Soliciting clients

What kinds of marketing methods can counsellors use to solicit clients in private practice contexts? In this setting counsellors are clearly operating a business and sound business practices apply. But the business of counselling is also bound by the ethics that govern the delivery of a professional service, which makes higher demands in terms of standards than the trading of goods might require. Professions have a long history of altruism which sanctions baselines for behaviour more stringent than those of fair exchange in the marketplace. For example, the principle of caveat emptor let the buyer beware would not suffice as an ethical baseline for professional practice

Understanding problematic sporting stories: Narrative therapy and applied sport psychology

In this paper we examine how postmodernism can inform the practice of sport psychology. More specifically, we will discuss how a therapeutic approach known as “narrative therapy” can enable athletes to reclaim control over their sporting practices and eliminate problem stories undermining their performance

Michael White: Fragments of an event

We present here fragments, reconstructed from memory1, of Michael White's last workshop2. These fragments are interspersed with descriptions of events that took place in San Diego in the days leading up to Michael's death. Our focus here is not on the medical details, nor on the private family stories, but on the task of recording Michael's last efforts to teach. Our hope is to play a small part in allowing his words to continue to resonate

The Foundations of Hope in Therapy

Hope is a necessary construct in narrative therapy but we need to be careful how we think about it. It does not lie in the essence of persons. There are not categories of people who are hopeful or hopeless. Rather, hope lies in the stories that we use to make sense of our lives but dominant stories from the world around us sometimes interfere with our access to hopeful stories. Therapy can help us reconnect with these stories, leading to the exercise of personal agency in our own lives. This presentation will explore how to help people do this through narrative therapy

What is Social Justice? Opening a Discussion

This paper is a record of a discussion on social justice that took place at California State University San Bernardino on January 23, 2013. It addresses the definition of what social justice is, what injustice is, and the significance of a concern for social justice for educators. Multiple viewpoints are included

Considering counsellor education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Part 2: How might we practise?

The registration environment offers particular challenges for the identity of counselling in 21st-century Aotearoa New Zealand. Counsellor education cannot hold itself apart from such challenges as it enters what the authors suggest is a third phase in its development (see Part 1, the companion to this article, earlier in this volume). Counselling in New Zealand has spent many years investigating and debating statutory regulation, and professional associations have implemented various internal regulatory practices that have had implications for counsellor education. Counselling and counsellor education in other parts of the world, and related professions in New Zealand, have engaged more actively with registration in a variety of forms. This article describes these various regulatory activities with the intention of making visible some possible directions for counsellor education in New Zealand. While we cannot predict with any accuracy what these possible directions would each offer to counselling, our review of various forms of registration leads us to make a case for pluralism and partnership. Advocating for pluralism in counselling, Cooper and McLeod (2010) suggest that it involves both sensibility and practice. The authors of the current article explore a pluralistic sensibility, emphasising its potential to produce a professional landscape in which practices of pluralism and partnership may emerge

Time travel with Gilles Deleuze

My focus here will be on working in therapy with an elastic concept of time built on Deleuze’s readings of time as a synthesis of the past, present and future. This interest has particular value for the construction of remembering conversations. I shall speak to the value I can see for this field of practice. The poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze has much to offer narrative practice through the concepts he developed. I intend to explore some specific aspects of his reconceptualization of time in this presentation

Learning from Finland: A book review

A review of Pasi Sahlberg’s (2015) Finnish Lessons 2.0: What can the world learn from educational change in Finland (2nd Edn.)

Competency Corner, Part Three: Practice-based Weightings of the CBPS

The first two articles in this series outlined the task, research, terminology and processes the Competence Committee used to develop the Competency-based Performance Standards (CBPS). These standards were designed as a framework for revision of the Canadian Standard Assessment in Optometry (CSAO) to directly link the exam and practice requirements of Canadian Optometrists. This linkage required determination of the relative weight to be assigned to each of the various competencies. Working groups of practising optometrists rated the frequency and criticality of performance of each of the competencies using a standardized rating system. Results indicated that the majority of a revised CSAO would focus on providing comprehensive eye and vision care (78%), followed by management (11%) and collaboration (10%). The ratings also allowed calculation of the appropriate weighting of the underlying general attributes. The heaviest weighting was assigned to candidates’ professional optometric knowledge and the ability to apply this knowledge (41%), followed by communication (27%), planning (13%), ethics (11%) and self-directed learning (8%). The last article in this series will describe work to evaluate the competence-based weightings of the current CSAO and to describe plans for future versions of the CSAO

What Participants Say about the San Bernardino USD’s Restorative Youth Court Program

Interviews were conducted with eighteen graduates of the San Bernardino City Unified School District’s Restorative Youth Court. These interviews yielded a view of how participants in the Youth Court program viewed their experience. In their view, the Youth Court was nearly always transformative and its dispositions fair. They were affected by the presence of their parents for their hearings but the main thing that seemed to lead to the transformation was being judged by their peers. They also took their responsibility seriously when they became the jurors for other respondents and doing so affected their thinking about their own case