is a debate over whether liberal theory needs— or should avoid—a “foundation.” Tocqueville seems to take the anti-foundational side: lie never mentions the “state of nature,” which was the standard foundation of 17th-century liberalism, and in Democracy in America he omits any reference to the Declaration of Independence with its ringing foundational assertion that “all men are created equal.” Yet, if he avoids laying a foundation in reason, he also thinks that religion is essential to political liberty because of the “certain fixed ideas” that it offers to ground the practice of self-government. These are doctrines of faith, since for Tocqueville “religion” means revealed religion, not a rational or natural religion."(...

Liberty and Yirtue in the American Founding

"Liberty and virtue are not a likely pair. At first sight they seem to be contraries, for liberty appears to mean living as you please and virtue to mean living not as you please but as you ought. It does not seem likely that a society dedicated to liberty could make much of virtue, nor that one resolved to have virtue could pride itself on liberty. Yet liberty and virtue also seem necessary to each other. A free people, with greater opportunity to misbehave than a people in shackles, needs the guidance of an inner force to replace the lack of external restraint. And virtue cannot come from within, or truly be virtue, unless it is voluntary and people are free to choose it. Americans are, and think themselves to be, a free people first of all. Whatever virtue they have, and however much, is a counterpoint to the theme of liberty. But how do they manage to make virtue and liberty harmonious?"(...

A Comparative Study of Tourism and Hospitality Education in the United Kingdom and France

pp.55-95Sufficient historical detail is provided on the development of tourism in France and the United Kingdom to provide a context for the discussion of how comparative education practices can inform and improve the provision of university education in Europe. Findings from a recent empirical comparative study of university provision for tourism and hospitality studies are presented and analysed to progress the work in this field of research. Finally, very recent moves, especially in industry-specific education in France, are combined with the teaching initiative called CLIL (Content & Language Integrated Learning) to offer a way forward for educators in tourism and hospitality departments in higher education in Europe